# Mein Kampf (Stackpole Sons)/Volume 1/Chapter 11

11. People and Race
There are truths which are so perfectly commonplace that for this very reason the every-day world does not see them, or at least does not recognize them. It often passes blindly by such truisms, and is utterly astonished when someone suddenly discovers a thing that everybody ought to have known. Columbus’ eggs are lying around by the hundred thousand; only the Columbuses are not so common.
All men without exception stroll about the garden of Nature, imagining they know and are familiar with almost all of it, yet with few exceptions they pass blindly over one of the most striking principles of Nature’s rule: the inner dissociation of the various species of all earth’s living creatures.
Even the most superficial observation reveals almost iron-bound basic law of all the countless forms in which Nature expresses her will to life: their specifically differentiated forms of propagation and increase. Every animal mates only with another of the same species. Titmouse pairs with titmouse, finch and finch, stork with stork, field-mouse with field-mouse, house-mouse with house-mouse, wolf with wolf.
Only extraordinary circumstances can alter this, primarily the compulsion of captivity, or some other reason that makes mating within the same species impossible. But then Nature begins to resist with all her resources; her plainest protest consists in denying further fertility to the bastards, or in restricting the fecundity of later descendants; but in most cases she deprives them of stamina to resist disease or the attacks of enemies.
This is but too natural: every cross-breeding between two creatures not of exactly the same level produces a result ​intermediate between the levels of the two parents. That is to say, the offspring will indeed be on a higher level than the racially lower one of its parents, but not so high as the higher one. Consequently in battle it will eventually succumb to the latter. That sort of mating runs counter to Nature’s will to breed life upwards. This is accomplished not by uniting superiority and inferiority, but by the complete victory of the former. The stronger must rule; it must not unite with the weaker, thus sacrificing its own stature. Only the born weakling can think this cruel, and that is why he is a weak and defective man; for if this law did not hold, any conceivable evolution of organic living things would be unthinkable.
The consequence of this instinct for race purity (universal throughout Nature) is not only the sharp outward demarcation of the separate races, but their homogeneous nature within themselves. The fox is always a fox, the goose a goose, the tiger a tiger, etc., and the only possible difference is in varying degrees of vigor, strength, understanding, cleverness, endurance, etc., among individual specimens. But we shall never find a fox which by disposition has accesses of humaneness toward geese, just as there is no cat with a friendly affection for mice.
Here too the battle goes on less because of any native hostility than from hunger and love. In both cases Nature watches with calm, nay with satisfaction. The struggle for daily bread vanquishes the weak, sickly and undecided, while the contest of the males for the female reserves the right or at least the opportunity of propagation for the healthiest individuals. Always struggle is a means to improve the health and stamina of the species, and thus a cause of its evolution.
By any other process all development and evolution would cease, and the very reverse would take place. For since numerically the inferior always outweighs the best, given equal opportunities of survival and propagation the worst part would increase so much faster that eventually the best would be crowded into the background. A correction in favor of the better individual must therefore be undertaken. Nature takes care of this by ​subjecting the weaker part to such hard living-conditions that they alone suffice to restrict the number, and by not allowing the remainder to increase indiscriminately, but making a new, ruthless selection according to strength and soundness.
But little as Nature wishes a mating of weaker with stronger individuals, still less does she want the fusion of a higher with a lower race, since otherwise the whole labor of selective evolution, perhaps through thousands of years, would be set at naught.
Historical experience offers us countless examples. It shows with alarming plainness that every mingling of Aryan blood with inferior races results in the end of the sustainer of civilization. North America, whose population consists overwhelmingly of Germanic elements, which have mingled very little with inferior colored peoples, can show a very different sort of humanity and culture from Central and South America, in which the predominantly Latin settlers mingled, sometimes on a large scale, with the aborigines. This one example alone clearly and distinctly shows us the effect of racial mixture. The racially pure and more unmixed Teuton on the American Continent has arisen to be its master; he will remain master so long as he too does not succumb to blood-defilement.
The result of any crossing of races, then, is in brief always as follows:
A. The depression of the level of the superior race,
B. Physical and intellectual retrogression, and thus the beginning of a slow but sure wasting disease.
To induce such a development, in other words, is nothing more nor less than to sin against the will of the Eternal Creator. And as a sin this action is rewarded.
In attempting to rebel against the iron logic of Nature, man comes in conflict with the principles to which he owes his very existence as a human being. Thus his action in defiance of Nature is bound to lead to his own downfall.
To this we hear the objection of the modern pacificist, truly Jewish in its impudence, and correspondingly stupid: “But man conquers Nature!”
​Millions thoughtlessly babble this Jewish nonsense, and end by really imagining themselves as a sort of conquerors of Nature; but their sole weapon is an idea, and this so wretched a one that no sort of world could really be conceived in accordance with it.
But quite aside from the fact that man has never once yet conquered Nature, but at most has caught hold of and tried to lift one corner and another of her vast, gigantic veil; that in fact he invents nothing, but merely discovers things; that he does not rule Nature, but has only risen, by knowing certain natural laws and secrets, to dominate other living creatures that lack this knowledge—aside from all this, an idea cannot conquer the foundations of mankind’s growth and being, since the idea itself depends solely on man. Without man there can be no human idea in the world, and so the idea as such is always dependent upon the existence of men and thus of all the laws which created the conditions essential for that existence.
But this is not all. Certain ideas are even inseparable from certain men. This is particularly true of thoughts originating not in an exact scientific truth but in the world of feeling, or which, as is so well and clearly said today, reproduce an “inner experience.” All these ideas, having nothing to do with pure, cold logic, and representing pure expression of feeling, ethical concepts etc., are chained to the existence of the men to whose intellectual imagination and creative power they owe their own being. Then is the time when the preservation of those particular races and men is the sine qua non for the existence of the ideas. Anyone, for instance, who really desired with all his heart the victory of the pacifist idea in this world would have to do his utmost by every means for the conquest of the world by the Germans, for if the reverse should happen, the last pacifist would very likely die out with the last German; the rest of the world has scarcely ever been so completely fooled as our own people unfortunately have by this unnatural and unreasonable nonsense. Anyone with serious intentions, therefore, would have to make up his mind willy-nilly to wage wars in order to arrive at pacifism. And in ​fact this and this alone was what the American world-savior, Wilson, intended, or at least our German visionaries thought so—which after all accomplished the purpose.
As a matter of fact the pacifist-humane idea may be a perfectly good one if the most advanced of men has first conquered and subjugated the world on a scale which makes him sole lord of the earth. The idea will have no chance for harmful effect to just the degree that its practical application becomes rare, and finally impossible. Battle first, then, and afterwards perhaps pacifism. Anything else means mankind has passed the summit of its development, and the end will be not the reign of any ethical idea, but barbarism and eventually chaos. Of course someone may laugh at that, but our planet moved through the ether for millions of years without human beings, and some day it may do so again if people forget that they owe their higher existence not to the ideas of a few crazy ideologists, but to the recognition and ruthless application of iron-clad laws of Nature.
Everything we admire on this earth today—science and art, industry and invention—is the creative product of but a few peoples, and perhaps originally of one race. Upon them the subsistence of this whole civilization depends. If they are destroyed, the beauty of this earth will be buried with them.
No matter how much the soil, for instance, may influence mankind, the result of that influence will always differ according to the races in question. The infertility of a territory may spur one race to supreme achievement; with another it will merely be the cause of bitter poverty and undernourishment with all their consequences. The inner proclivities of the peoples always determine the way external influences will take effect. What brings one man to starvation will train others to hard work.
The great civilizations of the past have all been destroyed simply because the originally creative race died out through blood-poisoning.
In every case the original cause of the downfall has been the failure to remember that all civilization depends on men, and not vice-versa—that in order to preserve a particular civilization the ​man who created it must also be preserved. But this preservation is dependent on the iron-clad law that it is necessary and just for the best and strongest man to be victor.
He who would live, then, must fight, and he who will not do battle in this world of eternal struggle does not deserve to live.
Even though this were harsh, it simply is so. But certainly by far the harshest fate is that which befalls the man who believes he can conquer Nature, and yet fundamentally is but mocking her. Distress, misfortune and disease are Nature’s reply.
The man who mistakes and ignores race laws is really cheating himself of the happiness which is fated to be his. He blocks the triumphant advance of the best race, and thus the sine qua non of all human progress. Burdened with human sensitivity he is entering the sphere of the helpless beast.
It is futile to argue over what race or races were the original sustainers of human civilization and thus the real founders of everything we include in the word humanity. It is simpler to ask ourselves this question about the present, and here the answer is plain and easy. The human culture, the results of art, science and invention which we see before us are almost exclusively the creative product of an Aryan. But this very fact permits the not unfounded deduction that he alone was the creator of a higher human life, and thus is the prototype of what we today mean by the word man. He is the Prometheus of humanity, from whose radiant brow the divine spark of genius has always sprung, ever lighting anew the fire which, in the form of knowledge, has illuminated the night of speechless mysteries, and thus sent man up the road to lordship over the other creatures of this earth. Take him away, and perhaps within a few thousand years profound darkness will descend again upon earth, human civilization will vanish, and the world become a desert.
If we were to divide humanity into three classes, the founders, sustainers and destroyers of civilization, probably the Aryan would be the only possible representative of the first class. He laid the foundation and built the walls of all human creations, ​and only the outward form and color are determined by the particular characteristics of the individual peoples. He furnishes the great building-stones and plans for all human progress, and only the execution depends on the character of the various races. Within a few decades the whole of Eastern Asia, for example, will call a culture its own whose ultimate foundation is Hellenic spirit and Germanic technology, just as in our own case. Only the outward form will—at least in part—show traits of Asiatic character. It is not true, as many people suppose, that Japan is superimposing European technical progress on her own civilization; European science and technology are being garnished with Japanese style. The basis of real life is no longer a specially Japanese civilization, although that does set the color of life (which owing to the inner difference, is more outwardly conspicuous to the European), but the tremendous scientific and technical work of Europe and America, that is of Aryan peoples. Only on the basis of these achievements can the East follow general human progress. It is the basis of the struggle for daily bread; it forges the weapons and tools. Only the outward dress is gradually accommodated to the Japanese character.
If, starting today, all further Aryan influence on Japan were to cease, supposing Europe and America to be destroyed, Japan’s present advance in science and technology might continue for a while; but within a few years the well would run dry, the Japanese individuality would gain, but the present civilization would ossify, and would sink back into the sleep from which it was awakened seven decades ago by the wave of Aryan civilization. And just as the present Japanese development owes its life to an Aryan source, so once in the dim past an alien influence and an alien spirit must have awakened the Japanese culture of the time. The best proof of this is the fact of the later hardening and complete rigidity. This can happen to a people only if the originally creative racial core has been lost, or if the outside influence is lacking which furnished the impulse and the materials for the first cultural development. But if it is known that a people receives and digests the essential substance of a civilization from ​alien races, and grows rigid each time the external influence ceases, the race may indeed be called a “sustainer” of civilization, but never a “creator.”
Examination of the various peoples from this standpoint shows the fact that almost none are creators; they are nearly always sustainers.
Something like the following picture of their development always results:
Aryan tribes—often in truly ridiculously small force—subjugate other peoples, and develop their slumbering intellectual and organizing powers under the stimulus of the particular living conditions of the new territory (fertility, climate, etc.), and with the help of the large number of available workers of an inferior type. Often in a few thousand, nay a few hundred years they build up civilizations which originally bear every inner mark of their character as adapted to the above-mentioned special characteristics of the soil and of the subjugated people.
But eventually the conquerors violate the principle, heretofore observed, of keeping their blood pure; they begin to intermingle with the conquered inhabitants, and thus terminate their own existence. Even the Fall of Man in Paradise was followed by expulsion.
After a thousand years or more the last visible trace of the former ruling people appears in the lighter skin-coloration that its blood bequeathes to the subjugated race, and an ossified culture which, as the original creator, it had once founded. For just as the actual and spiritual conqueror was lost in the blood of the conquered, so the fuel was lost for the torch of human cultural progress. The blood of the former masters has left a faint glow in the complexion as a remembrance, and the night of cultural life is gently illumined by the surviving creations of the ancient light-bringers. They shine out through all the renewed barbarism, and all too often make the thoughtless observer of the moment think he sees before him the image of the present people, whereas he is but looking into the mirror of the past.
It may happen that such a people in the course of its history ​comes in contact a second time, or even oftener, with the race which once brought it civilization, without there being necessarily any surviving memory of earlier encounters. Unconsciously the remnant of the old masters’ blood turns toward the new arrival, and what had originally been possible only by compulsion may now happen through free will. A new wave of civilization arrives, and lasts until those who uphold it once more go down in the blood of alien peoples.
It will be the task of future cultural and world history to make its explorations from this point of view, and not to smother in description of outward events, as our present historical learning unfortunately too often does.
Even this sketch of the development of “culture-sustaining” nations also covers the growth, work and—decline of the true culture-founders of this earth, the Aryans themselves.
Just as in daily life the so-called genius needs a particular occasion, indeed often a regular jolt to cause him to shine, so in the life of peoples does the race of genius. In the monotony of daily life even outstanding men often seem insignificant, scarcely rising above the average of their surroundings; but let them be faced with a situation where others would give up or go wrong, and the genius rises visibly from out of the inconspicuous average man, not infrequently to the astonishment of everyone who so far has seen him in the pettiness of community life—which is why the prophet is seldom much considered in his own country. There is no better opportunity to observe this than in war. In hours of trial, when others despair, apparently innocent children shoot up into heroes, reckless in determination and icily cool in judgment. Had it not been for the hour of stress, probably no one would have dreamed the beardless boy harbored a young hero. Almost always some sort of impact is necessary to call forth the genius. The hammer-blow of Fate, which lays one man low, suddenly strikes steel in another; the every-day outer shell breaks, and the hidden core lies open to the eyes of an astonished world. The world balks refusing to believe that what had seemed its own species can now suddenly be a different sort of ​being—an occurrence repeated with almost every outstanding son of the race.
Although an inventor, for instance, does not begin to become famous until the day of his invention, it is a mistake to think that genius itself had never taken hold of the man until then; the spark of genius exists in the brain of the truly creatively gifted man from the hour of his birth. True genius is always inborn, never taught or acquired.
But this is true, as I have already emphasized, not only of the individual but of the race. Actively creative peoples have fundamental creative gifts from the beginning, even though the superficial observer may not recognize it. Here too outward recognition is possible only as the result of deeds accomplished, since the rest of the world is after all not capable of recognizing genius as such, but only sees its visible expression in the form of inventions, discoveries, buildings, pictures, etc.; and even then it is a long time in winning its way to that realization. Just as the genius or the extraordinary talent of an outstanding individual man, set in motion by particular stimuli, strives for practical realization, so in the fife of peoples the real utilization of existing creative powers and abilities often takes place only when particular conditions invite it.
We see this at its clearest in the race which has been and is the bearer of human cultural development—in the Aryans. The moment Fate throws special conditions in their way, they begin to develop their innate abilities at an ever-swifter pace, and to embody them in tangible form. The civilizations which they thus inaugurate are almost always decisively conditioned by the soil, the climate—and the conquered people. The last element is almost the most important. The more primitive the technical limitations of any cultural activity, the more necessary is the existence of man-power, which, organized, concentrated and applied, must replace the power of the machine. Without this opportunity to use men of a lower type, the Aryan could never have taken the first step toward his later civilization—just as he would never, without the help of various suitable animals which ​he succeeded in taming, have arrived at a technical development which now is gradually permitting him to do without these very animals. The saying, “Othello’s occupation’s gone,” has a meaning unfortunately all too deep. For thousands of years the horse was forced to serve man, and help him lay the foundations of a development which now, thanks to the automobile, makes the horse himself superfluous. Within a few years the horse will have ceased his work; but without his help in days gone by, perhaps man would have had difficulty in arriving where he is today.
Thus the availability of inferior races was one of the most important essentials for the formation of higher cultures, since it alone could make good the lack of technical tools, without which advanced development is quite unthinkable. Beyond question the first civilization of humanity rested less on domesticated animals than on the employment of inferior human beings.
It was only after the enslavement of subjugated races that the same fate began to befall animals, and not the other way around, as many people would like to think. First it was the conquered man who drew the plow—and only after him the horse. But only pacifistic fools can consider this a sign of human degeneracy, not realizing that this development had to take place in order to arrive at last at the point from which these apostles can send their vaporings into the world.
Mankind’s progress is like the ascent of an endless ladder: there is no going higher without climbing the lower rungs. Thus the Aryan had to travel the road which reality pointed, and not that dreamed by the imagination of a modern pacifist. The road of reality is harsh and difficult, but it leads at last to the spot where the pacifist would like to dream mankind to be, but whence in reality, unfortunately, he is rather removing it than otherwise.
So it is no accident that the first civilizations arose where the Aryan, encountering lower races, subjugated them and made them do his will. They were the first technical tools to serve a dawning civilization.
Thus the road which the Aryan must travel was clearly marked. As a conqueror he subjugated the inferior peoples, and ​regulated their practical activity under his orders, according to his will, and for his own purposes. But in thus setting them to a useful if a hard task, he not only spared the lives of the conquered, but gave them fate which perhaps was actually better than their previous so-called “freedom.” So long as he ruthlessly maintained a master’s attitude, he remained not only the real master, but the preserver and encourager of civilization. For this depended entirely upon his abilities, and thus on his survival. When those conquered began to advance themselves, probably also approaching the conqueror in the matter of language, the sharp cleavage between master and servant disappeared. The Aryan surrendered the purity of his blood, and thus lost the right to the Paradise which he had made for himself. He went down in the mixture of races, and gradually lost more and more of his cultural capacities until finally he began to resemble the aborigine more than his own forefathers, not only mentally but physically. For a time he could still live upon existing cultural substance, but then ossification set in, and finally oblivion claimed him.
Thus civilizations and empires collapse to make way for new structures.
Mingling of blood, with the decline in racial level that it causes, is the sole reason for the dying-out of old cultures; for men are destroyed not by lost wars, but by losing that stamina inherent in pure blood alone.
Anything in this world that is not of good race is chaff. And every event in world history is but the expression in a good or a bad sense of the races’ instinct for self-preservation.
The question of the inner causes of the outstanding importance of Aryanism can be answered with the statement that these are to be found less in a stronger instinct of self-preservation as such than in the particular way it is expressed. Subjectively considered, the will to live is equally great everywhere, varying only in the actual form it takes. In the most primitive creatures, the instinct of self-preservation does not go beyond the individual’s care for itself. Here egoism, as we call this tendency, goes so far as to ​include time itself, so that the immediate moment claims everything, leaving nothing for the hours to come. In this state the animal lives for itself alone, seeks food but for the hunger of the moment, and fights only for its own life. So long as the instinct of self-preservation takes this form, there is no possible basis for the formation of a community, not even the most primitive form of family. Even the partnership between male and female outside of pure mating demands an extension of the self-preservative instinct, in that the care and struggle for self now extend to the mate; the male often hunts food for the female, but mostly both seek nourishment for the young. One will almost always fight to defend the other, so that we have here the first, if infinitely primitive forms of self-sacrifice. When this feeling spreads beyond the limits of the immediate family, we have the essential for the formation of larger groups, and finally of regular states.
In the most primitive men on earth this quality is present only to a very limited degree, often not going beyond the formation of the family. The greater the willingness to put aside purely personal interests, the more advanced the ability to set up extensive communities.
This will to sacrifice, to devote personal labor and, if necessary, life itself to others, is most highly developed in the Aryan. The Aryan is greatest not in his mental qualities as such, but in the extent of his readiness to devote all his abilities to the service of the community. In him the instinct of self-preservation can reach its noblest form because he willingly subordinates his own ego to the life of the community, and even sacrifices it if occasion demands.
It is not in his intellectual gifts that the cause of the Aryan’s civilizing and constructive ability lies. If he had these alone, they would enable him only to destroy, but certainly not to organize; for the essential character of every organization depends on the fact that the individual resigns insistence on his personal opinions as well as on his interests, and sacrifices both in favor of the majority of people. Only by way of this community does his ​own share come back to him. He no longer works, for instance, directly for himself, but takes his place with his activity in the structure of the community, not only for his own benefit, but for the benefit of all. The most wonderful exposition of this spirit is his word, work, which he understands by no means simply as activity for self-support, but exclusively as labor that does not run counter to the interests of the community. Otherwise he describes human effort, in so far as it serves the self-preservative instinct without consideration for the welfare of the world, as theft, usury, robbery, burglary, etc.
This spirit, putting the preservation of the community before the interests of one’s own ego, is really the first essential for every truly human culture. It alone can give rise to all the great works of humanity, which bring small reward to the founder, but rich blessings to posterity. This alone makes it possible to understand how so many people can bear honestly a shabby life which forces nothing but poverty and insignificance upon them, while it lays the foundation for the existence of the community. Every workman, every peasant, every inventor, civil servant, etc., who labors without ever attaining happiness and prosperity is a pillar of this high ideal, even though the deeper meaning of its action be forever hidden from him.
But that which is true of work as the basis of human sustenance and of all human progress is true to a yet higher degree of the protection of man and his civilization. The surrender of one’s own life for the existence of the community is the crown of all self-sacrifice. Only this prevents human hands from overthrowing or Nature from destroying what human hands have built.
It is precisely our German language which has a word that splendidly describes action on that principle: performance of duty (Pflichterfellung), that is to say, not satisfaction of self, but service to the community.
The fundamental spirit from which such action springs we call idealism (as distinguished from egoism or selfishness). By it we mean exclusively that individual’s ability to sacrifice himself for the community, for his fellow-men.
​But it is necessary indeed for us to realize ever and again that idealism is not in the least a superfluous expression of feeling; but that it was, is, and always will be in truth the prerequisite for what we call human civilization, nay that it alone created the idea, human being. To this spirit the Aryan owes his position in this world, and to it the world owes man; for it alone shaped pure mind in the creative force—a unique marriage of rude hand and inspired intellect—that built the monuments of human civilization.
Without its idealistic spirit all the capabilities of the mind, no matter how brilliant, would remain mere mind as such outward show without inner value, and never creative force.
But as true idealism is nothing but the subordination of the individual’s interest and life to the community, while this is in turn the first essential for the formation of any sort of organization, it corresponds at bottom with the ultimate will of Nature. It alone leads men voluntarily to recognize the primacy of power and strength, and makes them into grains of sand in the order which shapes and composes the whole universe.
The purest idealism corresponds unconsciously with the profoundest wisdom.
We can see at once how true this is, and how little real idealism has to do with fanciful utopianism by putting the judgment up to an unspoiled child, a healthy boy, for instance. The same boy who listens blankly and hostilely to the rant of an “idealistic” pacifist is ready to throw away his young life for the ideal of his nationality.
This is instinct unconsciously obeying the realization of the deeper necessity of preserving the species, at the expense of the individual, if necessary and protesting against the visionary oratory of the pacifist, who, a disguised but nevertheless cowardly egoist, is violating the laws of human development; for development depends on the self-sacrifice of the individual in favor of the community, and not on the sickly imaginings of cowardly wiseacres and critics of Nature.
It is therefore especially in times when the idealistic spirit thus ​seems to disappear that we notice an immediate decline in that force which forms the community, and thus prepares for the existence of civilization. Let egoism once become the ruler of a people, and the bonds of order are loosened; and in chasing their own happiness people fall from Heaven straight to Hell.
In fact even posterity forgets the men who work only for their own advantage, and glorifies the heroes who resign their own happiness.
The most extreme contrast to the Aryan is the Jew. In scarcely any of the world’s peoples is the self-preservation instinct more strongly developed than in the so-called Chosen. The best proof of this is the mere fact of the race’s existence. Where is the people that have undergone so few changes of inner proclivity, of character etc., in the last two thousand years as the Jewish? And what people has gone through greater upheavals—and yet always come through the most tremendous catastrophes of humanity still the same? What an infinitely tenacious will to live, to preserve the species becomes evident in these facts!
The intellectual qualities of the Jew have been trained in the course of thousands of years. He is considered “clever” today, and in a certain sense has always been so. But his understanding is not the product of his own development, but of object-lessons from others. Even the human mind cannot scale heights without steps; for every upward stride it needs the foundation of the past, and this in the inclusive sense which can reveal itself only in civilization in general. Any thinking rests to but a small degree on one’s own perception, and preponderantly on the experiences of previous times. The general level of civilization provides the individual (mostly without his noticing it) with such a wealth of knowledge that he is more easily able, thus armed, to take further steps of his own. The boy of today, for instance, grows up amidst a veritable host of technical achievements of past centuries, so that he takes for granted, without noticing much which only a hundred years ago was a mystery to the greatest minds, although it is of decisive importance to him in following ​and understanding our progress in the field in question. If even a genius of the twenties of the last century were suddenly to return from the grave today, his mere intellectual adjustment alone to the present time would be more difficult than it is for a modern fifteen-year-old boy of ordinary gifts. He would lack all the endless preliminary knowledge which our contemporary of today absorbs unconsciously, so to speak, as he grows up amid the scenes of his particular general civilization.
Since the Jew, for reasons which will immediately appear, has never possessed a culture of his own, the basis for his mental processes has always been furnished by others.
In every age his intellect has developed by means of the civilization surrounding him. The reverse of the process has never taken place.
For even though the self-preservation instinct of the Jewish people is not less but greater than that of other peoples, even if its intellectual powers often give the impression of being equal to the mental gifts of other races, it yet totally lacks the all-important requirement of a civilized people, the spirit of idealism.
The Jewish people’s self-sacrifice does not go beyond the native instinct of individual self-preservation. Its apparently strong feeling of affinity is based upon a very primitive herd instinct, such as occurs in many other forms of life in this world. Here the fact is worthy of remark that herd instinct leads to mutual support only so long as a common danger makes it seem useful or unavoidable. The same pack of wolves which a moment before was united in falling on its prey backs up, as hunger is satisfied, into its component animals. The same is true of horses, which try to defend themselves in unison against attack, and scatter again when danger is past.
The same thing holds for the Jew. His will to self-sacrifice is only apparent. It exists only so long as the life of each individual makes it absolutely necessary. The moment the common enemy is defeated, the common danger averted, or the plunder secured, the apparent harmony of Jews among themselves comes to an end, giving way once more to their original proclivities. The Jews ​are agreed only when a common danger forces them or common prey tempts them; if neither is the case, the qualities of crassest egoism come into their own, and in a turn of the hand the united people becomes a swarm of rats carrying on bloody battle among themselves.
If the Jews were alone in the world, they would smother in filth and offal, and would try mutually to overreach and exterminate one another in embittered battle, except as the lack of any willingness for self-sacrifice, expressing it all in their cowardice, turned even this battle into a sham.
It is a complete mistake, then, to infer a certain idealistic self-sacrifice among the Jews from the fact that they stick together in battle, or rather in plundering their fellow-men. Even here the Jew is guided by nothing but naked individual egoism.
And for that reason the Jewish State—which is supposed to be the living organism for the preservation and increase of a race—is territorially quite without boundaries. The definite spatial setting of a state structure always requires an idealistic spirit in the state’s race, and particularly a proper conception of the idea of work. To whatever extent this attitude is lacking, any attempt to form or even to preserve a spatially limited state will fail. But thus the sole foundation upon which a culture can grow up disappears.
So the Jewish people, despite all its apparent intellectual qualities, is nevertheless without any true civilization, particularly without any of its own. Whatever sham civilization the Jew possesses today is the contribution of other peoples, mostly spoiled under his hands.
As the most important guidepost in judging the attitude of Jewry toward the question of human civilization we must always remember that there has never been a Jewish art, and that there is none today, and that especially the two Queens of the Arts, architecture and music, owe nothing original to Jewry. What it accomplishes in the field of art is either distortion or intellectual piracy. In other words, the Jew lacks those qualities which distinguish creatively (and thus culturally) favored races.
​To what extent the Jew’s adoption of alien culture is but an echo, or rather a corruption, may be seen from the fact that he is found most often in the art which seems least dependent on personal originality, acting.
But even here he is really only the “mummer,” or rather an ape, for even here he lacks the final touch of real greatness; even here he is not the brilliant creator, but the superficial imitator, and all his little tricks and dodges cannot hide the inner lifelessness. But here the Jewish press lends loving aid, raising such hosannas over every bungler, no matter how mediocre, so long as he be but a Jew, that the rest of the world ends by believing it actually has an artist before it, whereas in truth the man is a mere wretched comedian.
No, the Jew possesses no civilization-building power; he has not and never did have the idealism without which there can be no upward development of man. Consequently his intellect is never constructive, but destructive—in very rare cases perhaps at best provocative, and then as the very archetype of the “power whose will is always evil and whose issue always good.” It is not through him that any progress of humanity takes place, but despite him.
Since the Jew has never had a state with definite territorial boundaries, and thus could never call a civilization his own, the idea has grown up that this is a people to be counted among the nomads. That is a mistake as great as it is dangerous. The nomad very definitely does have a sharply bounded territory, only he does not cultivate it as a sedentary peasant, but lives off his herds, with which he wanders about his territory. The outward cause is to be found in the infertility of a soil that simply will not allow settlement. The deeper cause, however, lies in the disproportion between the technical civilization of an age or a people and the natural poverty of a territory. There are districts in which it is only thanks to his technology, developed through more than a thousand years, that even the Aryan is able in solid settlements to make himself master of the broad land, and to gain a livelihood from it. If he did not have this technology, he would have either ​to avoid these districts or to support himself also as a constantly wandering nomad—that is if his thousand years’ training and habituation to sedentary life did not make this seem intolerable to him. We must remember that at the time when the American continent was being opened up many Aryans struggled for a livelihood as trappers, hunters, etc., often in large troops with wife and child, always on the move, so that their existence was exactly like that of nomads. But as soon as their growing numbers and better equipment made it possible to clear the wild land and resist the aborigines, more and more settlements sprang up throughout the country.
Probably the Aryan, too, was originally a nomad, and in the course of time became sedentary, but even so he never was a Jew! No, the Jew is no nomad; even the nomad had a definite approach to the idea of “work” which would serve as the basis for later development, so long as the necessary mental equipment was present. The basic idealistic outlook, however, the nomad possesses, even if it be infinitely diluted; his whole nature, while it may be foreign, is not repugnant to the Aryan peoples. In the Jew, on the contrary, this attitude simply does not exist; and therefore he has never been the nomad, but always a mere parasite on the body of other peoples. The fact that he has often left previous abodes has nothing to do with his intention, but is the result of ejection by his abused hosts from time to time. His spreading out is a phenomenon typical of all parasites; he is constantly seeking new soil for his race to live on.
But this has nothing to do with nomadism, for the reason that the Jew never dreams of vacating a territory he has once occupied; he stays where he is, and that so fixedly that he is very hard to get rid of even by force. His spread to new countries takes place only when certain conditions necessary for his existence arise, but—unlike the nomad—without his changing his previous residence. He remains a typical parasite, spreading like a harmful bacillus wherever a suitable medium invites it. And the effect of his existence is also like that of parasites: wherever he occurs, the host nation dies off sooner or later.
​Thus the Jew in all ages has lived in the states of other peoples, and has formed there his own state, although it has usually sailed under the colors of the designation “religious community” so long as outward circumstances did not make a complete unveiling of his nature seem indicated. But if he thought himself strong enough to do without the protective covering, he always dropped the veil, and suddenly was what so many had refused to see and to believe—the Jew.
The Jew’s life as a parasite within the body of other nations and states is the origin of a peculiarity which caused Schopenhauer to make the above-mentioned pronouncement, that the Jew is the “great master of the lie.” Existence drives the Jew to lie, and indeed to lie continually, as it forces warm clothes upon the Northerner.
His life within other peoples can in the end endure only if he succeeds in creating the impression that his is not a matter of a people, but only of a “religious community,” even though a special one. But this itself is the first great lie.
In order to carry on his existence as a parasite on other peoples he must resort to denial of his inner character. The more intelligent the individual Jew is, the more successful will his deception be. It may even go so far that great parts of the host nation will at last seriously believe the Jew is really a Frenchman or an Englishman, a German or an Italian, even if of a different persuasion. Particularly government offices, which always seem to be inspired with the celebrated fraction of wisdom, are easy victims of this infamous swindle. In such circles independent thinking is often considered a real sin against sacred advancement, so that we must not be surprised if a Bavarian State Ministry, for instance, even today has not the faintest idea that the Jews are members of a people and not of a “denomination,” although one glance at the world of newspapers belonging to Jewry must prove this at once to even the most ordinary intellect. But of course the Jewish Echo is as yet not the official journal, and thus, to the mind of these government potentates, not binding upon them.
​Jewry has always been a people with definite racial characteristics, and never a religion; only the matter of its advancement caused it early to seek a means to distract inconvenient attention from its members. And what indeed could have been more fitting and at the same time more innocent than the insinuation of the borrowed idea of a religious community? For even here everything is borrowed, or rather stolen, the Jew can derive no religious institution from his own original nature because he lacks idealism in any form, and the belief in a Hereafter is therefore absolutely foreign to him. But according to the Aryan concept no religion is imaginable which lacks a belief in some form of survival after death. And in fact the Talmud is a book to prepare not for the Hereafter but for a practical and prosperous life in this world.
The Jewish religious teaching is primarily a rule to keep the blood of Jewry pure and to regulate the intercourse of Jews among themselves, and still more with the rest of the world—with the non-Jews. But even here it is a matter not of ethical problems but of extremely elementary economic ones. Of the moral value of Jewish religious instruction there are and have long been quite detailed studies (not of Jewish authorship; the creeds of the Jews themselves, of course, are made to suit the purpose) which to Aryan eyes make this sort of religion seem absolutely monstrous. But the best indication is the product of this religious education, the Jew himself. His life is of this world alone, and his spirit is inwardly as foreign to true Christianity as his nature was two thousand years ago to the great Founder of the new teaching Himself. He, it is true, made no secret of His disposition toward the Jewish people, and even resorted to the whip if necessary to drive out from the Lord’s temple this adversary of any real humanity, who then as always saw in religion only a means for a business livelihood. But of course Christ was nailed to the cross for this, while our present party Christianity lowers itself in elections to beg for Jewish votes, and afterward tries to hatch political skulduggery with atheistical Jewish parties—and against its own nationality, at that.
​On this first and greatest lie—that Jewry is not a race, but a religion—are inevitably built a constant series of further lies. Language is to him not a means to express his thoughts, but a means to conceal them.
When he speaks French, his thinking is Jewish, and while he is spinning German verses he is but living out the nature of his own nationality.
So long as the Jew has not become master of the other peoples he must speak their languages whether or no; but let them once be his slaves, and they would have to learn a universal language (Esperanto, for instance!) so that Jewry could rule them more easily by this means as well.
How completely the whole existence of this people depends on one continuous lie is incomparably shown in the “Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion,” so bitterly hated by the Jews. They rest on a forgery, the Frankfurter Zeitung keeps groaning to the world—the best proof that they are genuine. What many Jews may do unconsciously is here consciously made clear. And that is what counts. It is a matter of indifference what Jewish head these revelations come from; the important thing is that they uncover the nature and activity of the Jewish people with absolutely horrible accuracy, and show their inner interconnections as well as their ultimate aim. But the best criticism of these is furnished by reality. Anyone who examines the historical development of the last hundred years from the standpoint of this book will immediately come to understand the clamor of the Jewish press. For once this book has become the common property of the people, the Jewish menace can be considered as broken.
In order to know the Jew it is best to study the road he has taken within other peoples in the course of centuries. It will be enough to follow through one example in order to arrive at the necessary realization. Since his career has been always the same, just as the peoples he devours are always alike, it is desirable for purposes of observation to break up his development into definite ​steps, which I will here indicate by letters for the sake of simplicity.
The first Jew came to Germany in the course of the advance of the Romans; as always, they came as traders. But in the storm’s great migration they apparently disappeared again, and so the time of the first formation of the Germanic state may be considered the beginning of the new and this time permanent Judaization of Central and Northern Europe. A development began which was always the same or similar wherever Jewry encountered Aryan peoples.
A. With the foundation of the first permanent settlement the Jew is suddenly “there.” He comes as a trader, and at first is little interested in obscuring his nationality. He is still a Jew, perhaps partly because the external racial difference between him and his hosts is too great, his knowledge of languages too slight, and the exclusiveness of the host nation too pronounced for him to dare try to appear anything but an alien trader. With his adaptability and the inexperience of the host nation there is no disadvantage, but rather an advantage in retaining his character as a Jew; the stranger finds a friendly reception.
B. Gradually he begins to be active in economic life, not as a producer but solely as an intermediary. In his adroitness, a thousand years in the making, he is far superior to the Aryans, who are still raw, but above all utterly honest, so that within a short time trade threatens to become his monopoly. He begins by lending money, at usurious rates as always. Indeed he actually inaugurates interest in that way. The danger of this new institution is at first not recognized, and for the sake of momentary advantages is even welcomed.
C. The Jew has settled down completely, that is to say he occupies a special quarter in the cities and towns, and forms more and more of a state within a state. Trade and all money business he considers his very own privilege, which he exploits ruthlessly.
D. Financial business and trade have become altogether his monopoly. His usurious interest finally arouses resistance, his ​growing general impudence indignation, his wealth envy. The cup runs over when he begins to include the very soil in the commercial sphere, and degrades it into a saleable, or better a tradeable form of property. Since he never cultivates the soil himself, but regards it solely as an object of exploitation upon which the peasants may perfectly well continue to live, but only under the most despicable extortion from their new master, the aversion to him gradually rises to open hatred. His blood-sucking tyranny grows so extreme that he is the victim of violent excesses. People begin to look more and more closely at the alien, and keep discovering new repellent features and idiosyncrasies until the chasm is too wide to be bridged.
Finally, in times of bitterest distress, the rage against him begins to break out, and the plundered and ruined masses resort to self-help to free themselves of this scourge of God. In the course of centuries they have come to know him, and they feel his very existence as a visitation like the plague.
E. But now the Jew begins to reveal his true characteristics. With disgusting flattery he approaches governments, puts his money to work, and thus keeps assuring himself of the letter of marque for fresh plundering of his victims. Even though the people’s rage against the perpetual leech often blazes up, that does not stop him from turning up again a few years later in the town he has scarcely left, and beginning his old life all over again. No persecution can change his way of exploiting men, none can drive him away; each time he is soon there again, still the same as ever.
To prevent at least the very worst from happening, people begin to withdraw the land from his usurious hands by simply making it legally impossible for him to acquire.
F. As the power of the princes begins to grow, he elbows his way closer and closer to them. He begs for “letters patent” and “Privileges,” which he easily obtains upon satisfactory payment to the noble lords, who are always in financial difficulties. No matter what this costs him, within a few years it brings back his money with compound interest. A veritable leech, he fastens ​himself upon the body of the unfortunate people, and is not to be removed until the princes need money once more, and with their own exalted hands draw off the blood he has sucked.
This game keeps repeating itself; in it the role of the so-called “German princes” is just as contemptible as that of the Jews themselves. They were really the punishment of God upon their dearly beloved people, these rulers, and their only parallel is in various ministers of the present day. It is due to the German princes that the German nation could not free itself permanently from the Jewish menace. Unfortunately there was never any change in this, so that they merely received from the Jew a reward earned a thousand times over for the sins they committed against their people. They leagued themselves with the devil, and wound up in his power.
G. Thus the entanglement of the princes leads to their destruction. Slowly but surely their position toward the peoples grows shaky as they cease to represent the people’s interests, and instead to exploit their subjects. The Jew well knows that their end is coming, and tries to hasten it as much as possible. He himself fosters their perpetual financial distress by estranging them more and more from their true tasks, fawning upon them with the barest flattery, inducting them into vice, and thus making himself more and more indispensable. His adroitness, or rather unscrupulousness, in all financial matters succeeds in sweeping, nay in flaying new funds from the plundered subjects—funds which go the way of all earthly things at even shorter intervals. Thus each court has its “Court Jew,” as the monsters are called who torture the people to desperation and arrange the perpetual pleasures of the princes. Who can be surprised that these ornaments of the human race are finally decorated even outwardly, and ascend into the heredity nobility, thus helping not merely to make that institution ridiculous, but actually to poison it?
Now of course he is better able than ever to use his position in the interests of his own advancement.
Finally he has only to let himself be bought in order to come into the possession of all the opportunities and rights of the ​native subjects. This business also is carried out not unusually, to the delight of the churches at the new son, and of Israel at the successful fraud.
H. In Jewdom a transformation now begins to take place. Thus far they have been Jews, that is they have been little interested in appearing to be anything else, and in fact could not have done so, considering the very pronounced racial characteristics on both sides. As late as the time of Frederick the Great no one thought of regarding the Jews as anything but the “alien” people, and even Goethe is horrified at the thought that marriage between Christian and Jew may in future no longer be legally forbidden. But Goethe, Heaven knows, was no reactionary or helot; what spoke within him was nothing but the voice of blood and reason. Thus, despite all the shameful actions of the Courts, the people instinctively saw the Jew as a foreign substance in its own body, and took its attitude accordingly.
But now this was to be changed. In the course of more than a thousand years he has learned the language of his hosts well enough so that he believes he may dare emphasize his Judaism somewhat less in the future, and put his “Germanity” more in the foreground; for ridiculous, nay imbecile as it may at first seem, he nevertheless has the audacity to transform himself into a “Teuton,” in this case that is into a “German.” Here begins one of the most infamous deceptions that can be imagined. Since he possesses nothing of Germanity except the ability to maltreat its language—and how fearfully!—and otherwise has never mingled with it, his whole Germanity depends on language alone. Race, however, is not in language, but entirely in blood—something which no one knows better than the Jew, who cares very little for the preservation of his own language, but a great deal for the purity of his blood. A man may change languages easily; that is, he may use a new one; but in his new language he will express the old ideas; his inner nature is not changed. The best proof of this is the Jew, who can speak a thousand languages, and yet remain the same Jew. His characteristics are still the same, whether he spoke Latin two thousand years ago as a grain-dealer ​at Ostia or mumbles German today as a flour-speculator. It is still the same Jew. That this obvious fact is not understood by a normal Ministerial Councillor or high police officer today may be taken for granted, since there is hardly anything with less instinct and intelligence running at large than these servants of our model government of the present.
The reason why the Jew suddenly decides to become a “German” is obvious. He feels the power of the princes slowly beginning to waver, and hence makes early efforts to get a platform under his feet. More than this, however, his financial command over the whole economic system has already advanced so far that without possession of full civil rights he can no longer prop up the whole vast structure, or at any rate no further increase of his influence can take place. But he desires both; for the higher he climbs, the more temptingly his old, promised goal rises from the mist of the past, and with feverish greed his most alert minds see the dream of world power coming within reach again. Thus his whole effort is directed at putting himself in full possession of civil rights.
This is the cause of the emancipation from the Ghetto.
I. Thus from the Court Jew the people’s Jew gradually developed—that is to say, the Jew remains as always in the neighborhood of the noble lords, and in fact tries to insinuate himself more than ever into their circle; but at the same time another part of the race begins to curry favor with the good old common people. When we consider what sins he has committed against the masses in the course of centuries, how he has kept pitilessly squeezing them and sucking them dry, when we remember further how the people gradually learned to hate him for it, and finally regarded his existence as but a punishment of Heaven upon other peoples, we can understand how difficult this change of base must be to the Jew. Yes, it is hard work all at once to present yourself to your flayed victims as “a friend of humanity.”
He begins by attempting to make good in the eyes of the people his previous crimes against it. He begins his transformation as a “benefactor” of humanity. As his new benevolence has a very ​tangible cause, he cannot well keep to the old phrase from the Bible that the left hand should not know what the right hand gives; willy-nilly he must resign himself to letting as many people as possible know how deeply he feels the sufferings of the masses, and what personal sacrifices he is making in his turn. With this inborn modesty of his he drums his merits into the rest of the world until the world really begins to believe it. Anyone who does not believe it, is doing him a bitter injustice. Within a very short time he begins to twist things as if hitherto injustice had always been done to him alone, and not the reverse. Particularly stupid people believe him, and cannot help pitying the poor “unfortunate.”
This incidentally, is, the place to remark that, with all his fondness for self-sacrifice, naturally the Jew still never becomes poor himself. He understands management; in fact his benevolence is often comparable only to the manure that is spread upon the field, not for love of the field, but, as a matter of foresight for one’s own future advantage. In any case everyone knows within a comparatively short time that the Jew has become a “benefactor and philanthropist.” What a peculiar transformation!
But what is taken more or less for granted in others arouses keen astonishment, frequently even obvious admiration, in his case, because in him it is not taken for granted. Thus it happens that people give to him much more credit for any such action than they would to the rest of humanity.
But more than this, the Jew all at once becomes liberal, and begins to chatter of the necessary progress of humanity. Thus he slowly makes himself the spokesman of a new age.
It is true also that he more and more completely destroys the foundations of any economy truly useful to the people. By way of stock exchange shares he intrudes himself into the cycle of national production, makes this a vendible or rather a tradeable object to barter and exchange, and so robs the factories of the basis of personal ownership. Thus for the first time that inner estrangement arises between employer and employee which ​later leads to political class antagonism. Finally, however, the Jewish influence on economic affairs by way of the stock exchange grows with tremendous speed. He becomes the owner or at least the controller of the nation’s laboring force.
To strengthen his political position he attempts to break down the racial and civil barriers which still confine him wherever he goes. For this purpose he fights with all his native tenacity for religious toleration; and in Freemasonry, which has fallen entirely into his hands, he has an excellent instrument to fight for his purposes or gain them by stealth. Governing circles as well as the higher levels of the political and economic bourgeoisie fall into his snares through Masonic connections, without necessarily even dreaming they are doing so.
Only the people as such, or rather that class which is beginning to awake and fight for its own rights and freedom, cannot thus be adequately laid hold of in its widest and deepest levels. But this is more necessary than anything else; for the Jew feels that the possibility of his rise to a ruling position exists only if there is a “pacemaker” ahead of him; but this he believes he sees in the bourgeoisie, specifically in its broadest levels. But the glovers and weavers cannot be caught with the delicate net of Freemasonry; here ruder but no less penetrating means must be used. Thus to Freemasonry a second weapon is added for the service of Jewry: the press.
He puts himself in possession of it with all the tenacity and adroitness he can muster. With it he slowly begins to clutch all of public life, to entangle it, steer it and push it, since he is in a position to create and direct that force which is more familiar to us today under the name of “public opinion” than it was even a few decades ago.
At the same time he professes to be infinitely thirsty for knowledge, and praises all progress, though mostly that which leads to the ruin of others; for he judges all knowledge and every development solely by the possibility of forwarding his own nationality, and where this is lacking he is the implacable, deadly enemy of all light, the hater of all true culture. He ​employs all the knowledge which he gains from the school of the others exclusively in the service of his race.
But this nationality he guards as never before. While he seems to be overflowing with “enlightenment,” “progress,” “freedom,” “humanity,” etc., he himself practices the strictest segregation of his race. He may sometimes put off his women on influential Christians, but as a matter of principle he always keeps his male line pure. He poisons the others’ blood, but preserves his own. The Jew almost never marries a Christian woman; the Christian marries the Jewess. But the bastards turn out on the Jewish side nevertheless. Part of the higher nobility, in particular, degenerates completely. This the Jew well knows, and so carries on systematically this sort of “disarming” of the intellectually leading class of his racial enemies. To disguise his doings and to lull his victims, however, he talks more and more of the equality of all men, regardless of race and color. The blockheads begin to believe him.
But as his whole character still smells too strongly of the altogether foreign for the great masses of the people to fall easily into his snare, he has his press depict him in a way as untrue to fact as it is useful to the purpose he is pursuing. In comic journals, particularly, pains are taken to represent the Jews as a harmless little people which has its peculiarities—as others do too—but which, even in its rather foreign-seeming manner, betrays a perhaps comical but always kind and honorable soul. Just as pains are always taken to make him seem insignificant rather than dangerous.
His eventual goal at this stage is the victory of democracy, or, as he conceives it, the rule of parliamentarism. This is best suited to his needs; it does away with personality, after all, and puts in its place the majority of stupidity, incompetence, and not least of cowardice.
The final result will be the downfall of monarchy, which must then take place sooner or later.
K. The enormous economic development leads to a change in the social stratification of the people. The small handicrafts ​slowly die out, and thus make ever rarer the possibility of a workman’s winning an independent existence. As a result he becomes visibly proletarianized. The industrial “factory worker” comes into existence, whose most essential characteristic is that he is scarcely ever in a position to gain an independent livelihood in later life. He is destitute in the truest sense of the word; his old age is a torment, and can hardly be described as life.
A similar situation has been created before; it imperiously demanded a solution, and found it. A new group had arisen to join the peasant and the artisan—the officials and employees, particularly of the State. They too were without property in the truest sense of the word. The State finally found a way out of this unhealthy condition by itself undertaking to provide for the State employee who could not prepare for his old age, and introducing pensions—retirement pay. More and more private enterprises slowly followed this example, so that today almost every regularly employed brain-worker eventually draws a pension if the firm has reached or passed a certain size. Only the provision for the State functionary in his old age trained him in that unselfish devotion to duty which was the finest characteristic of German officialdom before the war.
Thus a whole group remaining without property was wisely freed from social misery, and so assigned a proper place in the totality of the people.
Now this question rose again to face the State and the nation, this time on a much larger scale. More and more new masses of humanity, running into the millions, moved from the agricultural communities into the great cities to earn their daily bread as factory workers in the newly founded industries. The working and living conditions of the new class were worse than bad. The more or less mechanical transfer of the former methods of work of the old artisans or peasants to the new form was in itself altogether unsuitable. The activity of neither could be compared with the exertion required of the industrial factory worker. In the old handicrafts, time may have played a smaller part; but with the new methods of work it was all the more ​important. The formal adoption of the old working hours in the great industrial enterprise was absolutely catastrophic; for, owing to the lack of present-day intensive methods of work, the actual daily production in former times had been but small. One might have been able to stand the fourteen- or fifteen-hour day in the past, but one certainly could not in an age when every moment was utilized to the utmost. And in fact the result of this senseless transfer of old working hours to the new industrial activity was disastrous in two directions: health was shattered, and faith in a higher justice destroyed. Finally there was the wretched remuneration on the one hand and therefore the conspicuously superior position of the employer on the other.
In the country there could be no social question, since master and man did the same work, and above all ate from the same dish. But even this changed.
The separation of employer and employee now seemed complete in every field of life. How far the inward Judaization of our people had progressed in the process we can see by the slight respect, if not contempt, accorded to manual work as such. This is not the German way. Only the denationalization of our life, which in reality was a Judaization, transformed the old respect for the handicrafts into a certain contempt for any physical labor at all.
Thus there grows up in fact a new and very little-respected group, and some day the question must arise whether the nation will have the strength to assign the new group its proper place in society, or whether a difference in calling will grow into the chasm of class.
One thing was sure: the new group included in its ranks not the worst element, but, on the contrary, the most energetic. The over-refinements of so-called civilization had not yet produced their disintegrating and destructive effect here. The great masses of the new group were not yet touched by the poison of pacifist weakness, but were robust and when necessary even brutal.
While the bourgeoisie paid no attention at all to this momentous question, and indifferently let things take their course, the ​Jew realized the limitless possibilities here offered for the future. On the one hand he organized capitalistic methods of human exploitation down to the last detail; and then he himself crept up on the victims of his spirit and activity, very shortly becoming the leader of their battle against themselves. That is to say, of course, only figuratively “against themselves”; for the great master of lying succeeded as always in making himself seem innocent, and throwing the blame on others. Since he had the audacity to lead the masses himself, it never occurred to them that this could be the most infamous swindle of all time.
And yet so it was.
Hardly has the new class developed out of the general economic transformation before the Jew clearly recognizes it as the new pacemaker for his own further advancement. First he used the bourgeoisie as a battering-ram against the feudal world; now he uses the worker against the bourgeoisie. If in the shadow of the bourgeoisie he once succeeded by stealth in gaining civil rights, now he hopes to find in the worker’s struggle for existence the road to his own domination.
From now on the worker has no duty but to fight for the future of the Jewish people. Unconsciously he is put to work for the power which he believes he is combating. He is led apparently to tilt against capitalism, and thus is most easily made to fight on its behalf. People keep shouting against international capital, while they really mean the national economy. This must be demolished, so that the international stock exchange can triumph on the corpse-strewn battlefield.
For this purpose the Jew proceeds as follows: he creeps up on the workers, in order to win their confidence, pretending pity for their fate or even indignation at their wretched and poverty-stricken lot. He takes pains to study all the actual or even imaginary rigors of their life—and to awaken the longing for a change in such an existence. With infinite shrewdness he fans the urge for social justice slumbering within every Aryan into hatred of those more favored by fortune, and thus puts the stamp of a very special world-concept upon the battle for reform ​of social ills. He founds the Marxist doctrine.
By representing it as indissolubly linked with a whole series of socially justified requirements he fosters both its spread and the disinclination of decent humanity to satisfy demands which seem, when presented in such form and such company, to be unjust and impossible of fulfilment from the outset. For under this cloak of purely social ideas, truly diabolical intentions lie hidden; in fact they are even presented in public with the most audacious plainness. This doctrine is an inseparable mixture of reason and human derangement, but always in such fashion that only the madness can become reality; the reason, never. By categorical denial of personality and thus of the nation and its racial substance it destroys the basic foundations of all human civilization, which depends precisely upon those factors. This is the true core of the Marxist world-concept, in so far as this creature of a criminal brain can be called a “world-concept.” The destruction of personality and race removes the prime obstacle to domination by the inferior man—and he is the Jew.
Economic and political lunacy is the very meaning of this doctrine. For it prevents all persons of true intelligence from working for the cause, while the intellectually inactive and the economically uneducated rush to it with banners flying. But the intelligence for the movement—even this movement needs intelligence in order to exist—is “sacrificed” by the Jew from his own ranks.
Thus there comes into being a purely manual-workers’ movement under Jewish leadership, apparently attempting to improve the position of the worker, but in truth intending the enslavement and thus the annihilation of all non-Jewish peoples.
General pacifistic paralysis of the national self-preservative instinct, in the circles of the so-called intelligentsia by Freemasonry, is spread into the great masses, particularly the middle classes, by the activity of the great and today invariably Jewish press. To these two weapons of disintegration there is added a third, and by far the most fearful, the organization of brute force. Marxism as an attacking and storming detachment plans to ​complete the collapse prepared for by the undermining work of the first two weapons.
This coordination is truly masterly; there is really no reason for surprise if those very institutions fail most abjectly against it that are always so fond of posing as the embodiment of the more or less mythical authority of the State. In our high and highest State officialdom the Jew has always found (with a few exceptions) the most willing tool for his work of destruction. Crawling servility in an “upward” direction and arrogant superciliousness “downward” are as much marks of this class as its often flagrant purblindness, exceeded only by a sometimes absolutely astonishing conceit.
But these are qualities which the Jew needs in our government offices and therefore takes pride in.
In rough outline the practical battle which now begins takes place as follows:
Suitably to the ultimate aims of the Jewish struggle, which are not confined to economic world conquest but demand also political subjugation, the Jew divides the organization of his Marxist world-doctrine into halves which, apparently separate, in truth are one indivisible whole: the political and the trade-union movement.
The trade-union movement does the recruiting. In the hard battle for existence which the worker must wage because of the greed and short-sightedness of many business men, the movement offers help and protection, and thus the possibility of forcing better living conditions. If, in an age when the organized national community, the State, pays him almost no attention, the workman is unwilling to leave the upholding of his human rights to the blind whim of persons frequently but little responsible and often heartless as well, he must take the defense in his own hands. The so-called national bourgeoisie, blinded by its financial interests puts grave obstacles in the way of this fight for life, not only resisting but often actually sabotaging all attempts to shorten inhumanly long working hours, end child labor, protect woman, and improve hygienic conditions in factories and dwellings; and ​the Jew, being shrewder, takes the part of the people thus oppressed. He gradually becomes the leader of the union movement, and this the more easily because he is not interested in a real and honest correction of social abuses, but only in forming a blindly devoted economic fighting force to shatter national economic independence. While the direction of a sound social policy will always move between the guide-lines of preserving the people’s health on the one hand and assuring an independent national economy on the other hand, not only do these two considerations play no part with the Jew in this struggle, but their elimination is one of the purposes of his life. He does not want to preserve an independent national economy; he wants to destroy it. Consequently no qualms of conscience can prevent him as leader of the trade-union movement from making demands that not only overshoot the mark but in practice either are impossible of fulfilment or mean the ruin of the national economy. Nor does he want a sound and robust race, but a decayed herd ready for the yoke. This wish, again, allows him to make the most senseless demands, whose practical fulfilment he himself knows is impossible, and which could never produce any change in affairs, but at best a wild turbulence of the masses. This, however, is what he is after, and not the real and honest improvement of their social situation.
The leadership of Jewry in trade-union matters will therefore be undisputed until either a vast work of enlightenment influences the broad masses, and teaches them wisdom concerning their unending misery, or the State disposes of the Jew and his work. For so long as the perception of the masses remains as small as it is now, and the State as indifferent as today, the masses will always soonest follow him who makes them the most unabashed promises in economic matters. In this the Jew is a master. After all, no moral scruples hamper his activities!
In this field he soon perforce puts every competitor to rout. In accordance with his whole inner predatory brutality he teaches the union movement the most brutal use of force. If anyone’s clearsightedness resists the Jewish lures, his defiance and wisdom are broken by terrorism. The success of such activity is tremendous.
​By means of the union, which might be a blessing to the nation, the Jew actually destroys the foundations of the national economy.
The political organization runs parallel with this. It works hand in glove with the union organization, in that the latter prepares the masses for political organization, indeed lashes them into entering it by violence and compulsion. It is also the permanent financial source from which the political organization feeds its enormous machine. It is the organ of control for the political activity of the individual, and does recruiting service at all great political demonstrations. Finally it ceases to interest itself in economic concerns, and puts its chief weapon, refusal to work, at the disposal of the political idea in the form of the mass and general strike.
Through the creation of a press whose substance is adapted to the intellectual horizon of the least-educated people, the political and trade-union organization have an inciting instrument by which the lowest levels of the nation can be prepared for rashest action.
It is the organization’s task not to lead people from the slough of a base spirit to a higher level, but to pander to their lowest instincts. This is an enterprise as speculative as it is profitable with the lazy-minded and often presumptuous masses.
It is this press above all, in an absolutely fanatical war of slander, which breaks down anything that might be considered a prop of national independence, high civilization, and economic self-reliance.
It pounds away particularly at all those characters who will not bend to the Jewish presumption of domination, or whose inspired ability seems in itself a menace to the Jew. In order to be hated by the Jew it is not necessary to combat him; the mere suspicion that the other man might either some day stumble upon the idea of opposition, or be, by reason of his superior genius, an addition to the strength and greatness of a nationality hostile to the Jew, is enough.
His instinct, infallible in such matters, scents the inner-most ​soul in everyone, and his hostility toward anyone not spirit of his spirit is adjudged. Since the Jew is not the attacked but the attacker, is not merely the man who attacks his enemy, but also he who resists him. The method by which he attempts to break down such audacious but upright souls is not honorable battle but lying and slander.
Here he hesitates at nothing, and his viciousness becomes enormous; we need not be surprised that among our people the personification of the Devil as the symbol of all evil assumes the very form of the Jew.
The ignorance of the broad masses concerning the inner nature of the Jew, and the purblindness, devoid of all instinct, of our upper classes makes the people an easy victim of this Jewish campaign of lies.
While native cowardice leads the upper classes to turn away from a man whom the Jew thus attacks with lies and slander, stupidity or simple-mindedness induces the broad masses to believe it all. The State authorities either cloak themselves in silence, or as usually happens, prosecute the victim of unjust attack to put an end to the Jewish journalistic campaign—a procedure which in the eyes of such a jackass-in-office constitutes preservation of governmental authority and defense of peace and good order.
Gradually the fear of the Marxist weapon of Jewry comes to rest like a nightmare on the mind and soul of decent people.
They begin to tremble before the fearful enemy, and thus are already his doomed victims.
K. The domination of the Jew in the State seems so well assured that he can now not only designate himself as a Jew again, but ruthlessly admit his ultimate racial and political reasoning. One part of the race quite openly admits to being an alien people, though not without lying again, even here. For when Zionism tries to job off on the rest of the world the story that racial self-determination of the Jew would be satisfied by the creation of a State in Palestine, the Jews are once more craftily pulling the wool over the eyes of the stupid goyim. They never dream of ​building a Jewish State in Palestine in order to inhabit it; they merely want an organization headquarters with its own sovereignty, beyond reach of interference from other states—a refuge of convicted rogues and a college for knaves to come.
It is a sign not only of their growing confidence but of their feeling of security that while some of them are still truthlessly masking themselves as Germans, Frenchmen or Englishmen, others document themselves as the Jewish race.
How vividly they already see the approaching victory we can tell from the fearful manner in which they carry on intercourse with members of other peoples.
The black-haired Jew-boy lies in wait by the hour, Satanic delight on his face, for the unsuspecting girl whom he outrages with his blood, and thus steals from her people. By every means he attempts to undermine the racial foundations of the nation to be subjugated. While he himself systematically ruins women and girls, he does not hesitate to break down the barriers of blood on a large scale for others. It was Jews who did and still do bring the negro to the Rhine, always with the same motive and plain intention of destroying the hated white race by means of the consequent forced bastardization, overthrowing it from its cultural and political eminence, and ascending to be its masters themselves. A racially pure people which is conscious of its blood can never be subjugated by the Jew; in this world he can always be but the master of bastards.
So he tries systematically to lower the racial level by constant poisoning of individuals.
But politically he begins to replace the idea of democracy with that of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
In the organized mass of Marxism he finds the weapon which allows him to do without democracy, and permits him instead to subjugate and rule the peoples dictatorially, with an iron hand.
He works systematically in two directions for the revolution—economically and politically.
Peoples who too violently resist the attack from within he enmeshes through his international influence in a network of ​enemies, incites them into war, and finally, if necessary, raises the standard of revolution even on the battlefields.
Economically he shakes the State until the socialized enterprises, becoming unprofitable, are denationalized and put under his financial control.
Politically he refuses the State the means for its self-preservation, destroys the foundations of any national self-assertion and defense, destroys faith in the leadership, pours scorn on its history and past, and drags everything truly great in the gutter.
Culturally he infects art, literature and theater, makes a mock of natural feeling, overturns all ideas of beauty and nobility, of the exalted and good, drags people down into the sphere of his own base nature.
Religion is made ridiculous, morals and propriety are represented as outworn, until the last props of a nationality in its struggle for existence in this world have fallen.
L. Now begins the great, the final Revolution. As the Jew battles his way to political power, he flings aside what few coverings he still wears. The democratic popular Jew becomes the bloody Jew and tyrant over the people. Within a very few years he attempts to exterminate the mainstays of national intelligence, and, by robbing the peoples of their natural intellectual leadership, prepares them for the slave’s lot of permanent thralldom.
The most fearful example of this sort is Russia, where he has killed (sometimes with inhuman tortures) or starved to death with truly fanatical savagery close to thirty million persons in order to assure domination over a great people for a crowd of Jewish literati and stock-exchange bandits.
But the end is not only the end of the freedom of the peoples oppressed by the Jew, but also the end of these national parasites themselves. After the death of the victim, the vampire itself also dies sooner or later.
If we review all the causes of the German collapse, the failure to recognize the race problem, and particularly the Jewish menace, remains the ultimate and decisive one.
​To stand up under the defeats on the battlefield in August of 1918 would have been child’s-play. They bore no relation to the victory of our people. It was not they that overthrew us; we were overthrown by the power which prepared for these defeats by decades of systematic work in robbing our people of the political and moral instincts and forces which alone enable and thus entitle peoples to survive.
By passing heedlessly over the question of preserving the racial foundations of our nationality, the old Empire also neglected the sole right which can give life in this world. Peoples which become or allow themselves to be bastardized sin against the will of Eternal Providence, and their downfall at the hands of one stronger is not an injustice done them, but merely the restoration of justice. If a people no longer respects the characteristics given it by Nature and rooted in its blood, it has no further right to complain of the loss of its earthly existence.
Everything in the world is to be improved. Every defeat may father a later victory. Every lost war may be the cause of a later revival, every distress may crucify human energy, and from every oppression may come the forces for a new spiritual rebirth so long as the blood is kept pure.
Lost purity of blood alone destroys inner happiness forever, and lowers man irrevocably; the results can never again be eliminated from body and spirit.
If we examine and compare all the other problems of life as against this one question, we shall come to realize how ridiculously small they are by comparison. They are all temporally limited—but the question of preserving or not preserving purity of blood will remain so long as there are human beings.
All the really significant symptoms of decay before the war go back fundamentally to racial causes.
Whether the question is one of universal justice or of abuses in economic life, of signs of cultural decline or processes of political degeneration, a question of mistaken school training or of harmful influence upon adults through the press, etc., always and everywhere it is at bottom a neglect of the racial concerns ​of our own people or an overlooking of some alien racial threat.
Hence all attempts at reform, all social work and political exertion, all economic advance and all apparent increase in knowledge of spirit have in their final results nevertheless been immaterial. The nation and that organism which permits and preserves life on earth, the State, inwardly have not grown healthier, but have visibly wasted away in disease. All the apparent prosperity of the old Empire could not hide the inner weakness, and every attempt at a true strengthening of the Empire was balked by this same old ignoring of the most important question.
It would be a mistake to think that the adherents of the various political tendencies which were doctoring with the German body politic, or even to some extent their leaders, were bad or ill-intentioned men by nature. Their activity was simply condemned to be fruitless because at best they saw only the outward forms of our general sickness, and tried to combat them, but went blindly past the cause. Anyone who has systematically pursued the line of political development of the old Empire must realize, on calm consideration, that even at the time when the German nation was unified and thus on the upgrade, inner decay was already in full swing; and that despite all apparent political successes and increasing economic wealth the general situation grew worse from year to year. Even the rising tide of Marxist votes at the Reichstag elections presaged the ever-approaching inner and thus also outer collapse. All the successes of the so-called bourgeois parties were worthless, not only because they could not prevent the numerical growth of the Marxist flood even at so-called victorious bourgeois elections, but still more because they already carried the seeds of disintegration within themselves. Undreaming, the bourgeois world itself was inwardly infected with the carrion virus of Marxist ideas, and its resistance was due more frequently to the envy of ambitious leaders than to opposition on principle by opponents determined to fight to the last. One figure alone fought throughout those long years with unshakeable consistency, and this was the Jew. The Star of David rose ever higher as the will for self-preservation of our people disappeared.
​In August of 1914, therefore, it was no nation resolved to attack that stormed upon the field of battle; there was but the last flickering-up of the national self-preservative instinct against the increasing of Pacifist-Marxist paralysis of our body politic. As the enemy within was not recognized in those fateful days, all outer resistance was futile, and Providence did not reward the victorious sword, but followed the law of eternal retribution.
From this realization were to come the guiding principles and the tendency of the new movement which alone, we were convinced could not only halt the decline of the German people, but lay the granite foundation upon which some day a state may exist which will be no alien mechanism of economic concerns and interests, but an organism of the people—
A Germanic State of the German nation.