# Adolf Hitler's Own Book Mein Kampf (My Battle)/Chapter 10

Chapter X
Causes of the Collapse
Most people believe the German collapse was chiefly due to economic distress. So the cure is expected through economic means—that is why so far there has been no recovery.
It must be realized that economics are of only second or even third importance: before all stand factors of blood and morals.
Some go about saying that the lost war is back of our present misery. These same people used to cry that if this war were won, only the “capitalists” would profit, ​and that the entire affair would net nothing to the German workers and the German people! They said then that “militarism” could only be destroyed through a defeat of the Germans. The revolution supposedly, through robbing the German flag of victory, was to bring salvation of the German people.
Wasn’t this so? You rascally, lying villains?
The loss of the World War was a horrible thing for the German people, but it was a consequence, and not a cause.
The construction and leadership of the German army was the most tremendous thing the world has seen thus far. Its weaknesses were merely the result of natural human fallibility.
This army failed because of some crimes. The consequence of that failure, of course, led to further catastrophes.
The way in which German people accepted the peace showed that this defeat was not only a military one. If that had been the case people would not have laughed, and danced in the streets, when the Armistice was signed.
It took the never-ending lies of Jews and their Marxist fighting force to damn, with blame for the collapse, the warrior who had so desperately attempted to save the honor of his nation. Ludendorff, pointed to as the cause of the defeat, thus was robbed of his power to accuse the true traitors of the Fatherland.
The Value Of a Lie
This was clever, of course, for in the very magnitude of a lie is held a good amount of credibility. The primitive simplicity of the mind of the masses is more easily misled by great than by a tiny lie—they are accustomed to telling insignificant lies themselves, and so can detect them. But, never having dreamed of the vast possibilities of lies, they generally fait to detect a truly gigantic distortion.
Even when in the process of being enlightened as to the actual truth of the matter, after a great lie has once been told, they will for a long time have their doubts, completely unable to believe that some truth was not contained in what they had so completely accepted. This is a fact which all the great falsifiers and lying societies know all too well.
The Jews know this best of all.
    (Here, as in so many places throughout this book, and in his speeches, Hitler righteously attempts to blame and denounce the Jews for a weapon he himself has seized upon.
    (Hitler here frankly admits the value of the lie: make a thing monstrous, repeat it a thousand times, and people will begin really to believe you. Is it not logical, therefore, to assume that all his wild raving against the Jews is a colossal lie for propaganda purposes, and not a belief based upon reason?)
Their very existence is built upon a single monstrous lie. They pretend to be a religious group, but actually they are a race—and what a race.
One of the most dreadful symptoms of decay in Germany before the war was the ever-present, half-measure which was universally visible, and was the result of uncertainty and cowardice.
Heil Hitler!
German education of that period spent too little time training character and developing a determination and desire for responsibility. A too-pliable German was produced. This was disastrous when it came to dealings between German people and the Kaiser—he was never to be contradicted, all that he said, felt and did was to be approved.
Yet here, more than in any other place, the true dignity of man was absolutely vital, else the institution of monarchy was to perish through obsequity.
    (Nazi Church Minister Kerrl stated in 1937: “The Führer is the Jesus Christ and also the Holy Ghost of the Fatherland.”)
These fawning sneaks, grovelling about the throne, are gravediggers. No other way of looking at this matter is possible. A man who will stand up for his cause is never a man who can possibly be, at any time, a characterless sycophant. Such people will never die for their master.
That monarchs never learn this has always been their ruin.
Characteristic of the lack of responsible people in pre-war Germany was the attitude to the press. People who read can be put in three groups:
First, those who believe everything that they read.
Second, those who have reached the point where they no longer believe anything they read.
Third, those who critically examine what they read, and pass judgment accordingly.
Of course, the first group is by far the greatest. The masses form it—they actually do believe everything offered to them! The press has limitless control over these people, which is of advantage if their enlightenment is in the hands of truth-lovers, but it is ruinous when in the hands of crooks and lars.
Thus the state must watch the press with ceaseless vigilance, and must never be cooled by idle talk about “freedom of the press”—instead, the state ruthlessly must use the press for the service of the state and nation.
Before the war the state did nothing against the Jew-Marxist press poisoners who ripened the state for slavery.
For such people the Frankfurter Zeitung was decency itself: it never used rude words, denounced all physical brutality, and always would fight only with “intellectual” weapons; this latter idea, oddly enough, was always the product of the least intelligent people.
This is all the result of our semi-education which deprives people of their natural instincts, giving them instead a certain amount of knowledge, while at the same lime insuring that they can never use it.
Another Jew Plot: Syphilis
Another example of this half-heartedness of the leaders of pre-war Germany was this: right along with the moral infection of the people marched an equally dreadful poisoning of their physical health.
Syphilis spread everywhere, and tuberculosis was in all parts of the country.
The government threw up its hands, especially in regard to syphilis. The cause of the disease was primarily our prostitution of love. The ruinous moral and physical results of this Judaization of our life and the mammonizing of our mating instinct meant the corruption of future generations.
Marriage was too much related to finance, leading to blood poisoning; for any department store Jewess was considered good enough to produce the offspring of “His Highness”. The result of this is always complete degeneration.
Ever wider prostitution in the midst of our big cities means ever wider spread of syphilis, the results of which can be found in mad houses and in our children.
Too many people cannot see this, refuse to see it, shrug their shoulders, or else take refuge under a personal halo.
Sin against blood and race is the original sin of the world, and those who surrender to it speed the end of mankind.
“A majority always represents both stupidity and cowardice.”
Mein Kampf—Chapter III
Some in pre-war Germany thought abolition of this sin against and infection of German blood was impossible to halt. Solution of the problem required brutality.
It should have been understood, first of all, that whenever a seemingly impossible task is to be accomplished, the whole attention of a people must be absolutely united upon this single aim—as if existence or non-existence of the people depended upon its solution.
Thus the matter of the conquest of syphilis should have been made to appear not as a task of the nation, but as the task.
Marriage must not be thought of as an end in itself, for it has one great design: propagation and preservation of the race. This is its sole meaning.
Marriage must be mate more easily available at an earlier age through higher salaries, as one of the first maneuvers in the battle against prostitution and syphilis.
Education must also take up arms: sins against the body cannot be ended only by training the “mind”. Too great stress on intellectual training, leading to neglect of physical development, brings sexual notions too early into a youth’s life. A boy made hard by sports has less need of sensual pleasure than has the intellectual sitter.
Tt is also important to understand that physical weaknesses are usually the prime cause of personal cowardice.
Our whole public life is today a hot-house of sexual ideas and stimulants. The menus of our movies and theatres, our store windows and posters, the reports creeping out of our court rooms—all these are bad food for youth and the result is to give syphilis a foothold among our children. Is it not horrible to see so many physically wrecked and spiritually ruined young men, who have been introduced to marriage through some city whore?
The medical battle against this disease is helpless until these other things are cleaned up.
Merciless putting aside of the incurably diseased—a barbarous measure for the stricken, but a blessing for the healthy and for all generations to come—may be found necessary.
War upon syphilis and prostitution is one of the greatest tasks facing mankind, because to abolish it so many evils which are combined as its cause must also be destroyed. For this illness is the result of the disease of spiritual, social, and racial instincts.
This Futuristic Art!
A very visible proof of the decay of the old Reich was the gradual loss of culture—and I do not mean by culture that which is to-day labeled “civilization” for that stuff is the true opponent of all that is really of value in this world.
I am not talking of mistakes in taste, but of the Bolshevism of art—seen as Cubism and Dadaisim in many states to-day—which is nothing but artistic collapse. “Futuristic Art” is lunacy. How indignant a true Schiller, or a Goethe, would he at the sight of such prostitution!
The more debased is a new revolutionary movement, the more it hates all things representative of the past. How such feeble people try to make their own rubbish seem superior to past works!
The nineteenth century saw a loss of individual character among our great cities—which became poorer in culture as their populations increased—and this to me was a questionable sign. When in the course of history Munich grew to hold sixty thousand souls, it at the same time developed as a great art center; but what has been added to Munich of late is culturally disgraceful. And modern cities have become as great or greater in population than the original Munich of sixty thousand people, without ever producing anything culturally worthy.
Heroic monuments and grand buildings—the Acropolis, the Pantheon, or the old Gothic cathedrals—characterized growing cities in another age. Today, however, we erect Jew department stores, and imposing hotels.
A single battleship used to cost the Reich about sixty million marks, but hardly half as much was earmarked for the first building of the Reich—meant for all eternity—the Reichstag Building. When it came to voting upon the interior, the parliamentarians chose plaster instead of stone.
Our present cities, lacking great monuments, are symptoms of our cultural decline.
    (So Hitler burned down the Reichstag as soon as he came into power in Germany. He has since decreed that German workers construct the grandiose Olympic Stadium in Berlin, the giant Nazi Congress site in Nurnberg, and a few other such Nordic monuments.)
All these signs of decay are due to the fact that there is no clear, inspiring view of life in the Reich, or at least leading it.
Even the religions have no strong will. Both denominations may keep missionaries busy making converts in Asia and Africa, but meanwhile in Europe they are losing followers by the millions. As the people steadily lose interest in religion, the cheap politicians sell out their faiths by allying themselves with atheist Marxists.
Act—Even if It’s Suicide
The horrible vacillation and timidness of the Reich in affairs at home and abroad was due chiefly to the functioning of the Reichstag, which marched at the head of the nation in the direction of general collapse. Half-measure was the Reichstag slogan. Their vague efforts to preserve peace made war inevitable.
The Polish policy was another half-measure. It merely irritated the Poles, without accomplishing anything. The result was not friendship with the Poles, and it was not a German victory—no, it was the enmity of Russia.
The Alsace-Lorraine affair was, in the same way, only half concluded. Instead of savagely bashing the head of the French Hydra, or else giving fair rights to the Alsatian, neither one nor the other was done. Nothing could be done, for in the ranks of the great parties stood traitors—instance, Herr Wetterlé, of the Centre Party.
All this would have been sufferable it that power upon which the Reich depended for life had not been effected—the Army.
For this sabotage of the weapon of the Reich, this “German Reichstag” must forever merit the curses of the German race!
If the graves of Flanders Field could open to-day, hundreds of thousands of the finest young Germans, who were chased into death ill-trained and unprepared, would arise—bloody accusers of the traitors who sold them for their own selfish gains, or betrayed them with their weak doctrines.
The Jews with the Marxist democratic press cried out the falsehood about German “Militarism”—striving to disarm and incriminate the nation when anyone who paused to think could see that in case war ever came the whole nation would have had to take up arms. Thus disarmament and lack of this “Militarism” would have sent millions of inexperienced youths into the jaws of death.
It must also be realized that shortage of well-trained soldiers could very easily mean defeat in any war—as was demonstrated in the World War so dreadfully.
Defeat in the struggle for the independence of the German nation was the result of half-measures, executed during peace, when actually the entire strength of the people should have been called upon for the defense of the Fatherland.
    (Hitler, it may be recalled, devoted Mein Kampf’s Chapter VII—“Revolution”—to his theory that Germany lost the World War despite her “great army”, because of the “Jew-Marxist Stab In the Back”. At the very beginning of the present chapter, Hitler declared: “… the German army was the most tremendous thing the world has seen thus far. Its weaknesses were merely the result of natural human fallibility”.)
The same half-heartdness was at work at the same time on the Navy, for even the highest commanders were poisoned. The tendency was always to build ships similar to those under construction by the British, only in every instance each German ship was a wee bit smaller than the British ship with which it was to keep pace. This was indeed clever.
He who reviews all the great sacrifices, who can see before his eyes the uselessly crippled and dead, who feels the shame and dishonor, and who fully comprehends our present misery—and also who snows that all this was done only to help along their way a band of unscrupulous job-hunters—will well understand that only such words as rascal, villain, and criminal are suitable. Otherwise the existence of these expressions in our language would be incomprehensible.
​Compared to these traitors, every pimp is a gentleman of honor.
It is strange that all this villainy was so seldom seen. The really capable people in the government knew nothing of the value of propaganda.
Only the Jew knew that propaganda, rightly used, makes it possible even to pass Heaven to a people and make them think it is Hell.
    (Only Adolf Hitler knew that propaganda, rightly used, makes it possible even to pass Hell to a people and make them think it is Heaven—until they actually cross the River Styx, when they discover they’re really in the Domain of the Devil.)
Of course, the many ills I have listed, and many others, existed in other nations as well as in Germany before the war. And we possess some advantages. One of these was our effort to preserve the national nature of our economy. This, however, was a dangerous virtue, which eventually turned out to be the greatest cause of the World War.
Who Cared What The Kaiser Ate?
The existence of the Monarchy was both good and bad. Precise accounts of the reigning Kaiser’s proverbial frugality, his early rising, his late working hours at night—all this was highly questionable. Certainly no one cared what and how much the monarch ate; nobody begrudged him a full meal; no one desired to rob him of his sleep; everyone was contented if he was an honorable representative of his House and his nation, and ruled well.
Fairytale telling did more harm than good.
    (The monster propaganda machine which Hitler now wields over the German people devotes no small share of its energies to spreading among the German people the gospel of Hitler’s pure and abstemious love for milk and vegetables.)
A worse effect of the monarchy was the widespread belief that since government came from above, the individual need not worry about the nation. While the government was good this may have been all right. But alas—if an evil government stepped in, then the spiritless obedience and childish faith was the worst misfortune imaginable. (sic).
The greatest asset Germany possessed at that time was the army. Had we lacked that army, Versailles would long before have been inflicted upon our people. The debt of the German people to the army may be summed up in one word: Everything.
The army built responsible people despite spiritless days. The army taught bravery, and willingness to sacrifice; this in a time when willingness to sacrifice was in some quarters regarded as idiocy.
The army was the school that taught the individual German to seek national salvation not in the lying falsehood of international fraternity amongst Negroes, Germans, Chinese, Frenchmen, Britishers, etc.—but in the strength and united force of his own nationality.
Above all, the army upheld faith in individual personalities in the face of the Jew-Democratic worship of numbers.
Every year the army bred three hundred and fifty thousand real young men—it was not for nothing that the enmity of those who wished the weakness of the Reich was concentrated upon the army.
Old Germany— May It Return!
Still one other thing was great in the old Empire: the unsurpassable body of civil servants. Germany was the best-organized and best-administered nation in all the World. What other country could equal Germany’s railways? The revolution, however, broke this efficiency, and gradually ability was replaced by stupid party conviction.
It was upon the form of government, the army, and the officials, that the magnificent strength of the old Reich rested. There existed then what is utterly lacking to-day—state authority! This does not rest on parliamentary sop, or upon court sentences intended to frighten disputers of this authority. (Hitler was writing in the Prison fortress of Landsberg on the Lech, remember!) but instead upon broad confidence in the direction of the community.
In the ultimate analysis governments are maintained by belief in their good quality and in their truthfulness, and in their just representation of the interests of the People—and not by the pressure of force. (sic.)
The real underlying cause of the ruin of the old empire was its inability to understand the race problem and its importance in the historical development of the people.
The lives of nations are expressions of the drive for self preservation and development of species and race.