# Mein Kampf (Stackpole Sons)/Volume 2/Chapter 8

8. The Strong Man is Mightiest When Alone
I have mentioned above the existence of a working group of German-populist societies, and will take this occasion to discuss in brief the problem of these working groups.
In general we mean by a working group a number of societies that enter into a certain mutual relationship to facilitate their work; they chose a common leadership of lesser or greater authority, and carry out joint actions together. This in itself means the clubs, societies or parties must be such that their aims and methods are not too far apart. And it is asserted that this is always the cast. The ordinary average citizen finds it pleasing and reassuring to learn that the societies, in forming such a working group, have found their “points of agreement,” and “put aside their differences.” The belief is general that such a union means a vast increase in strength, and that the little groups, otherwise feeble, thus suddenly become a power.
But this is usually not so.
It is interesting, and I think important for the better understanding of this question, to understand clearly how the formation of societies, clubs or the like, all claiming to be pursuing the same end, can come about at all. In itself it would be logical for one aim to be fought for by but one society; it does not seem reasonable for several societies to work for the same end. Undoubtedly that end was originally envisaged by only one society. Somewhere a man proclaims a truth, summons people to solve a certain problem, sets a goal, and forms a movement to realize his purpose.
Thus a club or a party is founded which—depending on its program—purposes either to eliminate existing abuses or to achieve a certain state of affairs in future.
​When such a movement comes into existence, it has in practice a certain right of priority. It really ought to be taken for granted that everyone who intended to work for the same end would take his place in the movement, strengthening it, and thus better serving the common purpose. Every intellectually alert mind, in particular, ought to consider his joining indispensable to the real success of the common struggle. Hence, supposing reason and a certain straightforwardness (this, as I shall later demonstrate, is very important), there should be but one movement for one goal.
That this is not so may be attributed to two causes. One I might almost call tragic, while the second is pitiful, and is to be found in human weakness itself. But at bottom I see both as facts that are capable of strengthening the will, its energy and intensity, and of making possible at last, through this increase in human vigor, the solution of the problem in question.
The tragic reason why there is usually more than one society trying to solve a given difficulty is this: any really large achievement on this earth is generally the fulfilment of a wish that has long existed within millions of men, of a longing silently cherished by many. In fact it may happen that centuries pine for the solution of some question, because they are sighing under some intolerable condition, without this universal desire’s being fulfilled. Peoples that can no longer find any heroic solution for such distress may be described as impotent, while the best proof of a people’s vitality, and thus of its being fated to live, is the fact that some day Fate grants it the man endowed to bring about the long-desired fulfilment—release from some great pressure, elimination of bitter distress, or contentment of the people’s soul, restless in its uncertainty.
It is quite in the nature of so-called great questions of the times that thousands take part in their solution, that many feel called upon, in fact that Fate itself nominates several choices, and allows the free play of forces to bring victory to the strongest and ablest, and to entrust him with the solution of the problem.
Thus it may happen that centuries, dissatisfied with the state ​of their religious life, long for a revival; and that because this spiritual pressure dozens of men arise who believe themselves chosen to relieve this religious distress by virtue of their insight and their knowledge, as prophets of a new teaching, or at least as fighters against an existing one.
Here too, of course, by force of natural order, the strongest man is fated to carry out the great mission; but the knowledge that he alone is called usually comes late indeed to the others. On the contrary, they regard themselves as equally entitled to and chosen for the accomplishment of the task, and their contemporaries are usually the last people able to distinguish the one man among them who, being supremely gifted, deserves their sole support.
Thus in the course of centuries, nay within a single age, various men arise and found movements to fight for aims which (at least so it is claimed) are the same, or at any rate are felt by the great masses to be the same. The people itself no doubt has vague desires and general convictions, and cannot clearly conceive the real nature of its goal or of its wishes, let alone the possibility of their realization.
The tragedy is that those men are striving toward a single goal by altogether different roads, without knowing one another, and therefore, with the purest faith in their own mission, they think it their duty to go their own ways without regard to others.
That such movements, parties, or religious groups come into being absolutely independently, simply from the universal urge of the times, to work in a single direction, is what seems tragic, at least at first glance, because people are too much inclined to the opinion that the strength scattered on various roads would, if united on one, bring success faster and more surely. But this is not the case. Nature herself, with implacable logic, makes the decision by setting the various groups to compete with one another and struggle for the palm of victory, and leading to success that movement which has chosen the clearest, shortest and surest road.
And how is the rightness or wrongness of a path to be decided ​from without, if the interplay of forces is not given a clear track, the final decision withdrawn from the doctrinaire conclusions of human wiseacres, and left to the trustworthy proof furnished by visible success, which after all always sets the final stamp on the rightness of an action?
If, then, various groups are marching by separate roads toward the same goal, they will—in so far as they have learned of the existence of similar efforts—test the nature of their own path more thoroughly, shorten it if possible, and try by the exertion of their utmost energy to arrive sooner at the goal.
This contest improves the breed of the individual fighter, and mankind not infrequently owes its successes to those lessons, among others, that have been drawn from the mistakes of unsuccessful previous attempts.
Thus we recognize, in what at first sight seems the tragic fact of original disjunction without any conscious fault of individuals, the means by which the best method is eventually achieved.
We can see from history that in most people’s opinion the two possible paths for the solution of the German question, represented and upheld primarily by Austria and Prussia, Hapsburg and Hohenzollern, should have been united from the outset; in their opinion one road or the other should have been followed with united forces.
But in that case the road of the party that in the end was the most impressive would have been chosen; yet the Austrian purpose would never have led to a German Empire.
The Empire of strongest German unity arose from the very thing that millions of Germans with bleeding hearts felt was the final and most fearful sign of our fratricidal quarrel: the German Imperial Crown was in truth brought home from the battlefield of Königgrätz, and not from the struggles before Paris, as people afterward thought.
Thus the founding of the German Empire was not the result of common intent pursued along a common road, but the result of a conscious, and sometimes an unconscious, struggle for hegemony; from this struggle Prussia eventually emerged ​victorious. Anyone whose political partisanship does not blind him to the truth must agree that the so-called wisdom of men would never have made the same wise decision as that finally realized by the wisdom of life, i.e. the free play of forces. For who in the German lands two hundred years ago would seriously have believed that the Prussia of the Hohenzollerns, and not the House of Hapsburg, would some day be the nucleus, the founder and teacher of the new Empire? And who, on the other hand, would today deny that Fate acted better as it did; indeed who could imagine a German Empire at all, based on the principles of a decayed and degenerate dynasty?
No: natural development, even if only after centuries of struggle, finally put the best man in the one place where he belonged.
That will always be and eternally remain as it has always been.
For that reason it is not to be regretted when various people take the road for a single goal; the strongest and swiftest will thus be recognized, and will be the victor.
There is also a second reason why movements of apparently similar nature in the life of peoples try to reach apparently similar goals by different roads. This reason is not only not tragic, but actually altogether pitiful. It originates in the sorry mixture of envy, jealousy, ambition and a thievish disposition that is unfortunately often found in individual members of the human race.
Whenever these appears a man who deeply realizes the distress of his people, and who—first acquiring a full understanding of the nature of the disease—seriously attempts to alleviate it, then, the moment he envisages a goal and chooses the road that may lead to it, all the small and smallest spirits prick up their ears, and zealously follow the action of this man who has drawn the public eye. These people are just like sparrows watching a more fortunate fellow that has found a piece of bread; apparently quite uninterested, they nevertheless keep vigilant watch, to maraud him in an unguarded moment. A man has only to start on a new road, and immediately many lazy loafers become alert, scenting some profitable tidbit that may be at the end of that ​road. The moment they have found out where, they set out eagerly to reach the goal by another and, if possible, quicker road.
Once the new movement is founded, and its definite program established, these people rise to assert that they are fighting for the same end—but not by honestly joining the ranks of the movement, and thus acknowledging its priority; instead they plunder the program, and then start a new party of their own. And they are brazen enough to assure their unthinking contemporaries that they had had the same purpose long before the other man; not infrequently they succeed in putting themselves in a favorable light, instead of attracting justified universal contempt. For it is not, after all, a piece of cool impudence to pretend to write on one’s own banner the task that another has already written there, to lift the basic points of his program, and then, as if one had created all this oneself, to go one’s own way? The impudence is particularly evident in the fact that the very elements that originally caused the disruption by their new organization are, experience shows, the ones that talk most about the necessity for harmony and unity as soon as they think the adversary’s head-start is too great to be overcome.
To that process the so-called “populist disunion” is due.
On the other hand it is true that the formation of a whole series of groups described as populist resulted entirely from the natural development of affairs in 1918–19, quite without any fault of the founders. As early as 1920 the N. S. D. A. P. had gradually crystallized out as the victor among them all. Nothing could more brilliantly prove the fundamental honesty of the various founders than the decision, in many cases truly admirable, to sacrifice their own obviously less successful movement to the stronger one, i.e. to dissolve it or unconditionally incorporate it in the other.
This is particularly true of the chief warrior of the then German Socialist Party in Nuremberg, Julius Streicher. The N. S. D. A. P. and the German Socialist Party had been founded with the same ultimate aims, but quite independently. The chief advance guard of the German Socialist Party was, as aforesaid, the ​then school-teacher Julius Streicher, of Nuremberg. At first, naturally, he too was filled with holy conviction of his movement’s mission and future. But as soon as he saw clearly and beyond doubt the greater strength and swifter growth of the N. S. D. A. P., he discontinued his activity for the German Socialist Party and the working group, and urged his followers to take their places in the N. S. D. A. P., which had emerged victorious from the struggle, and to go on fighting for the common aim within its ranks. This was a personal decision as difficult as it was absolutely honorable.
Almost no disunion remains from these early days of the movement; the honest will and intent of the other men at that time led almost without exception to an honorable, upright, and proper end. What is now called “populist disunion” owes its existence, as I have already emphasized, exclusively to the second of the causes I cited: ambitious men who had never had any ideas of their own before, let alone any aims, felt “called upon” precisely at the moment when they saw the N. S. D. A. P.’s success undeniably ripening.
Suddenly programs arose that were copied altogether from ours, ideas were promulgated that had been borrowed from us, aims set up for which we had been fighting for years, paths chosen that the N. S. D. A. P. had long since traveled. By every means they tried to explain why, despite the long-established N. S. D. A. P., they were compelled to found these new parties; but the nobler the motives that were claimed, the more untruthful these pretenses were.
In reality but one reason had counted: the personal ambition of the founders to play a role to which their own dwarfishness contributed nothing beyond great audacity in appropriating the ideas of others—an audacity which in ordinary civil life is usually called thievish.
There was nothing among the ideas and conceptions of others that one of these political kleptomaniacs did not soon gather up for his new business. The people who did this were the same who later tearfully bewailed the “populist disunion,” and talked ​constantly of the “necessity of union,” in the secret hope of taking in the others to such an extent that they would grow tired of the perpetual accusing outcry, and fling after the stolen ideas the movements created to carry them out.
But if the thieves did not succeed in that, and if the profits of the new enterprises failed to keep step with expectations, owing to the trifling intellectual stature of their proprietors, they often sold out cheaper, and were pleased enough if they managed to land in one of the so-called working groups.
All those who could not stand on their own feet at that time united into these working groups—no doubt in the belief that eight lame men, arm in arm, would make one gladiator.
But if there really was one sound man among the lame ones, he needed all his strength to keep the others on their feet, and in the end was lamed himself.
Joining in such working groups must always be regarded as a question of tactics; but at the same time we must never lose sight of the following basic conclusion:
The formation of a working group never turns weak organizations into strong ones, but it may and not infrequently will weaken a strong organization. The belief that an element of strength must result from the union of weak groups is mistaken, since the majority in any form and under any conditions has been shown by experience to be the embodiment of stupidity and cowardice, so that any multiplicity of societies, if ruled by an elected governing body of several persons, succumbs to cowardice and weakness. This sort of union also prevents the free play of forces, stops the struggle for selection of the best man, and thus forever prevents the necessary and final victory of the healthier and stronger. Such unions are thus enemies of natural development; usually they hinder the solution of the problem being fought for far more than they further it.
It may happen that for purely tactical reasons the supreme leadership of a movement, looking to the future, will nevertheless make an agreement with similar organizations on the treatment of certain questions for a very short time, and will even ​undertake joint measures. But this must never lead to the perpetuation of such a situation, if the movement itself is not to abandon its mission of salvation. For once it is finally entangled in such a group, it loses the opportunity and the right to use its strength to the full in the direction of natural development, overcome its rivals, and reach the goal as victor.
It must never be forgotten that nothing really great in the world has ever been achieved by coalitions; it has always been the accomplishment of a single victor. Joint successes by their very origin bear within them the seeds of future attrition, indeed of loss of what is already achieved. Great intellectual revolutions that really overturn the world are thinkable and possible at all only as titanic struggles of individual units, never as enterprises of coalitions.
Above all, the populist State will never be created by the irresolute intent of a populist working group, but only by the iron will of a single movement that has fought its way through in the face of everyone.