 |
| “The right choice of a mate is the prerequisite for a worthy and happy community of life. Make your decision only when you have a clear picture of the hereditary traits of the other’s kin. Marry only the offspring of congenitally healthy, racially kindred stock. Mental and physical heritage is resurrected in the children. In your choice lies the destiny of your lineage and of the nation.” |
The text below represents a chapter from a booklet written by Dr. Rudolf Frercks, vice-director of the NSDAP’s Office of Racial Policy, and published with official approval originally in 1935. Translation by Hadding Scott, 2014.
Our leader has coined the saying, “What is not race on this Earth, is chaff.”* With that he conveyed that the value of a people lies in its race, its blood. A people that ceases to be loyal to its image, to its kind, and to its mission in history, has lost its right to life and is on its way to its demise. This has already played out many times in history. The descendants of the ancient Greeks and Romans no longer have anything physically and mentally in common with their ancestors who created those high cultures of antiquity. The men that live there today are different from those whose artworks we still admire today, whose philosophy and writings we still study today.
We ask, why do we find different men today than back then? — and we find the same causes back then as play out in our own time before our own eyes. First, counter-selection: in other words, the most competent and capable, the culture-bearing classes, renounced procreation and gradually died out, while the congenitally not so competent classes increased in number. Second, the feeling for purity of the blood was lost, so that through the peaceful infiltration of racially alien persons the face of these peoples changed.
Racial Conceit?
All these peoples have sinned against the missions assigned to them by God, namely to maintain themselves in their kind and to create from their essence. Among us too this sense has already in many ways been lost, and many found the Aryan legislation harsh. It was said that the Jews, Negroes, and Mongols in any case were humans too; one no longer sensed, in the megalopolitan civilization that gradually dulls every natural sense, what it was about these races that was so foreign to our essence. We have been accused of racial conceit and haughtiness: no, this is not it; we do not want to humiliate the alien races; we also do not even say that they are inferior, but of a different kind. And in this difference of kind — in this foreignness compared to our kind, our essence, our thought, and our feeling — is the basis for our response. We also do not want therefore to speculate and ask why there are now various races of man on this Earth; rather we want to concentrate on ourselves and again follow the laws of nature that have separated blood from blood. Everyone is familiar with the faces of mixed-race persons from the harbor-districts of the big cities, who look so ugly because they are internally unhappy and divided, and vacillate this way and that when making a decision. But we remember in contrast the men about whom one knows exactly how they will conduct themselves in particular situations of life — cowardly or brave, loyal or honorless.
“Infinitely many virtues of the character, infinitely great harmony of the spirit and of the body, and with that an immense quantity of human happiness, has been our loss due to mixture with alien blood. And whoever experiences our days with open eyes sees shocking examples every day of the frightening consequences that accompany such disloyalty toward one’s own blood. For, out of it arise men that wander anchorless and spiritually homeless between the peoples, that belong neither to the one nor to the other, and in psychic despair and often material distress must stand aloof from the great events of their age.” (Dr. Walter Gross.)
But woe unto a people if it is so strongly infused with foreign blood that it no longer thinks as a unit in difficult hours of its existence, if it vacillates at the moment when it has to decide for honor and freedom or for slavery.
Bastards on the Rhine
Where mixture with highly dissimilar races can lead has been shown to us by the occupation of the Rhineland with colored troops, which left behind about 600 Negro-bastards for us. The danger exists that their Negro blood might seep further into the German population and attach itself to countless lines of blood and heredity, the purity and character of which then would be forever clouded. The thought and feeling of these humans would be different, and would set up no resistance to the intrusion of foreign blood over the French border.
France today already has in Paris and in the southern provinces a considerable mix of bastards, and the decline in births has come to a halt only because of the higher number of births among racial aliens. France today has, after America, the greatest number of immigrants, of which Italians, Spaniards, and Negroes form a considerable part. Through this assimilation of immigrants the capacity for culture in particular regions has already sunk significantly. With the continuation of this development France in just a few decades will represent an outpost of Africa on European soil. For France itself this means racial suicide; most importantly the racial aliens in France are not tolerated guests that one would in the best case deport back to their homelands; rather they can even count on full equal rights among the French. Herein lie dangers also for us, since boundary-posts are never strong enough to prevent a racial infiltration.
The Question of the Jews
In Germany the November Revolution laid the intellectual groundwork for an unlimited, racially alien immigration consisting preponderantly of Jewish elements from the east.
It is the secret of the Jewish people, whereby it alone has accomplished its survival through all the tumults of history, that it constantly acknowledges the laws of blood for itself and has even anchored them in its religion of law. The religious Jews’ consciousness of blood and the sense of family are the roots of the Jewish people and have proven themselves stronger than other forces of history, and thus we have the unique example of a people without space and without language that otherwise represents and contains the essential characteristics of a people, and outlasts many peoples, but without ever abandoning its racial character. Everywhere they are regarded as foreigners, and also sense this themselves. This was most clearly expressed by Walter Rathenau as early as 1897: “Strange apparition! In the midst of German life a segregated foreign tribe of men, splendidly and conspicuously attired and of hot-blooded behavior. On Marxist sand, an Asiatic horde.” Einstein expressed himself similarly in the year 1931: “Whenever I hear the expression “German citizen of Jewish faith,” I have to laugh. These citizens in the first place want to have nothing to do with my poor Jewish brothers from the east; in the second place, not to be sons of my [Jewish] people, but only members of the Jewish cultural community? Is that honest? Can a non-Jew respect persons that dissimulate so? I am no German citizen. I am a Jew and happy to belong to the Jewish people.”
The demand for equal rights supplied the basis throughout the world for establishing Jewish preeminence and rule among all peoples. With the dwindling of racial consciousness only the religious difference was still noticed, and to the feeling of that time it seemed unjust to give a special legal status to particular persons only because of their religion, which is indeed every man’s personal affair. When the new purpose was called humanity and mankind, nothing stood in the way of mixing. Where objections were raised, it was silently hoped that assimilation also would denote the intention of Jewry. Jewry however only all too gladly made use of the opportunity for equal religious status: with that the path to all important offices and even to political leadership of the people stood open to him. Thus the certificate of baptism became “the admission-ticket to European culture” (H. Heine). This process of gaining racial acceptance was advancing at a greatly accelerated pace in the 14 years prior to the seizure of power by National-Socialism.
It has often been said that National-Socialism, in the question of race, is purely negative and destructively oriented, and that its essential content is gutter anti-Semitism. This accusation misses the essential point, and entirely fails to consider the result and the purpose of the work of racial education. In the Jewish Question, which was most palpable among us, an entire generation that had learned to see only the human in the human recognized the importance of the racial question, for its own people as well as for the rest of the world. The entire handling of the Jewish Problem in the years prior to the seizure of power should be viewed essentially in terms of the political education of the German people, whose racial instincts had been to a dangerous degree lost.
In this question, which showed its true face precisely in Germany, the eyes of many folk-comrades were opened, and, with the simultaneous call to all heroic and manly virtues of German humanity, there occurred the racial selection of political warrior-natures, which the leadership of the new state represents. The earlier status of the Jewish Question, as expressed in the absolute equalization of civil rights and in the unimpeded influx of Jews from the east, is the best demonstration of the extent to which the sense and consciousness of race had been lost. The emphasis in our position on this question is not on the negative, nor on mere rejection, but rather on the positive valuing of our own people. At the same time however it must also be taken into account that Jewry stood against Germany, principally through its role as leader of Marxist class-struggle and through its involvement in international finance, and supported all anti-nationalist efforts of a cultural as well as political kind.
So that the people may not fragment at its core, we strive for purity of the blood. We want a separation between people and people, between blood and blood. Out of these considerations the law about civil servants was created and German racial legislation came into being. We have been accused of blind hatred of Jews, but it was not hatred against the Jews, rather love for our own people, that motivated these measures.
_________________________
* “Was nicht Rasse ist auf dieser Erde, ist Spreu,” are the words that Frercks attributes to Hitler, but it is a slight misquote. The statement that appears as a one-sentence paragraph on page 324 in the 1936 edition of Mein Kampf is: “Was nicht gute Rasse ist auf dieser Welt, ist Spreu.” — “What is not good race in this world is chaff.”
