# Mein Kampf (Stackpole Sons)/Volume 1/Chapter 12

12. Early Development of the National- Socialist German Workers’ Party.
In describing, at the close of this volume, the early development of our movement, and briefly discussing a number of the questions it implies, I do not intend a treatise on the intellectual aims of the movement. The aims and tasks of the new movement are so tremendous that they must be treated in a volume by themselves. In a second volume I shall therefore discuss at length the foundations of the movement’s program, and attempt to depict what we mean by the word State.
By We I mean all the hundreds of thousands who fundamentally long for the same thing, without finding the particular word to describe what is before their inner eye. For it is a peculiarity of all great reforms that at first they often have only one man as a champion, while as supporters they have many millions. Their goal has often been the heart’s desire of hundreds of thousands for centuries before someone appears as the herald of one of these universal desires, and as its standard-bearer, leads to victory the old longing in a new idea.
That millions carry in their hearts the desire for a radical change in present conditions is a fact proved by the discontent they suffer from. It is expressed in a thousand forms—in one case as downheartedness and hopelessness, in another as disgust, anger and indignation; here as indifference, there again as furious extravagance. Further witnesses to this inner discontent are the election-weary and the many who incline to fanatical extremes on the left.
And to these the young movement ought primarily to address itself. It must not be an organization of the satisfied and well-fed, but must unite the suffering and the malcontents, the unhappy ​and the dissatisfied; and above all it should not float on the surface of the body politic, but must have its roots at the bottom.
Taken purely from a political standpoint this was the picture in 1918: we have a people torn into two parts. One, by far the smallest, includes the classes of the nationalist intelligentsia, excluding all those who do physical labor. It is outwardly nationalist, but cannot conceive of that word’s meaning anything except a very flat and feeble defense of so-called State interests, which in turn seem identical with dynastic interests. It tries to champion its ideas and aims with intellectual weapons both fragmentary and superficial, a complete failure in face of the enemy’s brutality. What a moment before was still the ruling class is laid low with one fearful blow; trembling in cowardice it swallows every humiliation from the ruthless victor.
Opposed to it is the second class, the great mass of the laboring population. It is united in more or less radically Marxist movements, determined to break down any intellectual resistance by the power of violence. It does not mean to be nationalist, but deliberately opposes any furthering of national interests, and conversely supports all foreign oppression. It is numerically the stronger, and includes above all those elements of the nation without which a national revival is unthinkable and impossible.
For by 1918 people must surely have realized that any recovery of the German people was possible only by regaining outward power. The essential for this is not arms as our bourgeois “Statesmen” keep prating, but strength of will. Of arms the German people used to have more than enough. They were not enough to protect freedom because the energies of the national instinct of self-preservation, the will to survive, were lacking. The best of weapons is but useless inanimate matter so long as the spirit ready, willing and determined to wield it is lacking. Germany became defenseless not because arms were lacking, but because the will to preserve the arms for the people’s survival was absent.
When our left-wing politicians in particular try today to point to disarmament as the unavoidable cause of their weak-willed, yielding, but in actuality treasonable foreign policy, there is but ​one answer: No, the truth is the other way about. By your anti-national, criminal policy of surrendering national interests you delivered up our arms. Now you try to claim lack of arms as the reason why you behaved like contemptible wretches. This, like everything else you do, is a lie and a counterfeit.
But this reproach must fall equally upon the politicians of the Right. Thanks to their miserable cowardice the Jewish rabble that came into power in 1918 could steal the nation’s arms. They too, then, have neither reason nor right to cite the present disarmament as compelling their wise caution (pronounced “Cowardice”); the defenselessness is the result of their cowardice.
The question of regaining German power is consequently not, How are we to manufacture arms? but, How are we to produce the spirit which enables a people to bear arms? If this spirit rules a people, the will can find a thousand ways, each of which ends with a weapon. Give a coward ten pistols, and in an attack he will nevertheless be unable to fire a single shot. To him they are more worthless than a mere knotty club to a bold man.
The question of regaining our people’s political power is a question primarily of the recuperation of our national self-preservative instinct, because—if for no other reason—all preparatory foreign policy and all appraisal of a state are, experience shows, guided less by armaments on hand than by the recognized or at least supposed moral vitality of a nation. A people’s availability for alliance is determined far less by dead masses of armaments on hand than by the obvious existence of a blazing national will to survive and a heroic courage in the face of death. Alliances are made not with weapons, but with men. Thus the English people must be regarded as the most valuable ally in the world just so long as its leadership and the spirit of the great masses lead one to expect that brutality and tenacity which are determined to fight a battle once begun through to a victorious end by every means to a victorious end; reckless of time and sacrifices; and for this the momentary military armament need bear no relation to that of other states.
​But if we realize that the German nationals’ revival is a question of regaining our political will to self-preservation, it is also clear that this can be accomplished not by winning over elements which at least by intention in themselves are nationalists, but only by nationalizing the consciously anti-national masses.
A young movement, therefore, which takes for its goal the resurrection of a German State possessing its own sovereignty will have to direct its battle altogether toward winning the great masses. Pitiful as our so-called “nationalist bourgeoisie” is in general, inadequate as its nationalist spirit may seem, there is certainly no serious resistance to a vigorous nationalist domestic and foreign policy to be expected from this quarter. Even if, for hidebound and short-sighted reasons, the German bourgeoisie should persist in passive resistance as it did toward a Bismarck when the hour of freedom was at hand, nevertheless no active resistance is ever to be feared, in view of its admitted proverbial cowardice.
The situation is different with the masses of our internationally-minded fellow-Germans. Not only does their more primitive directness tend toward the idea of violence, but their Jewish leadership is more brutal and ruthless. They will strike down any German revival just as they broke the backbone of the German army. But above all, they will not only block any national foreign policy, thanks to their numerical majority in this State of parliamentary government, but they will exclude any higher appraisal of German strength, and thus any possibility of alliance. For not only are we ourselves conscious of the element of weakness which lies in our fifteen million Marxists, Democrats, Pacifists and Centrists, but it is recognized even more by foreign countries, which measure the value of possible alliance with us according to the weight of this handicap. No one is going to ally himself with a state the active part of whose population is at the very least passive toward any decisive foreign policy.
In addition there is the fact that from a mere instinct of self-preservation the leadership of these parties of national treason must and will be hostile to any rehabilitation. Historically it is ​simply unthinkable that the German people could ever again occupy its former position without having a day of reckoning with those who furnished the cause and impulse for the unheard-of collapse which has befallen our State. Before the judgment-seat of posterity, November, 1918, will be judged not as mere high treason, but as treason against the nation.
Thus any recovery of German outward independence is linked primarily to the recovery of our people’s inward unity of will.
Even from a purely technical standpoint the idea of an outward German liberation is evidently nonsense until the great masses too are ready to labor for this idea of freedom. From a purely military angle, particularly to any officer it must be clear upon a little thought that a foreign struggle cannot be carried on with student battalions, but that the brawn of a people is needed as well as the brain. We must keep in mind further that any national defense built solely on the circles of the so-called intelligentsia is truly squandering an irreplaceable treasure. The young German intelligentsia of the volunteer regiments who met their deaths in the fall of 1914 on the plains of Flanders were bitterly missed later. It was the best possession the nation had, and its loss was irreplaceable while the war lasted.
But not only the battle itself cannot be waged unless the working masses are in the ranks of the storming battalions, but the technical preparation is impossible to carry out without inner unity of will in our body politic. Our people in particular, having to live disarmed under the thousand eyes of the Versailles Peace Treaty can make no practical preparations to win freedom and human independence unless the army of stool-pigeons within is decimated down to those whose native lack of character allows them to betray anything and everything for the well-known thirty pieces of silver. Those people can be taken care of. Not to be overcome, however, are the millions who oppose the national rehabilitation from political conviction—not to be overcome until the cause of their opposition, the international Marxist world-concept, is combated and torn from their hearts and minds.
No matter, then, from what standpoint we examine the ​possibility of recovering our independence as a state and a people—whether, from that of preparatory foreign policy, that of technical armament, or that of the struggle itself—the one thing indispensable for it all is to begin by winning over the broad masses of our people to the idea of our national independence.
Without recovery of outward freedom, however, any inner reform can mean at best the increase of our profitableness as a colony. The surplus from any so-called economic advance goes to benefit our international masters, and at the very best and social improvement will increase our productivity for them. Cultural progress will not be the lot of the German nation at all; it depends too much on the political independence and dignity of a nationality.
If, then, the happy solution of the German future is bound up with the gaining of the broad masses of our people for nationalism, this must be the highest and most tremendous task of a movement whose activity is not to be exhausted in the satisfaction of the moment, but which must test everything it does by the probable results in the future.
Thus we realized as early as 1919 that the new movement must carry through as its highest aim the nationalization of the masses.
From the tactical angle a series of requirements resulted:
1. No social sacrifice is too great to win the masses for the national rehabilitation.
No matter what economic concessions are made to our wage-earners today, they bear no relation to the gain for the whole nation if they help give back the common people to their nationality. Only hidebound short-sightedness, such as is found unhappily all too often in our business circles, can fail to realize that in the long run there can be no economic revival for them, and thus no further economic profit, if the inward populist solidarity of our nation is not restored.
If the German trade-unions in the war had ruthlessly protected the interests of the working class, if even during the war they had wrung the demands of the workers they represented ​from the dividend-hungry employers by continual strikes, but if in concerns of national defense they had been truly fanatical in their Germanity, and with equal ruthlessness had given to the Fatherland what is the Fatherland’s, the war would not have been lost. But how trifling any economic concession, even the greatest, would have been, compared to the enormous significance of winning the war!
Thus a movement that intends to give the German worker back to the German people must realize that in this question economic sacrifices are no consideration at all, so long as they do not threaten the independence of the national economy.
2. The national education of the broad masses can take place only by way of social improvement, which alone will create the general economic conditions that allow the individual to share in the cultural treasures of the nation.
3. The nationalization of the broad masses can never be accomplished by half-measures, by weak emphasizing of a so-called objective standpoint, but only by ruthless and fanatically one-sided concentration on the goal to be striven for. That is to say, a people cannot be made “nationalist” in the sense of our modern bourgeoisie, i.e. with so-and-so-many limitations, but only nationalistic with the whole vehemence inherent in extremes. Poison is driven out by poison, and only the shallowness of a bourgeois spirit can regard the middle way as the path to Heaven.
The broad masses of a people consist neither of professors nor of diplomats. The slight abstract knowledge they possess directs their perceptions more into the world of emotion. Here their attitude, either positive or negative, has its origin. It is receptive only for a vigorous expression in one of those two directions, and never for something floating half-way between the two. But this emotional attitude also brings with it extraordinary stability. Faith is harder to shake than knowledge, love less changeable than respect, hatred more durable than aversion; and the driving force in the most tremendous upheavels on this earth has always been less an intellectual insight ruling the masses than a fanaticism animating them, and often a hysteria hurling them onward.
​He who would win the broad masses must know the key which opens the gates to their hearts. It is not objectivity—that is, weakness—but will and vigor.
4. The soul of the people can be won only if, besides waging a positive battle for one’s own objectives, one destroys the opponent of those objectives.
In ruthless attack upon an adversary the people always sees the truth of its own just cause; and it feels that abstention from destroying the other must mean uncertainty of one’s own cause—if not a sign that the cause is unjust.
The great masses are only a bit of Nature, and with their feelings they cannot understand a handshake between men who claim to dislike opposite things. What they want is the victory of the stronger and the annihilation of the weaker, or his unconditional subjection.
The nationalization of our masses will succeed only if, along with all the positive struggle for the soul of our people, its international posioners are exterminated.
5. All the great questions of the time are questions of the moment, and constitute mere results of certain definite causes. But among them all, only one has causal importance: the question of the nationality’s racial preservation. In blood alone the strength and the weakness of man are alike rooted. Peoples that do not recognize and respect the importance of their racial foundation are like men who would train the qualities of greyhounds into poodles, not understanding that the speed of the greyhound and the teachability of the poodle are qualities not taught but inherent in race. Peoples that sacrifice the preservation of their racial purity are also sacrificing the unity of their soul in all its manifestations. The disunity of their nature is the inevitable result of the disunity of their blood, and the change in their intellectual and creative force is but the effect of the change in their racial foundations.
He who would free the German people of those present expressions and bad characteristics that originally were foreign to it will first have to release it from the foreign germ of these expressions and bad characteristics.
​Without a clear recognition of the race problem, and thus of the Jewish question, no new rise of the German nation can take place.
The race question is the key not only to world history but to human civilization in general.
6. To assign its proper place in a national people’s community to that great mass of our people now in the internationalist camp means no sacrifice of the protection of justified group interests. Divergent group and occupational interests are not synonomous with class division, but are natural consequences of our economic life. Occupational grouping is in no way opposed to a true national community, which means unity of the nationality in all questions concerning this nationality as such.
The ranging in the national community or even merely in the state of a group which has become a class is done not by the descent of higher classes, but by the raising of the lower ones. The generator of this process, again, can never be the higher class, but only the lower one fighting for equal rights. The present bourgeoisie was not ranged within the State by action of the nobility, but by its own energy under its own leadership.
The German worker will not be lifted into his place in the structure of the German people’s community by way of feeble scenes of brotherhood, but by deliberate improvement of his social and cultural position until the most momentous differences can be considered as overcome. A movement which sets this development as its aim will have to gain its adherents chiefly from the workers’ camp. It can resort to the intelligentsia only in so far as the latter has already completely understood the goal being striven for. This process of transformation and approach will not be finished in ten or twenty years; experience shows that it embraces many generations.
The gravest obstacle to the approach of the present-day worker to the national community is not in the assertion of his group interests, but in his internationalist leadership and attitude, hostile to people and Fatherland. If the very same trade unions had a leadership fanatically nationalist in political and populist ​concerns, they would make millions of workers into precious members of their nationality regardless of individual battles over purely economic concerns.
A movement which proposes honorably to restore the German worker to his people, and to snatch him from the internationalist madness, must make a most vigorous stand against an attitude common particularly in business circles, which understands by national community the unresisting economic surrender of the wage-earner to the employer, and sees in every attempt to defend even rightful vital economic interests of the wage-earner an attack upon the national community. To uphold this attitude is to uphold a deliberate lie; the community lays responsibilities not on one side only, but on both.
Surely as a worker sins against the spirit of a real national community by making extortionate demands without consideration for the common welfare and the subsistence of a national economy, relying on his power, no less surely does an employer violate this community if he misuses the national laboring power by exploitation and inhumanity in his management, and makes millions by profiteering on the sweat of others. He has no right to call himself a nationalist, no right to speak of a national community; he is an egoistical rogue who, by introducing social discontent, provokes later struggles that are bound to harm the nation one way or another.
The reservoir from which the young movement must draw its adherents, then, will be primarily the mass of our wage-earners. What must be done is to snatch them from their internationalist madness, to relieve their social distress, to lift them above cultural misery, and to lead them into the national community as a united, useful element, nationalist in feeling and intent.
If in the circles of the nation’s intelligentsia there are men with a warm heart for their people and its future, filled with a deep realization of the importance of the struggle for the soul of these masses, they are extremely welcome in the ranks of the movement as a valuable intellectual backbone. But the winning of the bourgeoisie voting cattle must never be the ​movement’s aim. It would thus be burdening itself with a group whose whole nature would paralyze all recruiting among the common people. Despite the theoretical beauty of the idea of bringing together, within the limits of the movement itself, great masses from below and above, there is still the opposing fact that by means of psychological influence one may be able at public demonstrations to produce a given spirit in the bourgeoisie masses, and even to spread comprehension, but not to cause the disappearance of qualities, or rather vices of character whose growth has continued through centuries. The difference in cultural levels and in attitudes toward questions of economic concern is still so great that it would immediately come into its own as an obstacle the moment the excitment of the demonstration had passed off.
Finally, however, it is not the purpose to produce a new stratification in the already nationalist camp, but to win over the anti-national one.
7. This one-sided but therefore clear attitude must also be expressed in the movement’s propaganda, and is itself in turn demanded by propaganda considerations.
If the movement’s propaganda is to be effective it must aim in one direction only; otherwise, owing to the difference in the previous intellectual preparation of the two camps in question, it would either not be understood by one side, or be refused as obvious and hence uninteresting by the other.
Even the style of expression and the tone in detail cannot be equally effective upon two such divergent levels. If the propaganda sacrifices primitive pungency of expression, it will not find its way to the feelings of the broad masses. But if in word and gesture it has the downrightness of the masses’ feelings and their manifestations, it will be objected to by the so-called intelligentsia as coarse and vulgar. And among a hundred so-called speakers there will be hardly ten who can speak with equal effect today before an audience of street-cleaners, mechanics, sewer-workers, etc., and tomorrow give a lecture, perforce with the same intellectual substance, before an auditorium of college ​professors and students. Among a thousand speakers there is perhaps but one who can address mechanics and college professors at the same time in a style that not only suits the capacities of both elements, but has equal influence on both, or even carries them away in a roaring storm of applause. And we must always keep in mind that even the finest idea for a noble theory can in most cases be promulgated only through the smallest of minds. The point is not what the inspired creator of an idea had in mind, but what the heralds of this idea transmit to the masses, in what form and with what success.
The strong attractive force of Social Democracy, of the whole Marxist movement, in fact, depended largely upon the unity and thus the one-sidedness of the public to which it addressed itself. The more limited, in fact the more hidebound its line of thought was, the more easily it was accepted and digested by masses whose intellectual levels accorded with what was said.
But for the new movement also this laid down a clear and simple guiding line:
Substance and form of the propaganda are to be aimed at the broad masses, and their soundness is to be measured by their effective success.
At a popular meeting of the common people the best speaker is not he who is intellectually closest to the intelligentsia who attend, but he who conquers the heart of the masses.
An intellectual who, attending such a meeting, carps at the intellectual grade of the speech, despite the visible effect upon the lower strata at which it is aimed, proves the complete incapacity of his thinking, and his own worthlessness for the young movement. For the movement, only that intellectual is of any value who realizes its task and purpose so completely that he has learned to judge the work even of propaganda solely by its success, and not by the impression it makes on him himself. Propaganda must serve not to entertain people already nationally-minded, but to win over the enemies of our nationality, in so far as they are of our blood.
In general those lines of thought which I briefly summed up ​under “War Propaganda” should be decisive for the young movement as respects the manner and execution of its work of enlightenment.
Success has proved them sound.
The aim of a political reform movement can never be attained by enlightenment work or by influence upon the ruling powers, but only by the conquest of political power. Every world-shaking idea has not only the right but the duty to assure itself of those means which make possible the carrying-out of its line of thought. Success is the sole earthly judge of the right and wrong of such an undertaking; success does not mean, as in 1918, the conquest of power in itself, but the use of it in a way beneficial to a nationality. Thus a coup d’etat cannot be considered successful (as thoughtless State’s Attorneys in Germany today believe) when the revolutionaries have succeeded in appropriating governmental power, but only when the purposes and goals underlying such revolutionary action prove in realization to do the nation more good than did the previous regimé. Something which cannot well be claimed for the German Revolution, as the bandit raid of the fall of 1918 called itself.
But if the conquest of political power is the prerequisite for the practical carrying-out of reforming intentions, a movement with reforming intentions must feel from the first day of its existence that it is a mass movement, not a literary tea society or a village bowling club.
9. The young movement is by nature and inner organization anti-parliamentary; that is, it denies in general, as in its own inner structure, a principle of majority rule by which the leader is degraded into a mere doer of the will and opinion of others. In detail and in the large the movement upholds the principle of absolute authority of the leader, coupled with the highest degree of responsibility.
The actual results of this principle in the movement are as follows:
The chairman of a local group is appointed by the next higher leader; he is the responsible director of the local group. All the ​committees are under his authority, and not the reverse. There are no voting committee, but only working committees. The responsible director, the chairman, divides up the work. The same principle holds for the next superior organization, the district, the department Kreis or the province (Gau). The leader is always appointed from above, and invested with absolute power and authority. Only the leader of the entire party is elected, for reasons of organization law, by the general assembly. But he is the exclusive leader of the movement. All the committees are under his authority; he is not under the authority of any committee. He dictates, and in consequence bears the responsibility on his shoulders. The followers of the movement are free to call him to account before the forum of a new election, and to relieve him of his office if he has offended against the principles of the movement, or has served its interests ill. His place is then taken by the new and more able man, but with the same authority and the same responsibility.
It is one of the highest tasks of the movement to put this principle in force, not only within its own ranks, but throughout the entire State.
He who would be a leader bears, along with supreme and unlimited authority, the final and greatest responsibility.
He who is not capable of this, or who is too cowardly to face the results of his action, is worthless as a leader. Only the hero has the true vocation for leadership.
The progress and civilization of mankind are not a product of the majority, but depend altogether on the inspiration and energy of personalities.
To encourage them and bring them into their own is one of the essentials for regaining the greatness and power of our nationality.
This means that the movement is anti-parliamentary, and even its participation in a parliamentary organization can have the purpose only of activity to destroy it, to eliminate an institution in which we cannot but see one of the gravest symptoms of mankind’s decay.
​10. The movement decidedly refuses to commit itself on questions which are neither outside the limits of its political work or immaterial because not of importance in principle. Its job is not that of a religious reformation, but that of a political reorganization of our people. It regards both religious denominations as equally valuable supports for the existence of our people, and therefore attacks those parties that try to degrade this foundation of our body politic’s religious and moral buttresses into a tool of their party interests.
Finally, the movement sees its job not as the restoration of one particular form of government, and the battle against another, but as the creation of those foundations in principle without which neither republic nor monarchy can survive in the long run. Its mission is not to found a monarchy or to strengthen a republic, but to create a Germanic State.
The question of outer elaboration in this State, that is its coronation, is not important in principle, but is merely conditioned by questions of practical expediency.
Once a people has realized the great problems and tasks of its existence the question of outward formalities can no longer lead to inner struggles.
11. The question of the movement’s inner organization is one of expediency, not of principle.
The best organization is the one which interposes between the leadership of a movement and its individual adherents not the most but the least intermediary machinery. The job of organization is to impart a certain idea—which always originates in the head of an individual—to a numerous body of people, and to supervise its transformation into reality.
The organization is thus but a necessary evil in every case. At best it is a means to an end, at worst an end in itself.
As the world produces more mechanical than ideal natures, the forms of an organization are usually more easily created than the ideas themselves.
The course of every idea striving for realization, particularly one of a reforming nature, is in broad outline as follows:
​Some inspired idea springs from the brain of a man who feels himself called to impart his insight to the rest of mankind. He preaches his views, and gradually wins a certain circle of adherents. This process of direct and personal transmission of a man’s ideas to the world around him is the most natural and ideal way. The increasing number of the new teaching’s followers makes it impossible for the upholder of the idea to go on working directly upon the innumerable followers, leading and guiding them. As the growth of the group cuts out quick and direct dealings, a consolidating organization becomes necessary. The ideal condition comes to an end, and in its place we have the necessary evil of organization. Small sub-units are formed, which in the form of local groups, for instance, represent the nuclei for the political movement’s later organization.
But if the unity of the doctrine is not to be lost, this sub-grouping must never take place until the authority of the intellectual founder and of the school he has trained can be regarded as absolutely recognized. In this connection the practical importance of a centrally-located headquarters for a movement cannot be over-estimated. Only the existence of such a place, surrounded by the magic spell of a Mecca or a Rome, can in the long run give a movement the strength that lies in inner unity and the recognition of a fountainhead standing for this unity.
In forming the first nuclei of the organization, therefore, care must always be taken not only to preserve the importance of the idea’s place of origin, but to increase it until it is paramount. This growth of the theoretical, moral and actual predominance of the spot where the movement began and whence it is directed must go on at the same rate that the lowest nuclei of the movement, becoming innumerable, demand new organized inter­ connections. For just as the increasing number of individual followers and the impossibility of further direct dealings with them lead to the formation of the lowest groupings, so the eventually immeasurable increase of the lowest form of organization forces the setting-up of higher units, which may be politically described as provincial or district divisions.
​Easy as it may be to maintain the authority of the original headquarters over the lowest local groups, it will become quite difficult to preserve this position in face of the higher forms of organization that now begin to grow up. Yet this is the first essential for the unified subsistence of a movement, and thus for the carrying-through of an idea.
If at length even these larger intermediate groupings are united in new forms of organization, the difficulty of maintaining even against them the absolute supremacy of the original place of foundation, its school, etc., is again increased.
Consequently, the mechanical forms of an organization must not be elaborated beyond the degree to which the intellectual authority of headquarters seems absolutely assured. With political entities this guarantee may often seem to be given only by practical force.
From this we deduce the following fines of guidance for the movement’s inner structure:
A. Concentration of all work at first in one single place, Munich. Training up of a fellowship of absolutely reliable followers, and the development of a school for the later promulgation of the idea. Gaining of the authority later necessary by means of the greatest possible visible success in this one town.
In order to make the movement and leaders known, it was necessary not only to shake the faith in the invincibility of the Marxist doctrine at a place where everyone could see it, but to prove the possibility of opposing movements.
B. Local groups to be formed only when the authority of the central management in Munich can be considered unqualifiedly recognized.
C. The formation of districts, provincial or national groups is also to take place not simply according to demand, but after achieving the certainty of absolute recognition of headquarters.
Furthermore, the creation of forms of organization depends on the available brains for possible leaders.
Here there are two methods:
A. The movement controls the necessary financial means to ​train capable minds for later leadership. It then systematically uses the human material thus gained, from the standpoint of practical and general expediency.
This method is the easier and quicker; but it requires great financial resources, since this leader material is not in a position to work for the movement except on salary.
B. For want of financial means the movement is not in a position to appoint leaders, but must begin by relying on those whose service is honorary. This method is the slower and more difficult of the two.
Under certain circumstances the movement’s leadership must let large districts lie fallow, if a man does not rise from among its followers who is able and willing to put himself at the disposal of the management and to organize and lead the movement in the particular district.
It may happen that in considerable regions there will be no one, whereas in other places there may be two or three almost equally able. The difficulty resulting from such a development is great, and takes years to overcome.
But always the prime essential for the creation of a formal organization is the brain able to lead it.
All the formal organization of an army is worthless without officers, and a political organization is equally worthless without the appropriate leader.
It is better for the movement to refrain from forming a local group than for its organization to fail if a guiding and driving leader’s personality is lacking.
Leadership itself requires not only will-power but ability; however, more importance must be attached to energy and strength of will than to genius in itself, and a combination of ability, resolution and perseverance is the most valuable of all.
12. The future of a movement depends upon the fanaticism, nay the intolerance with which its followers defend it as the only true one, and establish it as against other entities of a similar sort.
It is a great mistake to believe that the strength of a movement ​increases by its union with another similar one. Any enlargement by this means does of course mean an immediate increase in outward extent, and thus, to the eye of superficial observers, in power; but in fact it merely takes over the seeds of an inner weakness that will make itself felt later.
For no matter what anyone may say of the similarity of two movements, it never exists in reality. Otherwise there would in practice be one movement, not two. And it makes no difference where the diversities lie; even though they depend only on the varying abilities of the leadership, they are there. But the natural law of all development requires not the coupling of two unequal entities, but the victory of the stronger, and the natural selection of the strength and vigor of the victor made possible solely by the resulting struggle.
The union of two nearly similar political party structures may produce momentary advantages, but in the long run any success gained in this fashion will cause inner weaknesses to appear later.
The greatness of a movement is guaranteed solely by the unfettered development of its inner strength, and the constant increase of that strength up to the point of final victory over all competitors.
Nay more, we may say that its strength and hence its right to live continues to increase only so long as it recognizes the principle of battle as the first condition of its growth; and that it has passed the peak of its strength the moment complete victory comes to it.
Hence it can but be useful for a movement to strive for this victory in a form which will not lead to instant success, but whose duration, produced by absolute intolerance, will give the movement a long period of growth.
Movements which owe their increase only to the so-called union of similar entities—that is, whose strength is due to compromises—are like hot-house plants. They shoot up, but they lack the strength to defy centuries and to resist violent storms. The greatness of any powerful organization as the embodiment ​of an idea in this world consists in the absolutely religious fanaticism with which it establishes itself, fanatically convinced of its own rightness, intolerant of everything different. If an idea is right in itself, and takes up the battle in this world with that sort of armament, it is invincible, and any persecution will merely strengthen it.
The greatness of Christianity was not in attempted conciliatory negotiations with roughly similar philosophical opinions of Antiquity, but in implacable and fanatical heralding and defense of its own teaching.
The apparent head-start which movements gain by coalition is more than offset by the steady increase of strength in a doctrine and its organization which remain independent and fight for themselves.
13. As a matter of principle the movement must so train its members that they regard battle not as something casually taught them, but as that which they themselves are striving for. They must not fear the enmity of their adversaries, but must regard it as the sine qua non for their own right to exist. They must not avoid, but desire, the hatred of the enemies of our nationality and our world-concept, and the manifestations of that hatred.
Among these manifestations are lying and slander. Anyone who is not attacked, lied about and slandered in the Jewish newspapers is no decent German and no true National Socialist. The best yard-stick for the value of his principles, the honesty of his convictions and the strength of his determination is the enmity of our people’s deadly enemy toward him.
The followers of the movement, and in a broad sense the whole people, must be reminded again and again that in his newspapers the Jew always lies, and that even an occasional truth is intended only to cover a greater falsehood, and is thus again a deliberate untruth. The Jew is the great master of lying, and lie and deceit are his weapons in battle.
Every Jewish slander and every Jewish lie is a scar of honor on the body of our warriors.
He whom they most defame is closest to us, and he for whom their hatred is most deadly is our best friend.
​Anyone who picks up the Jewish newspaper in the morning without seeing himself slandered in it has put in the past day to no purpose; if he had not, he would be pursued, defamed, slandered, abused and besmirched by the Jew. Only the man who effectively opposes this deadly enemy of our nationality and of all Aryan humanity and civilization can expect to find directed against himself the slanders of the race, and thus the war of this people.
When these principles become second nature to our followers, the movement will be unshakable and invincible.
14. The movement must foster respect for personalities by every means. It must never forget that the merit of all humanity lies in personal merit, that every idea and every achievement is the result of the creative power of some one man, and that admiration for greatness is not only a tribute of gratitude to it, but that it binds those who are grateful with a unifying bond.
Individuality is irreplaceable; it is so particularly if it embodies not the mechanical but the cultural and creative elements.
No one else can replace the great master, and undertake to complete the half-finished painting he leaves behind; no more can the great poet and thinker, the great statesman and the great general be replaced. For their activity is always in the field of art; it is not mechanically taught, but inborn through Divine grace. The world s greatest upheavals and achievements, its greatest cultural accomplishments, immortal deeds in the field of statemanship, etc., all are forever inseparably linked each with a name that represents it. To cease doing homage to a great spirit is to lose great strength that issues from the names of all great men and women.
The Jew knows this better than anyone. He, whose great men are great only in destroying humanity and its civilization, takes care that they shall be admired to the point of being idolized. It is only the reverence of the peoples for their own great minds that he tries to represent as unworthy, branding it as a “personal cult.”
​When a people becomes cowardly enough to succumb to this Jewish presumption and impudence, it surrenders the mightiest force it possesses; this consists not in respect for the masses, but in reverence for genius, and in edification and exaltation by its example.
When human hearts break and human souls despair, the great vanquishers of distress and care, of shame and misery, of intellectual unfreedom and physical duress look down upon them from the twilight of the past, and hold out their eternal hands to faint-hearted mortals. Woe to the people that is ashamed to grasp them!
In the early days when our movement was coming into being we suffered from nothing so much as the insignificance, the obscurity of our names, and the doubt cast upon our success by this very fact alone. The hardest thing at the beginning, when often but six, seven or eight met to listen to the words of a speaker, was to awaken and maintain in this tiny circle a faith in the tremendous future of the movement.
Here, remember, were six or seven men, all poor, nameless devils, joining together in the intention of forming a movement which some day must succeed where so far the great and powerful mass parties had failed, in resurrecting a German Empire with yet greater might and magnificence. If at that time we had been attacked, nay, if we had even been laughed at, we would have been happy. For the only thing that depressed us was the complete disregard we then encountered, and from which I suffered most at that time.
When I entered the circle of a handful of men, one could speak of neither a party nor a movement. I have already described my impressions on the occasion of my first encounter with this little group. In the weeks that followed I had time and opportunity to study the as yet impossible appearance of this so-called Party.
Heaven knows the picture was uncomfortably distressing. There was nothing there—absolutely nothing whatever. The name of a Party whose practical committee represented the entire ​membership; which, take it how you please, was the very thing it attempted to combat, a parliament in miniature. Here too, the roll-call held sway, and while the big parliaments shouted themselves hoarse for months, it was at least about large problems, whereas in this little circle even the reply to a letter duly received would give rise to endless dialogue.
The public, of course, knew absolutely nothing of all this. Not a soul in Munich knew the Party even by name, except for its handful of followers and their new acquaintances.
Every Wednesday there was a so-called committee meeting in a Munich café, and once a week an evening with a talk. Since the entire membership of the “movement” was for the moment represented in the committee, the people naturally were always the same ones. The thing to be done now was to break out of the little circle at last, gain new followers, but above all to make the movement’s name known at all costs.
In doing so we used the following technique:
Every month, and later every fortnight, we tried to hold a “meeting.” The invitations were written on a typewriter, or to some extent by hand, on slips of paper, and we ourselves distributed or delivered them the first few times. Each of us turned to his circle of acquaintances to induce one or another of them to visit one of these gatherings.
The result was pitiful.
I can still remember how once during those early days I myself had delivered close to eighty of these slips, and how that evening we waited for the crowd of people who were to come.
After an hour’s delay the “chairman” had at last to open the “meeting.” We were seven strong again,—the old seven.
We went over to having the invitations typed and mimeographed at a Munich stationary shop. The result at the next meeting was a few more listeners. Thus the number gradually rose from eleven to thirteen, finally to seventeen, to twenty-three, to thirty-four listeners.
By taking up little collections among us poor devils the funds were gathered to announce a meeting by an advertisement in the ​Muenchener Beobachter of Munich; which was then independent. The success this time was astonishing indeed. We had arranged to hold the meeting in the Munich Hofbräuhaus cellar (not to be confused with the Munich Hofbräuhaus Banquet Hall), a little hall with a capacity of barely a hundred and thirty persons. To me the room seemed like a huge auditorium, and all of us were afraid we would not succeed in filling the “great” building with people that night.
At seven o’clock there were a hundred and eleven persons present, and the meeting was opened.
A Munich professor delivered the chief address, and I, as second on the program, was to make my first public speech.
To the then chairman of the party, Mr. Harrer, the thing seemed very hazardous. This gentleman, otherwise frank beyond a doubt, was simply convinced that while I might be able to do various things, speak I could not. Even afterwards he was not to be turned from his opinion.
The matter turned out differently. In this meeting, my first that could be called public, I was allowed twenty minutes to speak.
I spoke for thirty minutes, and the event now proved what previously I had simply felt without knowing—I could speak. At the end of thirty minutes the people in the little room were electrified, and the first expression of their enthusiasm was the fact that my appeal to the self-denial of those present resulted in the contribution of three hundred marks. This relieved us of a great worry. Our finances at that time were so straitened that we had not even a chance to get the tenets of the movement printed, let alone to put out leaflets. Now we had the basis for a little fund out of which at least the most urgent and necessary expenses could be met.
In another respect too the success of this first larger meeting was important.
I had already begun to import some fresh young strength to the committee. During my years of military service I had come to know a large number of faithful comrades, who now slowly ​began to enter the movement in response to my urging. They were all energetic young men, accustomed to discipline, who had grown up from the time of their military service in the principle that “absolutely nothing is impossible, and anything will work if you are bound it shall.”
How necessary this new blood was I realized myself after a very few weeks of working with them.
The then chairman of the party, Mr. Harrer, was by rights a journalist, and as such no doubt broadly cultivated. But he had one uncommonly great handicap for a party leader: he was no speaker for the masses. Painfully conscientious and exact as his work was in itself, it nevertheless lacked any great vigor—perhaps precisely owing to the lack of a great oratorical gift. Mr. Drexler, at that time chairman of the Munich local group, was a simple working man, likewise of no great consequence as a speaker, and furthermore no soldier. He had not served in the army, had not been a soldier even during the war; his whole nature was feeble and uncertain, and he had missed the one school which could turn soft and undecided natures into men. Thus neither man was made of the stuff that would have enabled him not only to carry in his heart a fanatical belief in the victory of a movement, but to break down with unshakable strength of will, and if necessary with the most brutal ruthlessness, whatever opposition might put itself in the way of the rise of the new idea. For this only those characters were suited who had acquired in mind and body the military virtues that can perhaps best be described thus: swift as greyhounds, tough as leather, and hard as Krupp steel.
At that time I was still a soldier myself. I had been rubbed smooth within and without for almost six years, so that at first I must have been felt as a stranger in this circle. I too had forgotten the words: You can’t do it, or it won’t work; we mustn’t risk that, it’s too dangerous, etc.
For dangerous the matter naturally was. In 1920 a nationalist meeting which dared to appeal to the broad masses, and to issue a public invitation to attend, was simply impossible in many parts ​of Germany. Those who attended were scattered with broken heads, and driven away. True, this was no great trick; even the largest so-called bourgeois mass meetings would scatter before a dozen Communists, and run like hares before the hounds. But little notice as the Reds took of such bourgeois chatter clubs, whose inner innocuousness and consequent lack of danger to themselves they realized better than the actual members, they were all the more determined to wipe out by every means a movement which seemed dangerous to them. The most effective thing at such times was always terrorism—violence.
But to the Marxist swindlers of the people the most hateful of all must be a movement whose announced aim was to win those masses which hitherto had been in the exclusive service of the international Marxist Jewish and stock exchange parties. The very little, “German Workers’ Party,” had a provocative effect. So it was easy to see that the conflict with the Marxist agitators, then still drunk with victory, would begin at the first suitable opportunity.
In the whole circle of the movement at that time there was a certain fear of such a struggle. They wanted to appear in public as little as possible, for fear of being beaten. In their mind’s eye they already saw the first large meeting dispersed, and the movement perhaps thus broken up forever. I had a hard fight for my contention that we must not evade this struggle, but must go to meet it, and therefore must equip ourselves with the only armament which gives protection from violence. Terrorism is not broken by intellect, but by terrorism. The success of the first meeting strengthened my position in this respect. They took courage for a second one, on a somewhat larger scale.
About October, 1919, the second large meeting took place in the Eberlbräu cellar. Subject: Brest-Litovsk and Versailles. Four men spoke. I myself spoke for nearly an hour, and my success was greater than at the first demonstration. The number attending had risen to more than a hundred and thirty. An attempted disturbance was nipped in the bud by my comrades. The troublemakers whizzed downstairs with broken heads.
​Two weeks later a second meeting took place in the same hall. The attendance rose to more than a hundred and seventy—a good crowd for the room. I spoke again, and again my success was greater than at the previous meeting.
I pushed for a larger hall. Finally we found one at the other end of the city in the Deutsches Reich in the Dachauer Strasse. The first meeting in the new hall was worse attended than the previous ones: a bare hundred and forty persons. Hope in the committee began to sink again, and the eternal doubters thought they saw the reason for the poor attendance in too-frequent repetition of our “demonstrations.” There were violent disputes in which I maintained the position that a city of 700,000 inhabitants would stand not one meeting every fortnight, but ten every week; that we must not be discouraged by setbacks; that the path we had chosen was right; and that sooner or later, if we persevered without weakening, success was bound to come. That whole winter of 1919–20 was one continuous struggle to strengthen the victorious force of the young movement, and to raise it to that fanaticism which, as faith, can move mountains.
The next meeting, in the same hall, proved I was right again. The attendance rose above two hundred, and both outward and financial success were excellent.
I urged the immediate arrangement of another meeting. It took place scarcely two weeks later, and the crowd of listeners rose to over two hundred and seventy.
A fortnight later we called together the followers and friends of the young movement for the seventh time, and the same hall could scarcely contain the people; there were over four hundred.
At that time the inner shaping of the young movement took place. It was often the cause of more or less violent disputes in the little circle. In various quarters—even then, just as today—the description of the young movement as a Party was criticized. I have always seen this approach as proof of the practical incompetence and intellectual pettiness of the person in question. These are and always have been the people who cannot distinguish the ​external from the inward, and who try to judge the merits of a movement by turgid and high-flown titles, for which, purpose, as the last straw, the vocabulary of our primitive forefathers usually has to serve.
It was hard to make the people understand that any movement which has not attained the victory of its ideas, and thus its goal, is a party, though it call itself a thousand times something else.
If somebody wants to carry out in practice a bold idea whose realization is useful in the interests of his fellow-men, he must begin by looking for followers who are ready to stand up for his purposes. And even if this purpose were only to destroy the set of parties of the time, to end the disunity, the upholders of this view and heralds of this decision are nevertheless a party themselves until the objective has been gained. It is hair-splitting and shadow-boxing for some populist theorist whose practical success is in inverse proportion to his wisdom to imagine he can change the party character of every young movement by changing its designation.
On the contrary.
If there is anything unnatural to people, it is this flinging about of ancient Germanic terms that neither fit the present day nor signify anything definite, but that may easily lead people to see the importance of a movement in its outward vocabulary. This is a truly pernicious tendency, but one which today we can observe times without number.
I have had to keep giving warning ever since of these German-tribal wandering scholars, whose positive accomplishment is always nil, but whose conceit can hardly be surpassed. The young movement had and still has to beware of a flood of men whose sole recommendation is usually their statement that they have been fighting for this same idea for thirty or forty years. But anyone who through forty years stands up for a so-called idea without producing the slightest success, and even without having prevented the victory of the adversary, has spent forty years to prove his own incompetence.
The chief danger, however, lies in the fact that such natures ​do not wish to take their places as units in the movement, but drivel about circles of leaders in which alone they see a suitable place for further activity on the basis of their long-continued labors. But alas and alack if a young movement is delivered up to such people! A business man who in forty years’ work has altogether destroyed a great business is not suited to be the founder of a new one; no more is a populist Methusaleh (who has spent the same amount of time in bungling a great idea and causing it to ossify) the right man to lead a new, young movement!
On top of that, only a fraction of all these people come into the new movement to serve it and be useful to the idea of the new doctrine; in most cases they come in order to afflict humanity again with their own ideas under the movement’s protection or through the opportunities it offers. What these ideas are is something that beggars description.
It is characteristic of these natures that they rave about ancient Germanic heroism, about grey primitive ages, stone hatchets, spear and buckler, but in reality are the greatest cowards that can be imagined. The very people who wear a cured bearskin with bull’s horns over their bearded heads, and brandish carefully-imitated ancient German tin swords in the breezes, preach nothing but battle with intellectual weapons for the present day, and hastily take to their heels before the first Communist rubber truncheon. Posterity will have little reason to glorify their own heroic existence in a new epic.
I came to know these people too well not to be profoundly disgusted with their wretched histrionics. But their effect on the broad masses is ridiculous, and the Jew has every reason to spare these populist play-actors, and even to prefer them to the real warriors of a coming German State. And yet these people are infinitely conceited, claiming to know best about everything despite all proof of their complete incompetence; they become a veritable pest for all those straightforward and honorable fighters who not merely enervate heroism in the past, but strive to hand down to posterity a similar picture of their own acts.
It is also very often hard to tell which of these people are acting ​from Stupidity or incapacity, and which are for some special reason only pretending to. Particularly in the case of the so-called religious reformers on a primitive Germanic basis. I always have the feeling that they are sent by those forces that do not wish the resurrection of our people. Their whole activity, after all, leads the people away from the common struggle against the common enemy, the Jew, to let it consume its strength in inner religious wrangles as senseless as they are ruinous. For these very reasons it is necessary to set up a strong central power in the sense of absolute authority of the movement’s leadership. It alone can put a spoke in the wheel of such corrupting elements. And it is quite true that for this reason the greatest enemies of a unified, rigorously conducted and guided movement are to be found among these populist Wandering Jews. What they hate about the movement is the power which puts an end to their mischief.
Not for nothing did the young movement settle upon a definite program, and avoid using the word “popular” in it. The concept popular has no real limitations, and consequently is not a possible basis for a movement, nor does it offer any standard for judging whether people belong to it. The more indefinable this concept is in practice, the more—and the more inclusive—interpretations it permits of, the more does the possibility of appealing to it increase. The injection into the political struggle of an idea so indefinable and capable of so many interpretations leads to the dissolution of any rigorous fighting fellowship, which cannot survive if the individual is left to decide on his own faith and will.
And it is scandalous what people are running around today with the world “Populist” on their hats, and how many have their own conception of the idea. A well-known professor in Bavaria, a celebrated fighter with intellectual weapons, rich in achievement in the way of equally intellectual marches on Berlin, makes the populist concept synonymous with a monarchical attitude. This erudite mind has, indeed, forgotten thus far to explain in more ​detail the identity of our German Monarchies of the past with a modern “populist” approach. And I fear the gentleman will hardly succeed in doing so. For anything more unpopulist than most of the German monarchical state structures is impossible to imagine. Otherwise they would never have disappeared, or else their disappearance would furnish the proof of the unsoundness of the populist world-concept.
Thus everyone interprets the idea as he happens to understand it. As a basis for a fighting political movement such a multiplicity of opinions is out of the question.
I am not even referring to the isolation from real life and particularly the ignorance concerning the people’s soul of these populist John the Baptists of the twentieth century. It is sufficiently illustrated by the ridiculous way they are treated from the Left. People let them prate, and laugh at them.
No one in this world who does not succeed in being hated by his opponents seems to me worth much as a friend. Accordingly the friendship of these people for our young movement was not only worthless, but altogether harmful, and in fact was the chief reason why we chose the name “Party” in the first place—we had reason to hope that this in itself would scare off a whole swarm of populist sleepwalkers—and why in the second place we described ourselves as the National Socialist German Workers’ Party.
The first expression got rid of the antiquity enthusiasts for us, the word-men and superficial phrase-makers of the so-called “populist idea”; the second relieved us of the whole cavalcade of knights of “intellectual” sword, all the rag, tag and bobtail that hold the “intellectual weapon” as a shield before their actual cowardice.
Naturally the fiercest attacks consequently came from these latter, not actively, of course, but only with the pen, as is only to be expected from such populist goosequills. For them there was something hideous in our very principle, “If a man offers us violence, we will defend ourselves by violence.” They reproached us most energetically not only with rude worship of the rubber ​truncheon, but with lack of intellect in itself. The fact that in a popular meeting a Demosthenes can be silenced if only fifty idiots, relying on their lungs and their fists, do not want to let him speak, has not the slightest influence on one of these quacks. His inborn cowardice always keeps him out of any such danger. He works not “noisily” and “obtrusively,” but “silently.”
Even today I cannot warn our young movement strongly enough against falling into the snare of these so-called “silent workers.” They are not only cowards, but invariably incompetents and do-nothings. A man who knows anything, who realizes an existing danger and sees with his own eyes the possibility of remedy, damned well has the duty and obligation not to work “silently,” but openly and in public to make a stand against the evil, and to work for its cure. If he does not do so, he is a miserable weakling, forgetful of duty, a failure either through cowardice or through laziness and incapacity. But the great majority of the “silent workers” is merely pretending it knows Heaven knows what. None of them has any ability, but they all try to fool the whole world with their artifices. They are lazy, but with their alleged “silent” work they give the impression of an activity both enormous and industrious; in a word, they are swindlers, political jobbers, to whom the honest work of others is hateful. When one of these populist night-owls refers to the value of “silence,” you can bet a thousand to one that during it he is not producing but stealing, stealing from the fruit of others’ work.
In addition there is the arrogance and conceited impudence with which this slothful, light-shy rabble falls upon the work of others, carps at it condescendingly, and thus in actuality helps the deadly enemies of our nationality.
Every last agitator who has the courage to stand on a public-house table among his adversaries, manfully and openly defending his views, accomplishes more than a thousand of these ruthless, malicious dissemblers. He is sure to convert and win over to the movement one man and another. His achievement can be tested and proved by the success of his activity. Only the cowardly frauds who boast of their “silent” work, and consequently shroud ​themselves in contemptible anonymity, are good for nothing, and may be considered in the truest sense of the word drones in the revival of our people.
At the beginning of 1920 I urged the holding of our first great mass meeting. This resulted in differences of opinion. Some of the leading Party members thought the affair altogether premature, and thus disastrous in its effect. The Red press had begun to occupy itself with us, and we were fortunate enough gradually to win their hatred. We had begun to speak during the discussion period at other meetings. Of course we were all shouted down immediately. But it did have one good result. People came to know us, and as the acquaintance ripened, their fury and their aversion to us rose. So we had good reason to hope for the attendance of our friends from the Red camp on a large scale at our first great mass meeting.
I also realized that the probability of its being dispersed was great. But the battle had to be fought—if not now, then a few months later. It was up to us to immortalize the movement on the very first day by standing up for it blindly and ruthlessly. In particular I knew the mentality of the adherents of the Red group too well not to be certain that a desperate resistance is the best way not only to make an impression but to win followers. We merely needed to have the resolution for that resistance.
The then chairman of the party, Mr. Harrer, felt unable to agree with my views about the time chosen, and therefore, as an honorable and upright man, withdrew from the leadership of the movement. Mr. Anton Drexler moved up into his place. I had reserved the organization of the propaganda for myself, and I carried it through inflexibly.
The date of this first great popular meeting of the as yet unknown movement was set for February 24th, 1920.
I personally directed the preparations. They were very brief. The whole machine was adjusted to the making of lightning-like decisions. Upon questions of the day a stand was to be taken in the form of mass meetings within twenty-four hours. These ​were to be announced by posters and leaflets, whose manner was fixed by the considerations I have already laid down in broad outline in my treatise on propaganda. Effectiveness with the broad masses, concentration on a few points, perpetual repetition of these, self-assured and self-confident wording of the text in the form of a positive assertion, great perseverance in promulgation, and patience in waiting for results.
As a color we deliberately chose red; it is the most inflammatory, and was bound to provoke and enrage our adversaries the most, thus making them conscious of us in one way or another.
In Bavaria, too, the inner brotherhood between Marxism and Center as a political party appeared most plainly in the care with which the ruling Bavarian People’s Party tried to weaken and later to destroy the effect of our posters on the masses of Red workers. If the police could find no other reason for taking steps against us, in the end “traffic conditions” had to serve, until, finally, for the sake of the silent Red spiritual ally, with the assistance of a so-called German Nationalist Party, these posters, which had given back to the German nationality hundreds of thousands of misled and misguided internationalist workers, were entirely forbidden. These posters are the best proof of the tremendous struggle which the young movement went through at that time. Before posterity they will also bear witness to the purpose and honesty of our principles and the arbitrariness of so-called national authorities in blocking an unwelcome nationalization and thus a redemption of the great mass of our nationality.
They will also help to destroy the belief that there was in Bavaria a nationalist regimé as such, and will document to posterity the fact that the nationalist Bavaria of 1919, 1920, 1921, 1922 and 1923 was not the product of a nationalist government, but that the latter was simply compelled to take into consideration a people gradually becoming nationalist in feeling.
The governments themselves did everything to hinder this process of revival and render it impossible.
We must make an exception of two men only:
The then Police President, Ernst Pohner, and his devoted ​advisor Chief Bailiff (Oberamtmann) Frick were the only high state functionaries who thus early had the courage to be Germans first and officials afterward. Ernst Pohner was the only man in a responsible position who did not court the favor of the masses, but felt himself answerable to his nationality, and who was ready to gamble and to sacrifice everything, even his personal existence if necessary, for the resurrection of the German people, which he loved above everything. And in fact he was always a thorn in the side of those venal official creatures the law of whose actions is laid down not by the interest of their people and the necessary advancement of its freedom but by the orders of their employer, without consideration of the welfare of the national property entrusted to them.
But above all he was one of those natures which, in contrast with most of our so-called governmental authority’s guardians, did not fear the enmity of traitors to people and country, but hoped for it as the natural possession of a decent man. The hatred of Jews and Marxists, their whole battle by lie and slander, were for him the only good fortune amid the misery of our people.
He was a man of rock-ribbed honesty, of Roman simplicity and German straightforwardness, to whom “better dead than a slave” was not a catchword, but the embodiment of his whole character.
I regard him and his collaborator Dr. Frick as the only men among those in state positions who have the right to be called co-founders of a national Bavaria.
Before we proceeded to hold our first mass meeting it was necessary not only to prepare the necessary propaganda material, but to have the guiding principles of the program put into printed form.
The guiding line which we had in mind particularly when drawing up the program I shall develop at great length in the second volume. Here I will merely remark that the program was made not only to give form and substance to the young movement, but to render its aims understandable to the broad masses.
In circles of the so-called intelligentsia there have been sneers ​and witticisms at this, and attempts to criticize. But the soundness of our conceptions resulted in the effectiveness of the program.
During those years I saw dozens of new movements arise, and they have all vanished and been dissipated again. One alone survived: the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. And today more than ever I am convinced that people may combat it, may try to paralyze it, that petty party ministers may forbid us to talk; but the victory of our ideas they can no longer prevent.
When the very names of the whole present State concept and its defenders are lost to memory, the foundations of the National Socialist program will be the basis of a State to come.
Our four months of meetings before January 1920 had slowly allowed us to save up the small means we needed for the printing of our first leaflet, our first poster and our program.
If I conclude this volume with the first great mass meeting of the movement, it is because the Party then burst through the narrow confines of a small club, and instead exerted its first decisive influence upon the most tremendous factor of our time, public opinion.
I had but one worry: would the hall be filled, or would we speak to a yawning void? I was unshakably convinced that if the crowd came, the day would be a great success for the young movement. So I looked forward anxiously to the evening.
Proceedings were to be opened at 7:30. At 7:15 I came into the banquet hall of the Hofbräuhaus on the Platzl in Munich, and my heart nearly burst for joy. The great hall—for great it still seemed to me—was overflowing with people, shoulder to shoulder, a mass of almost two thousand. And above all, the very ones had come to whom we wished to address ourselves. Far more than half of the hall seemed to be occupied by Communists and Independents. They had resolved on a quick end for our first great demonstration.
But the result was otherwise. After the first speaker had finished, I took the floor. Within a few minutes there was a barrage of shouted interruptions; there were violent encounters in the hall. A handful of devoted War comrades and other followers ​closed with the trouble-makers, and succeeded very gradually in restoring some semblance of order. I was able to resume speaking. After half an hour the applause slowly began to drown out the yelling and bellowing.
And now I took up the program, and began to explain it for the first time.
As the minutes passed, the hooting was drowned out more and more by shouts of applause. And when I finally presented the twenty-five theses point by point to the crowd, asking it to pronounce its own judgment, one after another was accepted amid ever-increasing cheers, unanimously and unanimously again; and when the last thesis had thus found its way to the heart of the crowd, I had before me a hall full of people united by a new conviction, a new faith, a new will.
When after almost four hours the room began to empty, and the mass of people rolled, pushed and crowded shoulder to shoulder like a slow river toward the exit, I knew there were spreading out into the German people the principles of a movement that could not be erased from memory.
A fire was kindled from whose flame some day the sword must come which shall win back freedom for the Germanic Siegfried, and life for the German nation.
And in step with the coming revival I could feel marching the Goddess of Implacable Revenge for the perjured deed of November 9th, 1918.
The hall was gradually emptied.
The movement took its course.