All the values of civilisation accumulated in the course of centuries are rejected, all traditional ideas of morality, justice and law give way to the primacy of race, its instincts, its needs and interests. The individual, his liberty, his rights and aspirations, no longer have any real existence of their own. In this conception of race it is easy to realise the gulf that separates members of the German community from other men. The Hitler regime has created a veritable chasm between the German nation, the sole keeper of the racial treasure, and other nations. Between the Germanic community and the degenerate population of an inferior variety of man there is no longer any common measure.
Human brotherhood is rejected, even more than all the other traditional moral values.
In order to understand it and to try to eradicate for ever from the Germany of to-morrow the evil by which our entire civilisation came so near to perishing, it must be recalled that National Socialism has deep and remote origins. The mysticism of racial community was born of the spiritual and moral crises which Germany underwent in the nineteenth century, and which abruptly broke out again in its economic and social structure through a particularly rapid industrialisation. National Socialism is, in reality, one of the peaks of the moral and spiritual crisis of modern humanity, convulsed by industrialisation and technical progress. Germany experienced this metamorphosis of economic and social life not only with an extraordinary brutality, but at a time when she did not yet possess the political equilibrium and the cultural unity which the other countries of Western Europe had achieved. This is the spiritual cruelty of the nineteenth century which so many Germans have described with a tragic evocative power.