Hitler’s Second Book

by Adolf Hitler

  For one thing must first of all be rejected most sharply: there is no Holy German Folk in the Southern Tyrol, as the Patriotic Leaguers foolishly prattle. Rather, all who must be reckoned as belonging to German Folkdom must be equally holy to it. It won’t do to appraise a Southern Tyrolean higher than a Silesian, East Prussian or West Prussian who is enslaved under Polish rule. It also won’t do to regard a German in Czechoslovakia as more worthwhile than a German in the Saar territory or also in Alsace-Lorraine. The right to grade the German element of the severed territories according to special values could, at best, grow out of an analytical examination of their specific decisive and dominant fundamental racial values. But this is the very measure which the protest groups against Italy apply least of all. For the Tyroleans in the territories now separated too, it could yield no higher credit factor than, let’s say, for an East or a West Prussian.

  Now the foreign policy task of the German Reich as such cannot be determined by the interests of the parts split off from the Reich. For in reality these interests will not be served thereby, since practical help indeed presupposes the regained power of the Motherland. Hence the sole viewpoint that warrants consideration in regard to the foreign policy position can be only that of the fastest and earliest restoration of the independence and freedom of the remaining part of the Nation united under a Government.

  In other words, this means that even if a German foreign policy were cognisant of no aim other than the salvation of the Holy Folk In Southern Tyrol, that is, the 190000 Germans who can really come under consideration, first the prerequisite thereto would be the achievement of Germany’s political independence as well as means of military power. For it should be rather clear, after all, that the Austrian protest State will not wrest the Southern Tyrol from the Italians. But it must be equally clear that even if German foreign policy knew no aim other than the actual liberation of the Southern Tyrol, its actions must especially then be determined by such viewpoints and factors which guarantee the regaining of the means of political and military power. Thus we should surely not place the Southern Tyrol in the focal point of foreign policy considerations, but, on the contrary, especially then must we be dominated and guided by those ideas which in fact allow us to smash the existing world coalition directed against Germany. For ultimately, even through Germany, the Southern Tyrol will not be restored to the German element by the droning of a Tibetan prayer wheel of protests and indignation, but by the commitment of the sword.

  Thus, if Germany herself were to have this aim, she must nevertheless ever and again look first of all for an ally who would furnish help for the gaining of German power. Now one can say that France could be considered in this case. As a National Socialist, I however oppose this most sharply.

  It may well be that France would declare herself ready to allow Germany to march with her as an ally against Italy. Indeed, it can even be that, in gracious recognition of our blood sacrifice, and as meagre bandages for our wounds, they would award the Southern Tyrol to us. But what would such a victory mean for Germany? Could our Nation, for instance, live then because it possesses 200000 more Southern Tyroleans? Or does one not believe that France, once she has defeated her Latin competitor in the Mediterranean with German military help, would surely turn once more against Germany? Or in any case that she would surely pursue her old political aim of the liquidation of Germany?

  No, if for Germany there remains any choice between France and Italy, then, according to all human reason, Italy alone warrants consideration for Germany. For a victory with France over Italy will bring us the Southern Tyrol and a stronger France to boot as a subsequent enemy. A victory over France with Italy’s help will bring us Alsace-Lorraine at the least, and at most, the freedom to carry out a genuine large scale territorial policy. And in the long run it is through this alone that Germany can live in the future, and not through Southern Tyrol. Nor will it do to choose one among all the severed territories, and indeed the one most unimportant to us in a vital sense, and to stake the total interests of a nation of 70000000 people, actually to renounce its future, just so that wretched fantastic German hurrah!-patriots can obtain a momentary gratification. And all this on account of a sheer phantom, for in reality the Southern Tyrol would be as little helped thereby as it is now.

  The National Socialist Movement as such must educate the German Folk to the effect that it must not shrink from staking its blood for the sake of shaping its life. But, likewise, our Folk must be educated to the effect that such a staking of their blood, at least in future history, must never again take place for the sake of phantoms.

  Let our protest patriots and Fatherland Leaguers for once please say how they envisage the reconquest of the Southern Tyrol other than by military violence. Let them, for once, summon up the honesty to avow, if they seriously believe it, that one day Italy — made mellow simply by their verbiage and heated protests — will hand over the Southern Tyrol, or whether they are not also convinced that a State with some existing national consciousness will give up a territory for which it had fought for four long years only under the compulsion of a military decision. Let them not always prattle that we, or I, had renounced the Southern Tyrol. These infamous liars know very well that, at least as far as regards my own person, I fought at the Front at the time when the fate of the Southern Tyrol was being decided, something which not a few of the presentday meeting protesters neglected to do at that time. And that at the same time, however, the forces with which our Patriotic Leaguers and National bourgeoisie make a common foreign policy and agitate against Italy, sabotaged the victory with every means, that international Marxism, democracy and the Centre even in peacetime neglected nothing in order to weaken and paralyse the military power of our Folk, and that finally they organised a revolution during the War which necessarily led to the collapse of the German Homeland and with it of the German Army.

  The Southern Tyrol was also lost to the German Folk through the activity of these people, and the accursed weakness and impotence of our presentday bourgeois manic protesters. It is a contemptible falsification on the part of these so called national patriots if today they talk about a renunciation of the Southern Tyrol. No, dear gentlemen, don’t twist and squirm in such a cowardly way over the right word. Don’t be too cowardly to come right out and say that today it could only be a question of the conquest of the Southern Tyrol. For the renunciation, gentlemen of the National Leagues, was effected by your worthy presentday allies, the one time Marxist betrayers of their country, with all legal governmental forms. And the only ones who had the courage to take an open position against this crime at that time were not you, esteemed National Leaguers and bourgeois diplomatists, but rather the small National Socialist Movement and primarily myself. Indeed, sirs, when you were so quiet that nobody in Germany had an idea of your existence, so deeply had you crawled off into your mouse holes, it was then in the years 1919 and 1920 that I came forth against the shame of signing the peace treaties — and not secretly, behind four walls, but publicly. At that time, however, you were still so cowardly that never once did you dare to come to one of our meetings for fear of being cudgelled by your present foreign policy allies, the Marxist street tramps.

  The men who signed the Peace Treaty Of Saint Germain were as little National Socialists as the signers of the Peace Treaty Of Versailles. They were the members of the parties who, by this signing, merely capped their decades long betrayal of their country. Whoever today wants to change the fate of the Southern Tyrol in any way cannot renounce anything that was already renounced in all forms by the presentday protesters. At most he can only reconquer it.

  I am most fanatically opposed to this, to be sure, and I announce the most extreme resistance to this endeavour, and I shall fight with the utmost fanaticism against the men who are trying to drive our Folk into this adventure, as bloody as it is insane. I did not learn about the War at a restaurant table reserved for regular customers. Nor was I, in this War, one of those who had to give
orders or to command. I was an ordinary soldier who was given orders for four and a half years, and who nevertheless honourably and truly fulfilled his duty. But I thereby had the good fortune to know war as it is, and not as one would like to see it. As a simple soldier, who had known only its dark sides, I was for this war up to the last hour because I was convinced that the salvation of our Folk could lie only in victory. Since, however, there is now a peace which others have perpetrated, I fight to the utmost against a war which would not benefit the German Folk, but instead only those who once before sacrilegiously traded the blood sacrifice of our Folk for their interests. I am of the conviction that one day I will not be lacking in the determination, to bear the responsibility even, if necessary, of staking the blood of the German Folk. But I fight against even a single German being dragged off to a battlefield, for fools or criminals to nourish their plans on his blood. Whoever reflects on the unprecedented horror and the frightful misery of a modern war, or considers the boundless demands on the nervous stamina of a Folk, must take fright at the idea that such a sacrifice could be demanded for a success which in the most favourable case could never be consonant with this enormous effort. And I also know that if today the people of the Southern Tyrol, so far as it thinks along exclusively German lines, were gathered in one front and the hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dead which our Nation would have to lay down in a struggle for their sake were to appear before these spectators, 300000 hands would rise protectingly toward heaven, and the foreign policy of the National Socialists would be justified.

  What is most terrible about all this is that they play with this dreadful possibility without ever giving a thought to really wanting to help the Southern Tyroleans.

  Since the struggle over the Southern Tyrol is being waged today by those who once surrendered all Germany to ruin, even the Southern Tyrol is to them only a means to an end which they use with ice cold unscrupulousness in order to be able to gratify their infamous anti German — in the most extreme sense of the word — instincts. It is the hate against the presentday nationally conscious Italy, and it is above all a hatred of the new political idea of this country, and most of all hatred against the towering Italian statesman, which induces them to stir up German public opinion with the help of the Southern Tyrol. For, in reality, how indifferent after all are these elements to the German Folk. While they lament the Southern Tyrol’s fate with crocodile tears in their eyes, they are driving all Germany toward a fate which is worse than that of the partitioned territory. While they protest against Italy in the name of national culture, they pollute the culture of the German nation within, destroy our whole cultural sensibility, poison the instinct of our Folk, and annihilate even the accomplishments of earlier times. Does an age which inside the country has depressed our whole theatre, our literature, our plastic arts to the level of swine, have the right to step forth against presentday Italy, or to protect German culture from her in the name of culture? The gentlemen of the Bavarian People’s Party, the German Nationalists, and even the Marxist defilers of culture, are concerned about the German culture of the Southern Tyrol, but, undisturbed, they let the culture of the Homeland be insulted by the most wretched bungling works, and surrender the German stage to the race shame of a Jonny Spielt Auf [note 11]. And, hypocritically, they lament the oppression of German cultural life in the Southern Tyrol, while they themselves most cruelly persecute those in the Homeland who want to protect German culture from a deliberate and intentional destruction. Here the Bavarian People’s Party incites the State power against those who raise a protest against the infamous defilement of our Folk’s culture.

  What do these solicitous protectors of German culture in the Southern Tyrol do in Germany itself for the defence of German culture? They have let the theatre sink to the level of a brothel, into sites of demonstrated race defilement, and destroyed all the foundations of our Folk Life with movies holding honesty and morality up to ridicule; they connive at the cubistic and dadaistic infatuation of our plastic art, they themselves protect the fabricators of this base deception or madness, they let German literature sink into mud and filth, and surrender the whole intellectual life of our Folk to international Jewry. And the same contemptible pack is so brazen faced as to stand up for German culture in the Southern Tyrol, whereby the only aim they have in mind, naturally, is to incite two cultured Folks against each other so that in the end they can all the more easily reduce them to the level of their own cultural wretchedness.

  Thus is it in everything, however.

  They complain about the persecution of the Germans in the Southern Tyrol, and they are the same people who in Germany most cruelly wage war on anyone who understands being national as something other than defencelessly surrendering his Folk to syphilisation by Jews and Negroes. The same people who call for the freedom of conscience of Germans in the Southern Tyrol oppress it in Germany itself in the meanest way. Never before has the freedom of expression of one’s national outlook in Germany been so muzzled as under the rule of these mendacious party riffraff who presume to break a lance for the rights of conscience and national freedoms, of all things, in the Southern Tyrol. They wail over every injustice that is inflicted on a German in the Southern Tyrol, but they are silent about the murders that these Marxist street tramps commit from month to month in Germany against national elements. And their silence is shared by the whole fine national bourgeoisie including the Fatherland protesters. In a single year — that is to say, only five months of this year have gone by — nine men from the ranks of the National Socialist Movement alone were murdered under circumstances that in part were bestial, and over six hundred wounded. This entire mendacious brood is silent about this, but how they would roar if only one such deed were committed by Fascism against the German element in the Southern Tyrol. How they would summon the whole world to revolt if only one German in the Southern Tyrol were slaughtered by Fascists under conditions similar to those which the Marxist murder riffraff employs in Germany, without this calling forth the indignation of this fine phalanx for the salvation of the German Folk. And how indeed these same people, who solemnly protest against the government persecution of the German element in the Southern Tyrol, persecute the Germans who inconvenience them in Germany itself. Beginning with the U-boat heroes up to the saviours of Upper Silesia, the men who first staked their blood for Germany — how they dragged them in chains before the courts and finally sentenced them to the penitentiary, all because they had sacrificed their lives hundreds upon hundreds of times out of a fervent love for the Fatherland, whereas this contemptible riffraff of protesters had crawled off somewhere where they could not be found. Let them total the sentences which have been imposed in Germany for acts which in a national conscious State would be rewarded with the highest decorations. If Italy today puts a German in the Southern Tyrol in jail, the whole German national and Marxist newspaper pack straightaway screams bloody murder. But they completely overlook that in Germany one can go to jail for months merely on the basis of a denunciation, that house searches, violation of the mails, telephone tapping — that is, sheer anticonstitutional deprivation of the personal freedoms guaranteed by the civil rights of this State — are the order of the day. And let not our so called national parties say that this is possible only in Marxist Prussia. First of all, they fraternise arm in arm with these same Marxists in regard to foreign policy, and, second, they have taken the same part in the oppression of a real, self conscious nationalism. In national Bavaria they placed the mortally ill Dietrich Eckart [note 12] in so called protective custody, despite the available medical testimony, without even the trace of any wrongdoing on his part save, at most, that of his incorruptible national outlook. And he was kept in such custody for so long that he finally collapsed, and died two days after his release. Moreover, he was Bavaria’s greatest poet. Of course he was a national German and had not perpetrated any Jonny Spielt Auf, and in consequence he did not exist for these fighters for the national culture.


  Just as these national patriots first murdered him, likewise did they kill his work with silence, for after all he was a German and a good Bavarian in addition, and no international Jew polluter of Germany. In that case he would have been holy to this league of patriots, but here they acted in accordance with their national bourgeois outlook, and the open statement in the München police administration: Croak, national pig! But these are the same German conscious elements who mobilise the indignation of the world when someone in Italy stupidly does no more than throw a German in jail.

  When a few Germans were expelled from the Southern Tyrol, these people again summoned the German Folk to blazing indignation. They forgot only to add, however, that the greatest incitement was being directed against Germans in Germany itself. Under a bourgeois national government, national Bavaria has expelled dozens and dozens of Germans, and all only because they did not politically suit the corrupt ruling bourgeois stratum in consequence of their uncompromising nationalism. Suddenly one no longer took cognisance of the clan brotherhood with German Austria, but only of the foreigner. But it was not at all limited to the expulsion of so called alien Germans. No, these same bourgeois national hypocrites who hurl flaming protests against Italy because a German is expelled from the Southern Tyrol and packed off to another province, have expelled from Bavaria dozens and dozens of Germans with German citizenship who fought for Germany in the German Army for four and a half years, and who had been severely wounded, and won the highest decorations. Indeed, this is how these bourgeois national hypocrites look who now bluster indignantly against Italy, whereas they themselves have burdened themselves with shame upon shame among their own Folk.