by Adolf Hitler
The National Socialist Movement, on the contrary, will always let its foreign policy be determined by the necessity to secure the space necessary to the life of our Folk. It knows no Germanising or Teutonising, as in the case of the national bourgeoisie, but only the spread of its own Folk. It will never see in the subjugated, so called Germanised, Czechs or Poles a national, let alone Folkish, strengthening, but only the racial weakening of our Folk. For its national conception is not determined by earlier patriotic ideas of government, but rather by Folkish, racial insights. Thus the point of departure of its thinking is wholly different from that of the bourgeois world. Hence much of what seems to the national bourgeoisie like the political success of the past and present, is for us either a failure or the cause of a later misfortune. And much that we regard as self evident seems incomprehensible or even monstrous to the German bourgeoisie. Nevertheless a part of German youth, especially from bourgeois circles, will be able to understand me. Neither I nor the National Socialist Movement figure to find any support whatsoever in the circles of the political national bourgeoisie, active at present, but we certainly know that at least a part of the youth will find its way into our ranks.
For them.
Chapter 6
GERMAN NEEDS AND AIMS
The question of a nation’s foreign policy is determined by factors which lie partly within a nation, and partly given by the environment. In general the internal factors are the basis for the necessity of a definite foreign policy as well as for the amount of strength required for its execution. Folks living on an impossible soil surface fundamentally will tend to enlarge their territory, consequently their living space, at least as long as they are under healthy leadership. This process, originally grounded only in the concern over sustenance, appeared so beneficent in its felicitous solution that it gradually attained the fame of success. This means that the enlargement of space, at first grounded in pure expediencies, became in the course of mankind’s development a heroic deed, which then also took place even when the original preconditions or inducements were lacking.
Later, the attempt to adapt the living space to increased population turned into unmotivated wars of conquest, which in their very lack of motivation contained the germ of the subsequent reaction. Pacifism is the answer to it. Pacifism has existed in the world ever since there have been wars whose meaning no longer lay in the conquest of territory for a Folk’s sustenance. Since then it has been war’s eternal companion. It will again disappear as soon as war ceases to be an instrument of booty hungry or power hungry individuals or nations, and as soon as it again becomes the ultimate weapon with which a Folk fights for is daily bread.
Even in the future the enlargement of a Folk’s living space for the winning of bread will require staking the whole strength of the Folk. If the task of domestic policy is to prepare this commitment of the Folk’s strength, the task of a foreign policy is to wield this strength in such a manner that the highest possible success seems assured. This, of course, is not conditioned only by the strength of the Folk, ready for action at any given time, but also by the power of the resistances. The disproportion in strength between Folks struggling with one another for land leads repeatedly to the attempt, by way of alliances, either to emerge as conquerors themselves or to put up resistance to the overpowerful conqueror.
This is the beginning of the policy of alliances.
After the victorious war of 1870-1871, the German Folk achieved a position of infinite esteem in Europe.
Thanks to the success of Bismarckian statesmanship and Prussian German military accomplishments, a great number of German States, which heretofore had been only loosely linked, and which, indeed, had not seldom in history faced each other as enemies, were brought together in one Reich. A province of the old German Reich, lost 170 years before, permanently annexed at that time by France after a brief predatory war, came back to the mother country. Numerically thereby the greatest part of the German nation, at least in Europe, was amalgamated in a unitary State structure. It was cause for concern that ultimately this State structure included ……… million Poles and ……… Alsatians and Lorrainers become Frenchmen. This did not correspond either with the idea of a National or of a Folkish State. The national State of bourgeois conception must at least secure the unity of the State language, indeed down to the last school and the last street sign. Further it must include the German idea in the education and life of these Folk and make them the bearers of this idea.
There have been weak attempts at this; perhaps it was never seriously wanted and in practice the opposite has been achieved
The Folkish State, conversely, must under no conditions annex Poles with the intention of wanting to make Germans out of them some day. On the contrary, it must muster the determination either to seal off these alien racial elements, so that the blood of its own Folk will not be corrupted again, or it must without further ado remove them and hand over the vacated territory to its own National Comrades.
That the bourgeois national State was not capable of such a deed is obvious. Neither had anyone ever thought about it, nor would anyone ever have done such a thing. But even if there had been a will to do this, there would not have been sufficient strength to carry it out, less because of the repercussions in the rest of the world than because of the complete lack of understanding that such an action would have found in the ranks of the so called national bourgeoisie. The bourgeois world had once presumed it could overthrow the feudal world, whereas in reality it continued the latter’s mistakes through bourgeois grocers, lawyers, and journalists. It has never possessed an idea of its own, but indeed a measureless conceit and money.
But a world cannot be conquered with this alone, nor another one built. Hence the period of bourgeois rule in world history will be as brief as it is indecently contemptible.
Thus, right from its foundation, the German Reich had also assimilated toxins into the new State structure whose deleterious effect could all the less be evaded as bourgeois equality, to top things off, gave Jews the possibility of using them as their surest shock troops.
Aside from that, the Reich nevertheless encompassed only a part of the German Nation, even though the largest.
It would have been self evident that even if the new State had not possessed any great foreign policy aim of a Folkish character, at least as a so called bourgeois national State it should have kept in view further unification and consolidation of the German Nation, as its minimum foreign policy aim. This was something that the bourgeois national Italian State never forgot.
Thus the German Folk had obtained a National State which in reality did not completely encompass the Nation.
Thus the new borders of the Reich, viewed in a national political sense, were incomplete. They ran straight across German language areas, and even through parts which, at least formerly, had belonged to the German Union, even if in an informal way.
But these new borders of the Reich were even more unsatisfactory from a military viewpoint. Everywhere were unprotected, open areas which, especially in the West, were, in addition, of decisive importance for the German economy, extending far beyond the border areas. These borders were all the more unsuitable in a military political sense, since grouped around Germany were several great States with foreign policy aims as aggressive as their military means were plentiful. Russia in the east, France in the west. Two military States, one of which cast covetous glances at Eastern and Western Prussia, while the other tirelessly pursued its centuries old foreign policy goal for the erection of a frontier on the Rhine. In addition there was England, the mightiest maritime power of the world. The more extensive and unprotected the German land borders were in the east and west, the more restricted, by contrast, was the possible operational basis of a naval war. Nothing had made the fight against German submarine warfare easier than the spatially conditioned restriction of its port areas. It was easier to close off and patrol the triangle shaped body of water than would have been the case
with a coast, say, 600 or 800 kilometres long. Taken all in all, the new borders of the Reich as such were not at all satisfactory from a military point of view. Nowhere was there a natural obstacle or a natural defence. As against this, however, everywhere were highly developed power States with hostile thoughts in the back of their minds. The Bismarckian premonition that the new Reich founded by him would once again have to be protected with the sword was most deeply justified. Bismarck expressed what was fulfilled forty five years later.
As little satisfactory as the new Reich borders could be in a national and military political sense, they were nevertheless even still more unsatisfactory from the standpoint of the possibility of sustenance of the German Folk.
Germany in fact was always an overpopulated area. On the one hand this lay in the hemmed in position of the German nation in Central Europe, on the other in the cultural and actual importance of this Folk and its purely human fertility. Since its historical entry into world history, the German Folk has always found itself in need of space. Indeed, its first political emergence was forced primarily by that need. Since the beginning of the migration of Folks, our Folk has never been able to settle this need for space, except through conquest by the sword or through a reduction of its own population. This reduction of the population was sometimes effected through hunger, sometimes through emigration, and at times through endless, unfortunate wars. In recent times it has been effected by voluntary birth control.
The wars of the years 1864, 1866 and 1870-71, had their meaning in the national political unification of a part of the German Folk and thus in the final end of German State political fragmentation. The black, white, red flag of the new Reich therefore did not have the slightest ideological meaning, but rather a German national one in the sense that it overcame the former State political fragmentation. Thus the black, white, red flag became a symbol of the German Federal State which had overcome the fragmentation. The fact that, notwithstanding and despite its youth, it enjoyed a positively idolatrous veneration, lay in the manner of its baptism, for indeed the very birth of the Reich towered infinitely above otherwise similar events. Three victorious wars, the last of which became a literal miracle of German statesmanship, German military leadership, and German heroism, are the deeds from which the new Reich was born. And when it finally announced its existence to the surrounding world in the imperial proclamation, through its greatest imperial herald, the thunder and rumbling of the batteries at the front surrounding Paris reechoes in the blare and the flourish of the trumpets.
Never before had an Empire been proclaimed in such a fashion.
But the black, white, red flag appeared to the German Folk as the symbol of this unique event exactly as the black, red and yellow flag is and will remain a symbol of the November Revolution.
As much as the individual German States increasingly fused with one another under this banner, and as much as the new Reich secured their State political prestige and recognition abroad, the founding of the Reich still did not change anything with regard to the major need, our Folk’s lack of territory. The great military political deeds of our Folk had not been able to give the German Folk a border within which it would have been able to secure its sustenance by itself. On the contrary: in proportion as the esteem of German nationality rose through the new Reich, it became all the more difficult for the individual German to turn his back on such a State as an emigrant, whereas, conversely, a certain national pride and a joy in life, which we find almost incomprehensible today, taught that large families were a blessing rather than a burden.
After 1870–1871 there was a visibly rapid increase in the German population. In part its sustenance was covered through the utmost industry and great scientific efficiency with which the German now cultivated his fields within the secured frontiers of his Folk. But a great part, if not the greatest, of the increase in German soil productivity was swallowed up by an at least equally great increase of the general living requirements which the citizen of the new State now likewise claimed. The nation of sauerkraut eaters and potato annihilators, as the French derisively characterised it, now slowly began to adjust its living standard to that of other Folks in the world. Thus only a part of the yield of the increase of German agriculture was available for the net population increase.
As a matter of fact, the new Reich never knew how to banish this need. Even in the new Reich, at first, an attempt was made to keep the relation between population and land within tolerable limits through a permanent emigration. For the most shattering proof of the soundness of our assertion of the towering importance of the relation between population and land lies in the fact that, in consequence of this disproportion, specifically in Germany during the 1870s, 1880s and 1890s, the distress led to an epidemic of emigration which even at the beginning of the 1890s had swollen to a figure of nearly one and a quarter million people a year.
Thus the problem of the sustenance of the German Folk had not been solved for the existing human mass, not even by the foundation of the new Reich. A further increase of the German Nation, however, could not take place without such a solution. Regardless of how such a solution might turn out, it had to be found in any case.
Hence the most important problem of German foreign policy after 1870–1871 had to be the question of solving the problem of sustenance.
Chapter 8
MILITARY POWER AND FALLACY OF BORDER RESTORATION AS GOAL
On November 11th, 1918, the armistice was signed in the forest of Compiègne. For this, fate had chosen a man who was one of those bearing major guilt for the collapse of our Folk. Matthias Erzberger, deputy of the Centre, and according to various assertions the bastard son of a servant girl and a Jewish employer, was the German negotiator who affixed his name to a document which, compared and measured against the four and a half years of heroism of our Folk, seems incomprehensible if we do not assume the deliberate intention to bring about Germany’s destruction.
Matthias Erzberger himself had been a petty bourgeois annexationist, that is, one of those men who, especially at the beginning of the war, had tried to remedy the lack of an official war aim in their own way and manner.
For even though in August, 1914, the entire German Folk instinctively felt that this struggle involved their being or non being, nevertheless once the flames of the first enthusiasm were extinguished, they were not in any way clear either about the threatening non being, or the necessity of remaining in being. The enormity of the idea of a defeat and its consequences was slowly blotted out through a propaganda which had complete free rein within Germany, and which twisted or altogether denied the real aims of the Entente in a way that was as adroit as it was mendacious. In the second and especially in the third year of the War, it had also succeeded to some extent in removing the fear of defeat from the German Folk, since, thanks to this propaganda, people no longer believed in the enemy’s annihilatory will. This was all the more terrible as, conversely, nothing was allowed to be done which could inform the Folk of the minimum that had to be achieved in the interests of its future self preservation, and as a reward for its unprecedented sacrifices. Hence the discussion over a possible war aim took place only in more or less irresponsible circles and acquired the expression of the mode of thought as well as the general political ideas of its respective representatives. While the sly Marxists, who had an exact knowledge of the paralysing effect of a lack of a definite war aim, forbade themselves to have one altogether, and for that matter talked only about the reestablishment of peace without annexations and reparations, at least some of the bourgeois politicians sought to respond to the enormity of the bloodshed and the sacrilege of the attack with definite counterdemands. All these bourgeois proposals were purely border rectifications and had nothing at all to do with geopolitical ideas. At best they still thought of satisfying the expectations of German princes who were unemployed at the time by the formation of buffer States. Thus even the founding of the Polish State appeared as a wise decision in national poli
tical terms to the bourgeois world, aside from a few exceptions. Individuals pushed economic viewpoints to the foreground according to which the border had to be formed; for example, the necessity of winning the ore basin of Longwy and Briey; other strategical opinions, for example, the necessity of possessing the Belgian fortresses on the Meuse River, and so on.
It should be self evident that this was no aim for a State engaged in a war against twenty six States, in which the former had to take upon itself one of the most unprecedented bloodsheddings in history, while at home an entire Folk was literally surrendered to hunger. The impossibility of justifying the necessity for enduring the War helped to bring about its unfortunate outcome.
Hence when the collapse took place in the homeland, a knowledge of war aims existed even less, as their former weak representatives had meanwhile moved further away from their former meagre demands. And this was quite understandable. For to want to conduct a war of this unprecedented extent so that the borders instead of running through Herbesthal should run through Liége, or so that instead of a Czarist commissar or governor, a German princeling could be installed as potentate over some Russian province or other, would have been really irresponsible and monstrous. It lay in the nature of German war aims, so far as they were at all subject to discussion, that they were later altogether denied. Truly for such baubles a Folk should not have been kept for even an hour longer in a war whose battlefields had slowly become an inferno.
The sole war aim that the monstrous bloodshed would have been worthy of could consist only in the assurance to German soldiers of so and so many hundred thousand square kilometres, to be allotted to front line fighters as property, or to be placed at the disposal of a general colonisation by Germans. With that the War would have quickly lost the character of an imperial enterprise, and instead would have become a cause of the German Folk.