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| Although Anglo-American war-propaganda of both World Wars exaggerated Nietzsche’s influence in Germany, he did exert some influence on National-Socialist thought, as becomes evident in the penultimate chapter of Dr. Frercks’ pamphlet on National-Socialist racial policy. |
The following represents the two final chapters from a booklet written by Rudolf Frercks, vice-director of the NSDAP’s Office of Racial Policy, and originally published in 1935. Translation by Hadding Scott, 2014.
“National-Socialism is applied racial doctrine.”
National-Socialism has recognized that the destiny of all peoples is not bound to external accidents — to lost wars, to an undermined economy, or to a natural disaster — but that a nation’s will to live solely and exclusively determines whether the race and the type, and therewith all the achievements of political, cultural, and economic life produced by it, are preserved through the centuries of history. We know therefore that all external measures in the end would be futile, that all exertions and casualties of the struggle, all commitment for building anew would be in vain, if in a few hundred years persons with different faces would then inhabit German lands, who, although they might still speak our language, would think and feel differently, because they would be of alien blood.
Whenever the question of healthy and valuable progeny in a people is no longer regulated by natural instinct, and “ethnic status” has been overcome, it is the duty of a state recognizing the biological laws of racial and populational policy as the foundation of its existence to intervene. To liberal thinking such measures may seem harsh, but they are nonetheless salubrious for the people as a whole. Therefore the new state had to undertake first, through the Law for the Prevention of Congenitally Ill Progeny, to cause the unhealthy hereditary lines of our people to run dry and to exclude them from propagation; and beyond that to prevent mixture with racial aliens. Even more important than these measures for protection against the congenitally incompetent and different, are the positive measures that add up to a promotion of families that are congenitally healthy and rich in children. The state seeks to facilitate the founding of families through marriage-loans, tax-breaks, and compensation-funds.
That these practical measures, necessary and desirable in themselves, will gradually yield what is required for keeping a people alive, is a fact that we must keep in mind. That is because the new state’s challenges in populational policy require the voluntary commitment of every individual.
Education about Racial Policy
Our racial world of beholding and experiencing is so basic and instinctual that we consider it fundamentally mistaken only to use promulgation of heredity-laws and many isolated scientific facts to move Germans to a changed attitude toward the child and toward the biological occurrence of the folk. For 2000 years the German people has taken the path of self-preservation and growth of its substance as a people, without having known anything about laws of heredity. And we are convinced that also in the future it will not consider this necessary for its racial health, if it succeeds in clearing away from the soul of the German person all the rubbish and refuse of a merely calculating and mechanically oriented epoch.
Our mission, deriving from biological facts, must be again to lead the nation as a whole into rediscovering the path to itself and heeding the voice of its own blood, and furthermore rejecting all values adopted from outside as alien to its essence. With this inner orientation the life of the people also will be secured in regard to its racial character.
“What was shackled for a thousand years is being liberated for the salvation and for the health of our people and for others. The nobility of the human body has become free of its defilement and decay. A new world of beauty proclaims itself.” (Adolf Hitler.)
The German Woman as Protectress of the Type
And here it has been shown to the German woman where she can assist in the mission of racial rebuilding; her cooperation is perhaps the most important, since whether we shall continue on the path of biological decay, or whether respect and reverence for the eternal process of life will rise again in the next generation, depends ultimately on her relationship to the child and to the family. The youth must again learn to understand with a sense of destiny (ahnungsvoll) that it is only a link in the chain of the eternal sequences of generations of a people, and it must eventually in turn be the beginning of new chains of generations, if the people of the Germans wants to live and ought not to shrink in number in the next decades.
The education should not consist in conveying knowledge; rather we have a much broader concept of education in racial policy, and we mean by that the retuning (Umstimmung) of the person in the depth of his soul, in his character. The point is to overcome the person’s wrong inner attitude, which is not to be accomplished with the aid of calculation, clever words, or imparting of knowledge, but only and exclusively through an inner transformation of the person himself.[1] Thus will the upbringing of the youth into a natural life that affirms life allow a healthy new generation to mature, for which the body is not bad in itself[2] and must be chastened for the salvation of the soul. We wish moreover, in accord with the words of our Leader at the Stuttgart Gymnastic Festival, a youth “with a radiant spirit and magnificent bodies.” If it is rumored from groups of emigrants that we have turned to barbarism, they might call it that — if we again understand it to mean life in its original condition, bound to Nature and close to the Earth. The meaning and the purpose however ought to be — and only then will the work have succeeded — to make all work of enlightenment and education in racial policy superfluous, when the life of the nation will again cut its path vigorously and instinctively into the future.
Today the epoch of raceless thinking is dissolved by the thought and the idea of human polymorphism, the value of which stems exclusively from rootedness in ancestry and soil, the historic mission of which consists in the representation of its own incontrovertible and eternal value. This breakthrough of new racial thinking must find its natural adversaries among all those who are anxious to produce the unity of the culture and of the social order and organization of mankind through calculation, or even dogmatically through a religion.
“When we speak of race, we mean the whole to which body and physicality is necessary, which however also extends into that great sphere of the life of the mind and the soul. If we deliberately conduct a racial policy, we are not thereby cultivating men as if they were cattle; rather we are taking care that healthy men grow, from whose healthy blood the great law of their kind speaks and which now for the first time in this world can structure what the German people has sought and longed for and striven after on an endlessly long, bitter path through centuries of its history: the Dominion of the Germans, about which we believe that it is not only a state but a dominion of the soul.” (Dr. Walter Gross)
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[1]. Houston Stewart Chamberlain had talked about such a deep inner transformation of the Germans in his book Aryan Worldview (which I recently translated for Wermod and Wermod). Chamberlain foresaw it as a result of the influence of ancient Indian thought in Germany, although that is not specified here by Frercks. Indian thought, Chamberlain believed, was superior to Ancient Greek thought for the purpose of helping the Germans to find their way out of Semitic influence and back to their own true selves.
[2]. Some of the language and ideas in this sentence, and to some degree in the rest of the chapter, are conspicuously Nietzschean. The noun Lebensbejahung (saying yes to life) is an important term in Nietzsche’s thought. The adjective lebensbejahend (life-affirming), which Frercks uses here, had been used by some authors influenced by Nietzsche in the early 20th century. The proposition that cultivation of the body should not be neglected (as had been the tendency in Germany prior to the First World War) is an emphatic point with Nietzsche.
