German Propaganda Archive Calvin University

line

Background: The Nazi-Sozi is one of Goebbels’s earliest publications, written before he moved to Berlin. First published in 1926, it was revised and reissued by the party’s Eher Verlag in 1931. I am translating the 1927 edition. It provides an interesting example of early Nazi propaganda, including some themes dropped as the party grew. I don’t know what editorial changes were made in later editions.

It takes the form of a dialogue between Goebbels and a rather dense fellow German, whose comments are indented.

The source: Joseph Goebbels, Der Nazi-Sozi (Elberfeld: Verlag der Nationalsozialistischen Briefe, 1927). One edition is available on archive.org.


The Nazi-Sozi

by Joseph Goebbels


Ten Commandments for Each National Socialist

The homeland is the mother of your life — never forget that!

1. Your fatherland is Germany. Love it more than anything else, and more in deed than in word.

2. Germany’s enemies are your enemies; hate them with your whole heart.

3. Each people’s comrade, even the poorest, is a part of Germany; love him as you love yourself.

4. Ask for yourself only duties. Then Germany will regain its rights.

5. Be proud of Germany; You may take pride in a fatherland for which millions gave their lives.

6. He who insults Germany insults you and your dead. Punch him.

7. Don’t cause mischief, but where someone denies you your rights, God gives you the right to use your fists.

8. Do not be a crackpot anti-Semite, but keep away from the Berliner Tageblatt.

9. Live your life such that you will not need to be ashamed in a New Germany.

10. Believe in the future, for that is the only way you will gain it.


No Politics

“No, no! I’ll stay away from politics. That is nothing but betrayal and swindle. After the revolution one could catch people with all these stupid phrases. That time is past. We are smarter today than back then. I don’t believe any of that nonsense any more. I do my work and don’t think about politics. That’s it. Period. Enough!”

“Pardon me! If you believe that, our common enemy — call him whatever you wish, capitalism, the Jew, parliament, democracy, or Marxism — reached his goal.”

“Why? I don’t understand.”

“Their goal is for the German people to ignore politics. It can create, serve, work like a serf — the Jew will control politics.”

“You are relentless. So whom should I trust today? Name me one party from the right or the left that hasn’t buried us in slogans and promises, and name me even one that has fulfilled even a tiny part of its promises!”

“You are right. All the parties have lied and betrayed the people. None has been honest, or attempted to put into practice what it promised in theory. They pay attention to the people only during elections. But are the parties Germany, and is disappointment with their betrayal doubts about our future? If the parties are bad, then throw them out and join the people in fighting the parties!”

“No! It is too late for that! We no longer have the courage, the determination, to proclaim to today’s Germany the life will of a new Germany.”

“You could better say I, not we. We have courage, faith, and determination. What about you? What do you think about the future?”

The Economy and Politics

“I still have one small hope. The economy. I believe that the enormous creative power of the German people will save us. Labor, the economy, is our hope. We must work more and talk less!”

“A nice roar, lion! But that is a platitude. I suggest you go to the three million unemployed, like some voice in the wilderness, and preach to them that ‘We must work more and talk less!’ Perhaps that will make the nonsense you are proclaiming clearer than anything I can or want to do.”

The economy is our hope! That is what Walther Rathenau said as he made the first broad steps toward incorporating German production into the international syndicalist thinking of American high finance. So you believe in the economy. The economy is directly linked with politics as a vital life factor of our people. Name me one people in history that has had, or been able to maintain, a sound economy without healthy, goal-oriented politics! And name me a people with a clear, instinctual politics that was not able to find a way to build a healthy economy!

Your view is simply nonsense, something that one can say only if one is a dolt paid by the Jew, or a bourgeois idiot. Politics, not the economy, determines the fate of a people. Healthy politics leads to the necessary economic policy. A sound economy not based on strong politics is unthinkable.

Of course, one can’t say that today’s statesmen are conducting politics.

The Nature of Politics

Politics is responsible action that serves people. Its goal is to create the conditions that will enable this people to build a life from this hard earth, to maintain and defend its life, to increase in number, and to assure freedom and prosperity for its descendants.”

Youth and Politics

“And you want to conduct this kind of politics in your movement? With green youth who have hardly any experience with life? With radicalism and lots of noise? With street fights and terror against those with other opinions? With total opposition to the state and its natural foundations?”

“Yes, that is what we want! We want this kind of politics because no one else is doing it. The old experienced leaders of the people who can’t complain enough about us inexperienced youngsters can’t do it. Neither can the well educated bourgeoisie or the intelligentsia, nor the tame political homebodies and mother’s boys. Neither this state, nor those who conduct ‘politics’ for it.

But permit me a few little corrections. If we conduct our politics with ‘inexperienced youngsters’ — whom we call the youth, German youth — we do so proudly, knowing that Germany’s youth has escaped the poison of the present day to find a way to a New Germany. We don’t care if this youth has experience with life or not. Sure, you are experienced in life, but you don’t understand anything at all about politics. I know 18-year-old lads in our S.A. whose every sentence would put you to shame. We do not conduct radical politics, but where radicalism is necessary we are not cowardly enough to reject it. The bourgeois gentleman complains about radicalism, perhaps because no one in his state is radical. And we resort to terror whenever terror is used against us. We don’t scream for the police like any old veteran’s association, nor do we hide like cowardly members of the bourgeoisie behind their fences and wait like cowards for whatever fate has in store. We step onto the streets and use our fists against terror. We practice the theory of power, and conduct maneuvers to prepare for a later assault on the bourgeois class state.”

Class Struggle

“That means that you have become a party favoring class struggle! You called yourselves a workers’ party! That was the first step. You called yourself socialist. That was the second step. Now you are speaking of the bourgeois class state. That is the third and final step.

How are you any different than Marxism?”

“There is nothing more hypocritical than a fat, well-fed citizen complaining against proletarian thinking about class struggle.

You got through the winter just fine. Your very person is an incitement to class struggle. What gives you the right to puff out your nationalist breast and complain about the proletariat’s class struggle? Has not the bourgeois state been an organized class state for nearly 60 years? Did it not give birth to the historical necessity of proletarian class struggle thinking? Did you not get your reward for your class state on 9 November 1918? In the face of Marxist insanity, are you not able to see how it came out of your old reactionary bourgeois error?

Are you not ashamed as a well-nourished Middle European to battle undernourished, empty-eyed, starving, unemployed proletarians?

Yes, we call ourselves a workers’ party! That is the first step. The first step away from a bourgeois state. We call ourselves a workers’ party because we want to free labor, because for us creative labor is the element that drives history, because labor to us is more than possession, education, class, and family origin.

That is why we call ourselves a workers’ party!

Social and Socialist

Yes, we call ourselves socialist! That is the second step. The second step against the bourgeois state. We call ourselves socialist as a protest against the lie of social bourgeois pity. Your talk of ‘social legislation’ is absurd. It is too little to live on but too much to die on.

We want our rights according to nature and the law.

We want our full share of what Heaven has given us, and what we have created with our own hands and minds.

That is socialism?

The Class State

Now let us speak about the bourgeois class state. Why? Because this bourgeois state has become a class state. Because this state does not value achievement and will, but rather pays heed only to education, wealth, and tradition. We speak of a bourgeois class state because this bourgeois state rejects what is most holy in the live of peoples, transforming the love of one’s ethnicity into a greedy love of wealth, excluding thereby 17 million German-feeling, German-thinking proletarians. What the bourgeois citizen wanted is irrelevant. What he achieved is decisive. If he wanted a strong Germany, what did he get? He got an international slave colony that on 9 November 1918 was ready to collapse under the blows of the rebels.

That is the truth. We protest against the idea of class struggle. Our whole movement is a grand protest against class struggle, which has excluded our people from the course of history. However, we call things by their proper names. Seventeen million people see class struggle as their only hope because they learned that over 60 years from the right. Why do we have the moral right to complain against proletarian class struggle if we do not first thoroughly destroy the bourgeois class state and replace it with a new socialist structure of German community.”

Hand and Mind

“And who is going to help you to overcome the old state and build a new one?”

“We trust the healthy instinct of the creative German people. The day will come when even the last person will see. One day the hands and minds will rise up to protest; then we will accuse, we will judge.

Our task is to all we can to hurry that day.

Then we will come together, blue collar workers and white collar workers. Then we will see who really loves his fatherland more than party and class. That is when young workers of the future will build a third Germany.

Then the inexperienced youth will have its say. Like chaff in the wind, old wisdom and experience will blow away.

We will take Germany’s fate in our hands. We will resolve the question of socialism, radically and completely, disregarding tradition, education, wealth, social standing and class. Our only concern will be the future of the creative German people.

Nationalist and Socialist

Then we will prove that National Socialism is more than a comfortable moral theology of bourgeois wealth and capitalist profit. A new spirit of nationalism will grow from the ruins, displaying the most radical form of ethnic self defense, a new socialism that will create the necessary foundation.”

Marxist Desperation

“You talk of socialism! Is it not right for the German worker, after the past 60 years have proven the complete bankruptcy of his political ideal, to feel despair about socialism and the future of his class?”

“Never! Because:

1. He fought for 60 years not for socialism, but for Marxism. Marxism, whose theories are fatal to peoples and races, is the exact opposite of living socialism.

2. Marxism was never the political idea of a German worker. He only accepted this jumble of Jewish ideas because he had no other choice in his struggle for the freedom of his class.

3. Marxism is the death not only of nationally-minded peoples, but above all of the class that fights with total devotion for its realization: the working class.

The worker has no right to doubt socialism, but rather the duty to doubt Marxism. The sooner he does that, the better. The clock has almost struck midnight.”

Anti-Semitism

“You make a lot of noise about the fact that you oppose the Jews. Isn’t anti-Semitism outdated in the twentieth century? Isn’t the Jew a human being like everyone else? Aren’t there decent Jews? Isn’t it bad that we 60 million fear 2 million Jews?”

“You miss the point. Try to think logically:

1. If we were only anti-Semites, we would be out-of-place in the twentieth century. However, we are also socialists. For us, the two go together. Socialism, the freedom of the German proletariat and thereby of the German nation, can only be achieved against the Jews. Since we want Germany’s freedom, or socialism, we are anti-Semites.

2. Sure, the Jew is also a human being. None of us has every doubted that. But a flea is also an animal, — albeit an unpleasant one. Since a flea is not a pleasant animal, we have no duty to defend and protect it, to be of service to it so that it can bite and torment and torture us. Rather, our duty is to make it harmless.

The same is true of the Jew.

3. Sure, there are decent (weiße) Jews. More of them very day. That however, is not evidence for the Jews, but rather it is evidence against them. The fact that one calls scoundrels among us decent ‘Jews’ is proof that to be Jewish carries a stigma, else one would call deceitful Jews ‘decent (gelbe) Christians.’ The fact that there are so many decent Jews proves that the destructive Jewish spirit has already infected wide circles of our people. It is encouragement for us to carry on the battle against the Jewish world plague wherever possible.

4. It is a bad sign for you, not for us, that 60 million fear 2 million Jews. We do not fear these 2 million Jews, but rather we fight against them. You, however, are too much of a coward to join this battle, and behave like a cat on a hot stove.

If these 60 million fought the Jews as we do, they would have nothing more to fear. It would be the Jews’ turn to fear.”

Monarchy or Republic?

“Show your true colors. Are you monarchists or republicans?

“We are neither.

1. The question of the form of government is irrelevant for us today. A people that is being destroyed under the dictates of Versailles has other things to worry about than the question of monarchy or republic.

2. This question can be decided by the people only when it is free.

However, we do say:

A good republic is better than a bad monarchy, and a good monarchy is better than a bad republic. Both forms of government have their advantages and disadvantages. Only a free people can make that choice. However:

It is hard to conceive of a worse government than what we have today. It is certainly not a republic. It is an international used goods market in which the loudest shouters and highest bidding Hebrews call themselves statesmen and commissars.”

Black-White-Red or Black-Red-Gold

“Hand on your heart, now, and swear to tell the truth.

Are you black-white-red [the radical party colors] or black-red-gold [the centrist colors]?”

“Neither the one nor the other:

1. We do not care if the Scheidemann/Stresemann republic collapses under black-white-red or black-red-gold. We might prefer black-gold, since they would at least die wearing their own colors.

2. We will be able to decide on a common flag only when the German people holds to a single idea and has a single will. The movement that brings about such a people’s community will also give its colors to the whole people. We are confident that that will be us.”

Our Program

“Every party has a program. What is yours? Since you want to win over the German worker, what do you offer him?

“If we were party bigwigs or Jews, we would play down the whole litany of our promises. Nothing is easier than that. It is hard to speak the truth. Harder still to hear and understand it. However, we know that it alone is the way to salvation:

1. Sure, each party has its program. But no party has ever carried out its program. They could not do so in the past, not will they be able to in the future, because all previous programs have been impossible to implement.

2. Our program is short and sweet: the freedom of the creative German people. The path to that is clear and simple: to free the German worker and make him once again a part of the nation.

We will do anything necessary to achieve that goal. We will not hold back from a social revolution if the nation’s freedom demands it. We are not afraid to break the chains that have been wrapped around our nation if that is necessary to guarantee basic necessities for German workers.

3. We promise nothing to the German worker but this: that we will fight to the last breath for his right to exist, regardless of what it costs and what results. We offer the most that one can offer a people and its oppressed class:

A battle for freedom and prosperity!”

Our Demand

“And what does the German worker have to do?”

“In this world, nothing comes from nothing. The German worker must realize:

1. If he wants to be free, he will have to sacrifice. No one will make him free. He must do it himself. Since freedom is the greatest good, he must be willing to give everything he has: Life itself.

2. The goal is always directly related to the resources. Only liars promise heaven in exchange for a membership book.

We do say this: Freedom is everything. We therefore demand everything that we have: a long, hard struggle filled with poverty and worry and difficulty and hunger and danger, requiring constant sacrifices of health, pleasure, happiness, and contentment.

That is what the German worker must do.

At the end, however, is the most beautiful reward: a free Germany filled with creative labor.”

The Bourgeoisie

“Doesn’t Marxism have a point when it says that the N.S.D.A.P. a petty bourgeois movement led by worn-out officers, students, and doctors? How can the worker believe that you want to liberate him? You will not be able to dissuade him of his conviction that the worker can only be freed by the worker.

“You are saying a lot of nonsense in a single breath. Listen:

1. The N.S.D.A.P. is not a petty bourgeois movement, but rather a protest against the corruption (Verbürgerlichung) of socialism in social democracy. Our leaders do not belong to the petty bourgeois, but rather the likes of Scheidemann, Leinert, Noske, Bauer do — although they have been grand bourgeois for a long time.

2. Name one worn-out officer, student, or doctor in the N.S.D.A.P. leadership. My friend, if an officer, student, or doctor is a Marxist leader — I could name a hundred of them for you — he is a ‘worker leader.’ If he is an N.S.D.A.P. leader, he is a ‘worn-out creature.’

3. You ask how they could free the worker! If your question is justified, the worker will first have to throw out piles of rotten Jewish literature from the labor movement, which insults labor leaders and in reality misuses the labor movement for their own vile goals. And just look around: Do you see ‘the worker’ who is supposed to free the worker all by himself? What about ‘workers’ like Scheidemann, Wels, Noske, Bauer, and all the rest? They have all become big fat members of the bourgeoisie. Their battle against the bourgeoisie was only from envy, and as soon as they joined the bourgeoisie themselves they stopped fighting and were no longer envious.

Not only German workers lead the German labor movement. There are also former members of the bourgeousie who have overcome it, renegades who fight not from envy, but rather because of hatred against a class that brought Germany to the edge of the abyss. They did not come to the proletariat to become bourgeois, but rather from a deep sense of responsibility, having found the way to a creative growth of the strength of the people.

The German worker will extend his hand. From hand and mind will spring the miracle of the future: the third Reich.”

Proletariat and Working Class

“If I understand you rightly, you are saying that the N.S.D.A.P. is a proletarian party with a bourgeois leadership?”

“I see that you can only think in the ways of the past. The Germany that we want will overcome all of these old, outmoded concepts. We are neither bourgeois nor proletarian. The concept of bourgeois is dead, and the concept of proletarian will never have life again. We want neither the bourgeois world that is declining today, nor the proletarian-Marxist future that is the goal of Jews and Jewish lackeys.

We want the Germany of labor. What does that mean? We want a Germany in which labor and accomplishment are the highest moral and political values. We are today a workers’ party in the best sense of the word. Once we have taken over the state, Germany will become a state of labor, a workers’ state.

“Those are fine words. But what is behind them? Or are you trying to conceal with phrases the fact that you have not thought things through?’

“Not at all, my friend! Do understand me. The Germany of the future will rest on new foundations. It is nonsense to believe that the bourgeois class could carry out this transformation, while at the same time it is responsible for the current state that must be transformed, the bourgeois state of today. That, of course, does not mean that members of the bourgeois class will be unable to join in building the new Germany. As a class, however, the bourgeoisie has played out its role in history and will have to give way to the creative spirit of a younger, healthier class.

In its place a young class is coming. We will not call it the proletariat, because that is an insult to the German worker coming from Jewish sophistry. It is the community of workers. This community of workers includes all who work for Germany’s future, blue collar or white collar.

The hand will be lead by the mind, and the mind will be kept secure by the brutal strength of the hand as they together build their new German state. This complementarity of hand and mind will forge white and blue collar workers together. If the Jew leads the German worker, he will always confuse things through the false call of the International.

Together, German minds and German hands will find the only slogan that leads to freedom:

German workers of the mind and hand, unite!”

International and National

“In other words, you want to set the Marxist International against a national German socialism?”

“Exactly! We finally understand each other.”

“But permit me one more question. If I understand you correctly, the enemy — whether we call him the Jew, capital, or whatever — thinks and feels internationally. If so, he can only be fought using international methods. Will the result be a socialist International that will forever destroy the capitalist International?”

“My friend, I think that everything I’ve been saying has been in vain. We can never come to an understanding. Try to think logically:

1. Yes, we have clearly seen that the enemy is building his International on the backs of Europe’s nations. Germany hardly has any national forms of capital today: railroads, mines, factories, money, gold, the Reich Bank, everything has been transformed into shares of stock and these are in the hands of Jewish bankers in London and New York. Yet shares of stock are in themselves worthless. They do not run on railroad tracks, they do not mine goal, they do not produce food or goods, they do not make money and earn no money. They serve only to earn interest. If we had a true German state, all German shares of stock held by Jewish banks would be declared worthless, treated only as scraps of paper, and a government of national labor would be established in Germany. since we do not have such a state, we must be content with the blessings of being a Dawes colony. We have no national property, no national capital, meaning property and capital that belongs to the people, to the nation. Instead, everything is administered by an international bank syndicate. National capital does not act internationally, but rather international economic hyenas act internationally with it.

2. Of course the battle against this world power must be fought internationally, and it would be short-sighted of us not to support every movement throughout the world that joins our front. The goal of this battle, however, is not a world socialist republic — there never was such a thing and never will be. It exists only in the brains of Jews who betray workers, and in the minds of mislead German workers. The goal is the establishment of new national, socialist states. And we do not expect all that much from the common struggle of the peoples against the International of money through international methods. We know all the barriers that stand between understanding among peoples. And the International of capital will not be stupid enough to enslave all the peoples in the same way and at the same time. The turn of one after the other will come. No one will think of the others. Each people will hope to save itself by giving in, until it is too late and it is devoured by the capitalist Moloch.

Besides, my friend, we do not have time to wait for others. We are at the edge of final collapse, and it is a crime to hope for the help of those who have never helped us in the past, and who probably will not help us in the future.

We have one principle: God helps those who help themselves!

3. If you speak of a socialist International, you prove that you lack the most elementary understanding of peoples and governments. There has never been a great political idea — and socialism certainly is such an idea — that has an international collection of states following it. The principle of history is not unity, but rather variety. It always was so, and always will be so. Battle makes states and peoples, and whoever does not fight is doomed to decline.

You may say that that is terrible. That it is. We have to accept it and fight. History is ruled by eternal natural laws, not by Marxist phrases about brotherhood.

Nature does not want unity, but rather variety. It does not want a human mish-mash, but rather a humanity that consists of differing peoples and races, under which the strong will always overcome the weak.

We understand that, and we want to act accordingly. We want to forge the weapons that will help of German people survive the struggle for existence in this hard world of battle in which the strong triumph over the weak.

We call that national!”

Production and the Social Problem

“That is all fine and good. But now you must show your true colors. So far, everything has been talk. Here is the cardinal question: How do you intend to solve the social problem?”

“Let us go to the core of the question: What is the nature of the social problem? Seventeen million proletarians are at the mercy of capitalism, which controls all the means of production. They are forced to sell their only capital, their labor, at the lowest price. They thus, and rightly, feel left out of a people, a state, or a nation that silently tolerates such a situation. Under such conditions, the inner unity of a people collapses. The people separates into two parts, one that wants to protect this state, and one that is against this state. Such conditions rule a people out as a force in the larger course of history.

The solution of the social question, therefore, means no more nor less than re-incorporating an oppressed part back into the nation, involving it in all vital aspects of the state and economy, and thereby permitting the nation once more to influence the great flow of history.

To this end, we demand:

1. Everything that nature gave to the people: territory, rivers, mountains, forests, treasures under the earth and the air above, everything belongs in principle to the people as a whole. Should a people’s comrade own these goods, he must feel himself obligated to the state as the administrator of the people’s possessions. If he administers them poorly, or to the harm of the community, the state has the right to take these possessions from him and make them once again the possession of the community.

2. Production, in as far as it requires human strength, abilities, inventiveness, entrepreneurship, and genius remains the possession of the individual. The state guarantees that those contributing to production, whether physically or mentally, share in the ownership and profits.

3. Production that is essentially completed, which no longer requires strength, ability, inventiveness, entrepreneurship and brilliance (e.g., the transportation system, trusts, conglomerates) will be brought back to state ownership.

This closes the great circle of production, and it once again includes all productive workers.

In implementing this demand, we free labor from the chains of wage slavery. The result will be a free people with a free economy on free land: the people’s community.”

Parliament and Parties

“Does this require a new party? Why have you not taken this program some one of the parliamentary parties? Surely they would be ready to argue for it.”

“I can’t stop laughing! Maybe you are right. Any party would certainly be willing, if it could win a million votes by doing so. We, however, don’t care about voting totals and parliament. We don’t want to ‘represent’ our program in the Reichstag, but rather we want to implement it. That separates us from all the other parties. The others represent, speak, debate, vote, and collect their pay. We act. We are building the strength with which we will one day conquer this state. We will then act pitilessly and brutally, using the power of the state to carry out our will and our program.

We no longer believe in the swindle of parliament and parties. It is nothing more than a huge system of cattle-trading that exploits the strength and labor of the German people.

A parliamentarian is a drone living off the German national body. Parliament is a busy swarm of bees, but instead of honey it produces manure and cabbage. Although this manure and cabbage is far worse than the farmer’s, it is a thousand times better paid.

The money and prosperity of the people is squandered. The Jew is behind everything and lets his puppets talk, vote, collect their pay — but he governs.

When they want something from us, we are the free and sovereign people that exercises its will through its elected representatives. When we want something from parliament, we are a mob. That is what one calls democracy.

“Well, then what? What do you want instead? There has to be a government! If you want to get rid of parliament, you must have something better.

What do you have in mind?”

Dictatorship and Corporate State

“History teaches that a young, determined minority that overthrows a corrupt, rotten, stinking majority takes control of the state and its resources for a time and establishes a dictatorship using state power to create the conditions to carry out its new ideas until it has triumphed completely. That will also be true with us. Once we conquer the state, this state is our state. We and we along will be responsible for this state. We are a party, and have to be one, in our battle against a corrupt system. We are not, of course, a parliamentary party. But the moment that we overthrow this system, we become the state. They will use dictatorial power to form the state according to our principles. We, as a responsible minority, will force our will on a weak, rotten, incompetent and stupid majority, behind which the Jew hides and follows his evil plans. We will do what has to be done to rescue the people.

We want to free Germany, nothing more. If the German people is unwilling to become free, we do not care.

The greater part of the German people is today so materialistic, so cowardly, that it can only be made happy against its will, and by force.”

“Well, that may make sense. But you surely don’t want a permanent dictatorship. Something has to follow.”

“Of course! We have already thought about that, and made our will clear. We do not want to keep the people from ruling. We only want to fight for and establish the conditions that alone can assure life on this planet. Once they have been fought for and established, our task will be fulfilled. We will have a National Socialist state.

Instead of democracy’s parliamentary system, we will have an economic parliament of the National Socialist state. It will be chosen by the totality of the working German people. Everyone will have a vote. This election, however, will not involve parliamentary parties, but rather by the great professions within the people’s community. German professions are organized down to the smallest detail, and provide the guarantee that each working German will have the right to have his will, his accomplishments, and his responsibility taken into consideration by the state. The economic parliament will manage economic policy, not state policy.

That will be managed by the Senate. It will consist of about 200 personalities, chosen by the dictator from all groups and classes. It will lead the state. These 200 will be the elite from the whole people. They will provide the government with advice and support. They will be appointed for life. In the event of death, another will be appointed.

The senate will select the chancellor. He will have full responsibility for the whole policy of the Reich, both domestic and foreign. He will be ready to give his life for that policy if necessary.

The chancellor will choose his ministers and officials. He will also have full responsibility over them, which means he can appoint and fire them at will.

Whether this system is headed by a president or a monarch will not matter. The chancellor is the decisive person, and we will be sure that he is up to the job.”

The Will to Power

“This system is astoundingly simple and clear. It is almost to simple to happen. But let’s assume that such a program could be implemented once the state was conquered.

How are you going to conquer the state? You know that this state is based on power, that it is a police state, one crasser and more brutal than we had before the war. It has recovered somewhat, is stabilizing, concentrating its strength, and sitting on our backs using every means of power available. Let’s assume that your minority party grows stronger and stronger, as you believe. There will come a time when the growth stops. You will have fighters from the whole of the German people on your side. But you will never win a majority. The majority will always be against you, and the state with all its strength will be on its side. Then what?”

“My friend, you are beginning to understand. That is the first thing you have said that follows logically. Then what? That ‘Then what’ can only be understood by he who is a fighter, both in his heart and with his fists, by the conqueror. The others will have no answer.

What then?! Then we clench our teeth and get ready. They we march against this state, then we risk the final great step for Germany. We will change from revolutionaries of the word to revolutionaries in deed.

We will make a revolution!

We will throw out parliament and found the state on the strength of German fists and German minds.”

“But you do not have what it takes to take that action.”

“We are not talking about an action, my friend. You are thinking 1918 and Kapp [the 1918 Kapp Putsch]. Those were revolts, Putsches, soldier strikes, nothing more.

We want a revolution. A revolution overthrows an old world and builds a new one. At their core, revolutions are creative, constructive. True revolutions are never lost. They are the end and beginning points of historical epochs.

True, we lack the means to conquer this state. The others have everything with which they can defend this state: weapons, the press, propaganda, parliament, majority, money, and power. But one thing they always lack, the most important thing that we have and what now gives us the greatest certainty of victory."

The will to power!

It is the will to power that always and everywhere triumphs, whatever the cost. It is brutal action that accepts poverty and hunger, worry and terror, for the sake of the great goal. It is the willingness of the few to sacrifice, and it will ultimately triumph over the bellies and pleasures of the fat, well-fed majority.

The will to power creates the means to power. If others have the weapons, we have what they do not have: the will to use force. This will creates weapons when it needs them.

He who believes in his world is ready to die for it. The democrat no longer believes in democracy, so he defends himself with paid serfs. He is ready to live for parliament, but no longer willing to die for it.”

War and Pacifism

“So, you depend on strength. You do not respect justice and the law, but rather your will is justice and the law, and behind it stands the brutal power of the fist.”

“Yes, we rely on strength. We depend on strength not because we do not respect justice or the law, but rather because justice and the law are dead ideas in today’s Germany.

There are no judges any longer in Berlin. Justice and the law are trod under foot, and one no longer even bothers to hang the cloak of law over barbaric injustices. One practices oppression and despotism by intent. It all happens in the name of the majority. He who has the majority is right, and he who is in the minority lacks rights. He is persecuted, mocked, and given over to despotism.

We want justice for the German people. Since one is not willing to give us that justice, we demand it with our brutal fists. The right to life of the people is more important to us than the right to life of a parliamentary majority. Our will is the will to live. Since justice is always on the side of life rather than death, we have a right above democracy, and if one refuses to give us that right, we fight for it with power.”

“You are always disturbing the peace. You do not want peace and order, but rather battle. War is your final goal!”

“Now you’re almost beginning to cry! You speak piously of peace. Do we have peace today? Is it peace when millions of people are on the street, without work, without food? It is peace when innocent children starve, when the people beg, when this flourishing land of Germany is turned into a desert? We have had constant war since 1918, and this war grows more grim and brutal each day. Read the news from the international stock exchanges. They are the war dispatches from the headquarters of the economic battles. See the German workers and families who are the dying and dead of the war.

That is your peace. It is the peace of a cemetery. Your order is the grim order of death. No, my friend, that we do not want. We proclaim war against it. We want to call the people to throw off its torturers, to break the chains the Jew has laid on us.

Only struggle can save a people from dying and lead it to true peace. The eternal principle of nature is not justice, but rather strength. That is why we want to harden our people so that it will be able to survive the battles on this earth.

Pacifism does not assure peace. The opposite! History teaches that peoples who are no longer willing to defend their lives, with force if need be, die shamefully. We want to protect our people from that. They should become strong in will and spirit. No one may disgrace it, or treat it as a pariah.

We want justice, and justice means freedom, prosperity, and living space. If we are denied this right, we will fight for it.

This battle for freedom, prosperity, and living space includes everyone from the highest to the lowest. It is a matter of the entire people.

The unified strength of 80 million Germans possessed with the will to life are a better guarantee of peace than any lie about human rights.”

Germany’s Freedom

“How will it all end?”

“It will end with the freedom of the German people on German soil. Each productive German will enjoy the life and prosperity this freedom will provide. It will provide the moral and spiritual strength on which we will build in the new century.

The freedom means more than a new system of government. We want to create the new human being, who will be able to develop a better worldview because of the conditions we have fought for.

This future will be ours, or it will not exist at all.
Liberalism is dying. Long live socialism.
Marxism is dying so that nationalism can live.
Then we will build the new Germany, the nationalist, socialist third Reich!”

[Page copyright © 2014 by Randall Bytwerk. No unauthorized reproduction. My e-mail address is available on the FAQ page.]


Go to the pre-1933 Page.

Go to the German Propaganda Archive Home Page.