The Racial Awakening of the German People, by Dr. Rudolf Frercks — Part 2

Originally published with official approval of the NSDAP in 1935. Translation by Hadding Scott, 2014.




The Racial Doctrine in Politics

Race signifies Destiny

The organic, racial mode of contemplation has caused us to recognize that the most essential and most important indicator of a people is its race. The explanation of a people as a community of language and culture no longer suffices, since today we have acknowledged the person and his race as the most essential vectors and structures of history. With the doctrine of race and its heredity-bound values the liberal world has been deprived of the prerequisite for its striving after international unity in politics and culture.

Although calculation (Verstand) and the laws of logic may be the same in the whole world, these are only one part of life. That is because during a logical sequence of thoughts not only what I think but what I feel and experience, and above all what I do with it, is very likely different in a German than in, for example, a Jew, and indeed so different that we can conclude based on our experiences that there is a very wide range of differences in the hereditary proclivities and racial composition of these two peoples. Liberal thought called this conclusion unscientific because racial differences, especially in the mental and psychic areas of life, cannot be measured, weighed, or counted, and consequently rejected the evaluation of racial differences among humans and their significance for the course of history and cultures of peoples. The National-Socialist says: “Race is reality, since whenever I go through the world with an open mind I daily observe it and live it, and feel its effects.”


The so-called Environmental Theory

When differences between humans could not be lied away, the old world made environmental influences responsible. The external differences between say a Negro and a blond Frisian lad were traced to the environment, which in the one case burned the skin brown and kinked the hair through the effect of the Sun, but in the other case is supposed to have bleached the hair and skin through the salty tide. This assumption applies not only to physical differences but likewise to the world of the mind. and has yielded the basis from which all political groups from right to left rejected National-Socialism and its racial thought, since they instinctively had to regard the racial idea-world of National-Socialism and all practical and ideological implications of it as an attack upon their own existence.

Social milieu, class-affiliation, economic conditions (“Economy is destiny,” says Marxism), upbringing, education (“Knowledge is power,” says the liberal bourgeoisie) are supposed to be what determine and define the person. The man of the right would ask somebody about his father’s profession,about examinations and membership in a student-association. If this all corresponded to the social requirements, he believed that he could justly request for this person a position of leadership over the people, which would appear to him as sluggish and dull-witted masses, far beneath his so-called level of education. Thus for decades the people (das Volk) was regarded as something that did not belong to the whole, to the nation, but represented only a subordinate part.

On the left side it is said, not that the mind and education are the criteria, but belonging to and  being born into a particular class. The battlecry was “class-consciousness”; it called for the ungovernable will to impose a better configuration onto the material world, onto economic relations, and it was believed that in this way mankind would be led to a better future.  The word “people” (“Volk”) became a term of the class-struggle.

It is in principle the same, whether I judge the person by his knowledge, his education, or by what he owns. In both cases the world of yesterday was unanimous that humans are fundamentally equal, and that it is the environment, sometimes good, sometimes bad, that decisively influences the person. Both interpretations however National-Socialism rejects, since they both represent only a way of emphasizing external conditions and environmental influences while saying nothing about the value of blood and race, and about the value of the character that results from them.


The Racial Awakening of the German People


“If essentially Marxism called for an International and denied the essence of race, it was on this crucial point that the conflict was initiated.” (Rosenberg.)

The fourteen years of the struggle were practical racial politics for the salvation of the German people, which was threatened in its substance. In the Jewish Question a whole generation had to think racially again and learn to reject the Jew as someone alien and different who was trying, with his strongholds in the form of banks and warehouses, to bring an entire people under the yoke of international finance-capitalism. In vast swaths especially of the bourgeoisie, racial consciousness had dwindled to the point that they immediately branded this struggle as gutter-anti-Semitism (Radauantisemitismus), even as a blot on our culture (Kulturschande). It was the battle for the extinction of a political leadership that did not correspond to the feeling of the German people and was racially destructive through its alien manner of thought and action.

The struggle of these years had as its deepest and final content the people’s introspection and retrospection (Selbst- und Rückbesinnung) upon the type that is most fundamentally their own, the rediscovery of the people’s soul and its natural instinct; in the age of materialism and individualism this soul was overlaid with many alien ideas and hindered in the unfolding of its own essence. It was the belief of the movement that the people in its inmost core was still healthy enough to understand the appeal to the forces of blood and race. The call was directed therefore not to a class, to a profession, or an interest-group, but to the valuable instincts of the entire people, which are present in every person regardless of education and knowledge. It was the call to the blood and to the bearers of its best and most heroic properties. “National-Socialism professes an heroic valuation of blood, of race, and of personality, and of the eternal laws of selection, and thus steps consciously into irreconcilable opposition to the worldview of pacifist international democracy and its ramifications.” (Adolf Hitler.)


The National-Socialist State is Made for the People


The new and revolutionary part of National-Socialism is that it has led politics back to its proper meaning and purpose, namely to protect and maintain the life of the people, judging the value of the state only by how well it is suited for this task. The state receives its value and meaning only from the people, and from the benefit that it accomplishes for this people. The foundation for the National-Socialist state is the existence of the people (die Existenz des Volkes), and the new state has no higher task than to represent the best possible form of political organization and to give to the people the form appropriate to its kind. For this state, the strength and health of the race again constitute the center of history and politics. According to the National-Socialist view it is not the state, not the economy, not the individual that is worth preserving; rather it is always only the people that is worth preserving.


Racial Politics Secure the Peace


In the same way, National-Socialism has no goal externally apart from preserving its ethnic group (Volkstum). As it claims this right for itself, it also accords it to the other peoples. It knows no goals that lie outside of its ethnic group. Therein lies simultaneously an acknowledgement of the right to life of foreign peoples and of their character and custom, as we generally see in  peoples the building blocks of human society. They all have their natural entitlement to life, but also their own honor. The more the other peoples are biased in their liberal assumptions, the harder it becomes for them even to understand this conception of ours.  Recently our Leader for the first time declared this clearly and unambiguously to a Polish press-correspondent: “The racial doctrine of the National-Socialist idea rejects so-called denationalization. It sees in this forced annexation of foreign population much more a weakening than a strengthening of its own ethnic group. We keep in mind not to continue what earlier centuries committed in the way of mistakes.”

“The National-Socialist racial idea and the knowledge of race that lies at its foundation leads not to a contempt or lowered estimation of other peoples, but rather to a recognition of the assigned task of a uniquely efficacious management and preservation of the life of one’s own people. It leads necessarily therewith to a natural respect for life and for the essence of other peoples. It dissolves therewith the undertakings in foreign policy that try to subject foreign persons so as to be able to rule them or to incorporate them into one’s own people as pure quantity through the coercion of the state. This new idea obliges a great and fanatical commitment not only to the life, and therewith to the honor and freedom, of one’s own people, but also to the respect and honor and freedom of others.” (Adolf Hitler.)

For the National-Socialist state therefore the highest purpose remains the preservation of its own people, and not the rule and subjection of any foreign peoples. It therefore sees all the more danger in a warlike dispute where it is conscious of the enormous bloodletting of the best of a people that a war must bring with it. That is because such biological damage always affects the healthy and strong of a people, while the sick, cowardly, and incompetent are spared. The World War has therefore also in this sense  yielded  disastrous consequences and caused losses that our people’s compelling biological will to live has still not to this day been able entirely to offset.

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