This is a chapter from the 1940 edition of Politische Fibel (The Political Primer of National-Socialism) by Hansjoerg Maennel, which was a collection of summaries to aid those responsible for teaching the doctrines of the NSDAP to new members. It is not a general treatise about race but a brief treatment of racial concerns specific to Germany in the 1930s. Translation by Hadding Scott, 2009.
Chapter 1.
Race*
(* Only those party-members who possess a special license from the “Office of Racial Policy” of the NSDAP may teach about specific questions of racial science and genetics!)
Race is a group of people with the same physical and mental hereditary traits. Race is invariable, enduring (constant). Every human being, like every other living creature, inherits its own traits of body, mind, and character. The folk varies precisely in accord with its racial composition. The character of a folk results from its racial composition.
The German folk consists of several races: Nordic, Eastern (Alpine), Dinaric, East Baltic, Phalian, and Western (Mediterranean). (cf. Guenther, Brief Racial Study of the German Folk). The concepts Germanic, Romance, Slavic, etc., delineate not separate races but language- and folk-groups, which certainly also exhibit a distinctive racial imprint.
In Germany the Nordic race preponderates (tall, thin, long-headed, small-faced, blond, blue-eyed; prudent, creative, energetic, truthful, brave, leader-like, cool, reserved, often gruff. Propensity for solitude, for seclusion and eccentricity.
The Nordic race is the binding component, the unifying element of our folk. It is the determining, guiding, and culture-creating power of the German nation. – The exterior of a human being is not by itself a signifier of his race. A small, dark German therefore is not necessarily inferior or un-German; he could very well be a bearer of Nordic heritage.
Adolf Hitler : “All great cultures in the past only perished because the originally creative race died out from poisoning of the blood .”
The races of which the German folk consists are all related to each other; consequently they have more that is common than distinct. The German folk represents a unity; the particular races that comprise it produce the polymorphism and richness of the German essence, nonetheless without inhibiting the unity of our nation. A danger of the first rank to the German folk could therefore result only through mixture with alien races.
Germany is the mighty wedge which the Nordic race forms on the European mainland. It must maintain itself in the face of all neighboring peoples, which are racially entirely differently constituted. All Europe is menaced by alien races. In France the Negro gains ever more acceptance. In the Rhineland the black disgrace is supreme. (The Black occupation-troops left behind many hundreds of bastards on the German Rhine!) Every mixture with racial aliens (e.g. Jews, Negroes, Mongols, leads necessarily to the decline of the nation. In racial chaos all great states and cultures have perished (e.g. Greece, Rome, etc.) From this recognition result these demands: expulsion of the racial alien and preservation of the purity of our race. Through the Nuremberg Laws (the Blood Protection Law and the Reich Citizenship Law of September 15, 1935) mixture of the German folk with racially alien Jewry is therefore finally halted. The German folk must die if its typical and fundamental component, the Nordic race, dies out. This danger looms not just externally, but also internally.
The decline of the birth-rate threatens the existence of the German folk. (In Germany the birth statistics for 1901amounted to 37.7 per thousand; in 1933 only 15.1 per thousand.) Historically only a growing folk succeeds; dying people go to ruin. Therefore, through a slow, deliberate, and tactful campaign of education , a population increase must be achieved. – Above all it was the economically more secure parents who started limiting the number of their children, although especially they were in a position to raise several children (the two-, one-, and no-children plans).
Urbanization gradually diminishes the racial strength of a people. The rural population exhibits a substantially higher birth-rate than the population of the cities, especially the big cities. (In 1871 4.8% of the population of Germany lived in big cities, but in 1933 it was 30.1%!) The yeomanry is the most important bearer of the race (cf. Darré, The Yeomanry as Life-Source of the Nordic Race). Furtherance of the farmer is therefore at the same time furtherance of the best racial forces. The rural exodus is solved in the National-Socialist state through a deliberate, energetic settlement.
Alfred Rosenberg : “The belief in the value of heredity and in the value of the Germanic race is the fundamental premise of the National-Socialist worldview.”
The Nordic race was receding more and more (danger of de-Nordization). By contrast, criminals and the congenitally ill multiplied very rapidly. With that, criminal and unhealthy hereditary traits also multiplied. If one assumes that half a nation consists of the congenitally healthy, the highly valuable, and that the other half consists of the congenitally ill, the less valuable, and if the former group always has three children while the latter always has four children, then this people, after 300 years, would consist of 4% highly valuable and 96% less-valuable people! A mentally ill person costs the State about 4 reichsmarks daily, which is more than some healthy laborers with families have at their disposal. National-Socialism therefore makes the following demands:
1. Prevention of the increase of the congenitally ill and inferior. This is feasible through legislative means. The Sterilization Law is the first great deed of the National-Socialist government in this area.
2. Furtherance of the increase of all congenitally sound and valuable people. This goal is to be accomplished not so much through legislation as through cultural policy. The German people must be educated to a Nordic ideal of culture and beauty. The judaized art of the post-war period had consciously propagated an alien “ideal of beauty.” Through a flood of trash and smut the Jew undermined custom and morality in order to shatter the racial strength of the German people. In opposition National-Socialism appeals to the healthy forces of our nation. The racial will of the people is awakened once again. Every German must become aware that he is a link in the eternal chain of the race, that he as the bearer of an ancient bloodline has a great responsibility.
Adolf Hitler: “Whatever in this world is not good race, is chaff.”
Adolf Hitler: “A state which, in an age of racial poisoning , dedicates itself to the nurturing of its best racial elements, must someday become lord of the earth.”
Alfred Rosenberg: “Blood is greater than gold, a dirt clod is greater than a stock portfolio, honor is greater than the highest dividend, the folk stands taller than the sum of its business-transactions.”
Adolf Hitler: “Never forget that the holiest right in this world is the right to land which one wishes to cultivate oneself, and the holiest sacrifice is the blood which one pours forth for this land !”
An important Jew, Benjamin Disraeli, (an English prime-minister of the prewar period) opined: “The racial question is the key to world history.” Here, this Jew – who indeed must have known it – was right. Through the racial question alone, i.e. through the eternal laws of blood, of type, of nature, we can understand life and history. The results of the inquiries of natural science in the field of racial science disprove the fundamental concepts of the past. The Folkish Movement is the first political consequence of the more recent findings of science. National-Socialism deliberately places race at the center of political thought. Blood and Soil are the two most important foundations of life. “Blood” and”soil” are however not material, but the highest ideals. As our Germanic forerunners already recognized, blood and soil are eternal and holy values. For eternal is the bloodline which manifests itself from the past through the present into the most distant future. And eternal too is the soil, hallowed by the blood poured forth in its defense. These highest core-values place a great obligation upon us: remember that you are a progenitor!
Only a people that observes the eternal laws of the preservation of the type, that believes in its own racial strength, has a future!