Hitler’s Second Book

by Adolf Hitler

  The conception of honour of a whole profession slowly but imperceptibly became the general patrimony of a whole Folk.

  That this organisation was destroyed through the Peace Treaty Of Versailles was all the worse for our Folk, as our internal enemies thereby finally received a free path for effecting their worst intentions. But our incompetent bourgeoisie, for lack of any genius and ability to improvise, could not even find the most primitive substitute.

  Thus, to be sure, our German Folk has lost possession of arms and their bearer. But this has been the case countless times in the history of nations, without the latter having perished because of it. On the contrary: nothing is easier to replace than a loss of weapons and every organisational form can again be created or renewed. What is irreplaceable is the spoiled blood of a Folk, the destroyed inner value.

  For in opposition to the present bourgeois conception that the Treaty Of Versailles has deprived our Folk of arms, I can reply only that the real lack of weapons lies in our pacifistic democratic poisoning, as well as in internationalism, which destroys and poisons our Folk’s highest sources of power. For the source of a Folk’s whole power does not lie in its possession of weapons or in the organisation of its army, but in its inner value which is represented through its racial significance, that is, the racial value of a Folk as such, through the existence of the highest individual personality values, as well as through its healthy attitude toward the idea of self preservation.

  In coming before the public as National Socialists with this conception of the real strength of a Folk, we know that today the whole of public opinion is against us. But this is indeed the deepest meaning of our new doctrine, which as a world view separates us from others.

  Since our point of departure is that one Folk is not equal to another, the value of a Folk is also not equal to the value of another Folk. If, however, the value of a Folk is not equal to another, then every Folk, apart from the numerical value deriving from its count, still has a specific value which is peculiar to it, and which cannot be fully like that of any other Folk. The expressions of this specific, special value of a Folk can be of the most varied kind and be in the most varied fields; but collected together they result in a standard for the general valuation of a Folk. The ultimate expression of this general valuation is the historical, cultural image of a Folk, which reflects the sum of all the radiations of its blood value or of the race values united in it.

  This special value of a Folk, however, is in no way merely aesthetic cultural, but a general life value as such.

  For it forms the life of a Folk in general, moulds and shapes it and, therefore, also provides all those forces which a Folk can muster in order to overcome the resistances of life. For every cultural deed, viewed in human terms, is in truth a defeat for the hitherto existing barbarism, every cultural creation [thereby] a help to man’s ascent above his formerly drawn limitations and thereby a strengthening of the position of these Folks. Thus a power for the assertion of life truly also lies in the so called cultural values of a Folk. Consequently the greater the inner powers of a Folk in this direction, the stronger also the countless possibilities for the assertion of life in all fields of the struggle for existence. Consequently the higher the race value of a Folk, the greater its general life value [through] which it can stake in favour of its life, in the struggle and strife with other Folks.

  The importance of the blood value of a Folk, however, only becomes totally effective when this value is recognised by a Folk, properly valued and appreciated. Folks who do not understand this value or who no longer have a feeling for it for lack of a natural instinct, thereby also immediately begin to lose it. Blood mixing and lowering of the race are then the consequences which, to be sure, at the beginning are not seldom introduced through a so called predilection for things foreign, which in reality is an underestimation of one’s own cultural values as against alien Folks. Once a Folk no longer appreciates the cultural expression of its own spiritual life conditioned through its blood, or even begins to feel ashamed of it, in order to turn its attention to alien expressions of life, it renounces the strength which lies in the harmony of its blood and the cultural life which has sprung from it. It becomes torn apart, unsure in its judgement of the world picture and its expressions, loses the perception and the feeling for its own purposes, and in place of this it sinks into a confusion of international ideas, conceptions, and the cultural hodgepodge springing from them. Then the Jew can make his entry in any form, and this master of international poisoning and race corruption will not rest until he has thoroughly uprooted and thereby corrupted such a Folk. The end is then the loss of a definite unitary race value and as a result, the final decline.

  Hence every existing race value of a Folk is also ineffective, if not indeed endangered, as long as a Folk does not consciously remind itself of its own and nurse it with great care, building and basing all its hopes primarily on it.

  For this reason, international mindedness is to be regarded as the mortal enemy of these values. In its place the profession of faith in the value of one’s own Folk must pervade and determine the whole life and action of a Folk.

  The more the truly eternal factor for the greatness and the importance of a Folk is sought in the Folk value, the less will this value as such achieve a total effectiveness if the energies and talents of a Folk, at first slumbering, do not find the man who will awaken it.

  For so little as mankind, which is made up of different race values, possesses a uniform average value, just as little is the personality value within a Folk the same among all members. Every deed of a Folk, in whatever field it might be, is the result of the creative activity of a personality. No distress can be redressed solely by the wishes of those affected by it, as long as this general wish does not find its solution in a man chosen from a Folk for this task. Majorities have never wrought creative achievements. Never have they given discoveries to mankind. The individual person has always been the originator of human progress. Indeed a Folk of a definite inner race value, so far as this value is generally visible in its cultural or other achievements, must at the outset possess the personality values, for without their emergence and creative activity the cultural image of that Folk would never have come into being, and therefore the possibility of any inference as to the inner value of such a Folk would be lacking. When I mention the inner value of a Folk, I appraise it out of the sum of achievements lying before my eyes, and thereby at the same time I confirm the existence of the specific personality values which acted as the representatives of the race value of a Folk and created the cultural image. As much as race value and personality value seem to be linked together, because a racially valueless Folk cannot produce important creative personalities from this source — as, conversely, it seems impossible to infer, for example, the existence of race value from the lack of creative personalities and their achievements — just as much can a Folk, nevertheless, by the nature of the formal construction of its organism, of the Folk Community or of the State, promote the expression of its personality values, or at least facilitate it, or indeed even prevent it.

  Once a Folk installs the majority as the rulers of its life, that is to say, once it introduces presentday democracy in the western conception, it will not only damage the importance of the concept of personality, but block the effectiveness of the personality value. Through a formal construction of its life, it prevents the rise and the work of individual creative persons

  For this is the double curse of the democratic parliamentary system prevailing today: not only is it itself incapable of bringing about really creative achievements, but it also prevents the emergence and thereby the work of those men who somehow threateningly rise above the level of the average. In all times the man whose greatness lies above the average measure of the general stupidity, inadequacy, cowardice, and arrogance too, has always appeared most threatening to the majority. Add to this that, through democracy, inferior persons must, almost as a law, become leaders,
so that this system applied logically to any institution devaluates the whole mass of leaders, insofar as one can call them that at all. This resides in the irresponsibility lying in the nature of democracy. Majorities are phenomena that are too elusive to be grasped so that they can somehow be charged with responsibility. The leaders set up by them are in truth only executors of the will of the majorities.

  Hence their task is less that of producing creative plans or ideas, in order to carry them out with the support of an available administrative apparatus, than it is to collect the momentary majorities required for the execution of definite projects. Thus the majorities are adjusted less to the projects than the projects are to the majorities. No matter what the result of such an action may be, there is no one who can be held concretely accountable. This is all the more so as each decision that is actually adopted is the result of numerous compromises, which each will also exhibit in its character and content. Who then is to be made responsible for it?

  Once a purely personally drawn responsibility is eliminated, the most compelling reason for the rise of a vigorous leadership falls away. Compare the army organisation [institution], oriented to the highest degree toward authority and responsibility of the individual person, with our democratic civil institutions, especially in relation to the results of the leadership training on both sides, and you will be horrified. In one case an organisation of men who are as courageous and joyous in responsibility as they are competent in their tasks, and in the other, incompetents too cowardly to assume responsibility. For four and a half years the German Army organisation withstood the greatest coalition of enemies of all times. The civil, democratically decomposed domestic leadership literally collapsed at the first thrust of a few hundred ragamuffins and deserters.

  The pitiful lack of really great leading minds among the German Folk finds its most simple explanation in the desolate disintegration which we see before us through the democratic parliamentary system which is slowly corroding our whole public life.

  Nations must decide. Either they want majorities or brains. The two are never compatible. Up to now, however, brains have always created greatness on this Earth, and what they created was again destroyed mostly through majorities.

  Thus, on the basis of its general race value, a Folk can certainly entertain a justified hope that it can bring real minds into existence. But then it must seek forms in the mode of construction of its national body which do not artificially, indeed systematically, restrict such brains in their activity, and erect a wall of stupidity against them, in short, which prevent them from achieving efficacy.

  Otherwise one of the most powerful sources of a Folk’s strength is blocked.

  The third factor of the strength of a Folk is its healthy natural instinct for self preservation. From it result numerous heroic virtues, which by themselves make a Folk take up the struggle for life. No State leadership will be able to have great successes, if the Folk whose interests it must represent is too cowardly and wretched to stake itself for these interests. No State leadership, of course, can expect that a Folk possess heroism, which it itself does not educate to heroism. Just as internationalism harms and thereby weakens the existing race value, and as democracy destroys the personality value, so pacifism paralyses the natural strength of the self preservation of Folks.

  These three factors — the race value as such, the existing personality values, as well as the healthy instinct of self preservation — are the sources of strength, from which a wise and bold domestic policy time and again can draw the weapons which are necessary for the self assertion of a Folk. Then the army establishments and the technical questions regarding weapons always find the solutions suitable to support a Folk in the hard struggle for freedom and daily bread.

  If the domestic leadership of a Folk loses sight of this standpoint, or believes that it must arm for the struggle in terms of weapon technique only, it can achieve as much momentary success as it pleases, but the future does not belong to such a Folk. Hence the limited preparation for a war was never the task of truly great legislators and statesmen of this Earth, but rather the unlimited inner and thorough training of a Folk, so that its future could be secured almost as by law, according to all human reason. Then even wars lose the isolated character of more or less immense surprises, but instead are integrated into a natural, indeed self evident, system of fundamental, well grounded, permanent development of a Folk.

  That present State leaders pay little attention to this viewpoint is partly due to the nature of democracy, to which they owe their very existence, but secondly to the fact that the State has become a purely formal mechanism which appears to them as an aim in itself, which must not in the least coincide with the interests of a specific Folk. Folk and State have become two different concepts. It will be the task of the National Socialist Movement to bring about a fundamental change here.

  Chapter 4

  ELEMENTS OF FOREIGN POLICY

  Consequently if the task of domestic policy — besides the obvious one of satisfying the so called questions of the day — must be the steeling and strengthening of a nation by means of a systematic cultivation and promotion of its inner values, the task of foreign policy is to correspond to and collaborate with this policy in order to create and to secure the vital prerequisites abroad. A healthy foreign policy, therefore, will always keep the winning of the basis of a Folk’s sustenance immovably in sight as its ultimate goal. Domestic policy must secure the inner strength of a Folk so that it can assert itself in the sphere of foreign policy. Foreign policy must secure the life of a Folk for its domestic political development. Hence domestic policy and foreign policy are not only most closely linked, but must also mutually complement one another. The fact that in the great conjunctures of human history domestic policy as well as foreign policy has paid homage to other principles is not at all a proof of soundness, but rather proves the error of such action. Innumerable Nations and States have perished as a warning example to us, because they did not follow the above mentioned elementary principles. How little man thinks of the possibility of death during his life is a noteworthy fact. And how little he arranges the details of his life in accordance with the experiences that innumerable men before him had to have and which, as such, are all known to him. There are always exceptions who bear this in mind and who, by virtue of their personality, try to force on their fellow men the laws of life that lay at the base of the experiences of past epochs. Hence it is noteworthy that innumerable hygienic measures which perforce redound to the advantage of a Folk, and which individually are uncomfortable, must be formally forced upon the main body of a Folk through the autocratic standing of individual persons, in order however to disappear again when the authority of the personality is extinguished through the mass insanity of democracy. The average man has the greatest fear of death and in reality thinks of it most rarely. The important man concerns himself with it most emphatically, and nevertheless fears it the least. The one lives blindly from day to day, sins heedlessly, in order suddenly to collapse before the inevitable. The other observes its coming most carefully and, to be sure, looks it in the eye with calm and composure.

  Such is exactly the case in the lives of nations. It is often terrible to see how little men want to learn from history, how with such imbecilic indifference they gloss over their experiences, how thoughtlessly they sin without considering that it is precisely through their sins that so and so many Nations and States have perished, indeed vanished from the Earth. And indeed how little they concern themselves with the fact that even for the short time span for which we possess an insight into history, States and Nations have arisen which were sometimes almost gigantic in size, but which two thousand years later vanished without a trace, that world powers once ruled cultural spheres of which only Sagas give us any information, that giant cities have sunk into ruins, and that their rubble heap has hardly survived to show presentday mankind at least the site on which they were located. The cares, hardships and sufferin
gs of these millions and millions of individual men, who as a living substance were at one time the bearers and victims of these events, are almost beyond all imagination.

  Unknown men. Unknown soldiers of history. And truly, how indifferent is the present. How unfounded its eternal optimism, and how ruinous its wilful ignorance, its incapacity to see, and its unwillingness to learn. And if it depended on the broad masses, the game of the child playing with the fire with which he is unfamiliar would repeat itself uninterruptedly and also to an infinitely greater extent. Hence it is the task of men who feel themselves called as educators of a Folk to learn on their own from history, and to apply their knowledge in a practical manner [now], without regard to the view, understanding, ignorance or even the refusal of the mass.