Alfred Rosenberg – National-Socialist Worldview

What does Alfred Rosenberg’s Diary say about the Holocaust?

Hadding — Sun, 18 Dec 2016 17:27:00 +0000

Alfred Rosenberg’s diary, spanning Spring 1936 to Winter 1944, disappeared after the war (stolen by Jewish prosecutor Robert Kempner) but was rediscovered in 2013.

The diary, touted by Henry Mayer of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum as “the most revealing Nazi documents ever found,” turns out (as reported by CODOH’s David Merlin) not to support the Jewish Holocaust story at all. Robert K. Wittman, a former FBI-agent who co-authored a book about the diary, admits it:

“There is no place in the diary where we have Rosenberg or Hitler saying that the Jews should be exterminated…. All it said was ‘move them out of Europe.’ ” [S.F. Kovaleski, NYTimes, 30 March 2016]

This is consistent with Rosenberg‘s testimony at Nuremberg. Having heard the accusation of a conspiracy to annihilate Slavs and Jews, Rosenberg declared that he had no part in it:

Besides repeating the old accusations, the prosecutors have raised new ones of the strongest kind; thus they claim that we all attended secret conferences in order to plan a war of aggression. Besides that, we are supposed to have ordered the alleged murder of 12,000,000 people. All these accusations have been collectively described as “genocide” — the murder of peoples. In this connection I have the following to declare in summary.

I know my conscience to be completely free from any such guilt, from any complicity in the murder of peoples. Instead of working for the dissolution of the culture and national sentiment of the Eastern European nations, I attempted to improve the physical and spiritual conditions of their existence; instead of destroying their personal security and human dignity, I opposed with all my might, as has been proven, every policy of violent measures, and I rigorously demanded a just attitude on the part of the German officials and a humane treatment of the Eastern Workers. Instead of practising “child slavery,” as it is called, I saw to it that young people from territories endangered by combat were granted protection and special care. Instead of exterminating religion, I reinstated the freedom of the Churches in the Eastern territories by a decree of tolerance.

In Germany, in pursuance of my ideological convictions, I demanded freedom of conscience, granted it to every opponent, and never instituted a persecution of religion.

The thought of a physical annihilation of Slavs and Jews, that is to say, the actual murder of entire peoples, has never entered my mind and I most certainly did not advocate it in any way. I was of the opinion that the existing Jewish question would have to be solved by the creation of a minority right, by emigration, or by settling the Jews in a national territory over a ten-year period of time. The White Paper of the British Government of 24 July 1946 shows how historical developments can bring about measures which were never previously planned.

The practice of the German State Leadership in the war, as [ostensibly] proven here during the Trial, differed completely from my ideas. To an ever-increasing degree Adolf Hitler drew persons to himself who were not my comrades, but my opponents. With reference to their pernicious deeds I must state that they were not practising the National Socialism for which millions of believing men and women had fought, but rather, shamefully misusing it. It was a degeneration which I, too, very strongly condemned.

I frankly welcome the idea that a crime of genocide is to be outlawed by international agreement and placed under the severest penalties, with the natural provision that neither now nor in the future shall genocide be permitted in any way against the German people either.

Among other matters, the Soviet prosecutor stated that the entire so-called “ideological activity” had been a “preparation for crime.” In that connection I should like to state the following: National Socialism represented the idea of overcoming the class struggle which was disintegrating the people, and uniting all classes in a large national community. Through the Labor Service, for instance, it restored the dignity of manual labor on mother earth, and directed the eyes of all Germans to the necessity of a strong peasantry. By the Winter Relief Work it created a comradely feeling among the entire nation for all fellow-citizens in need, irrespective of their former party membership. It built homes for mothers, youth hostels, and community clubs in factories, and acquainted millions with the yet unknown treasures of art.

For all that I served.

But along with my love for a free and strong Reich I never forgot my duty towards venerable Europe. In Rome, as early as 1932, 1 appealed for its preservation and peaceful development, and I fought as long as I could for the idea of internal gains for the peoples of Eastern Europe when I became Eastern Minister in 1941. Therefore in the hour of need I cannot renounce the idea of my life, the ideal of a socially peaceful Germany and a Europe conscious of its values, and I will remain true to it.

Honest service for this ideology, considering all human shortcomings, was not a conspiracy and my actions were never a crime, but I understood my struggle, just as the struggle of many thousands of my comrades, to be one conducted for the noblest idea, an idea which had been fought for under flying banners for over a hundred years. [IMT Transcript, 21 August 1946]

A National-Socialist View of European Unity

Hadding — Fri, 06 Jun 2014 09:10:00 +0000

While Alfred Rosenberg distrusts the motives of those advocating a “United States of Europe” in the 1920s (among whom Jews figured prominently), he sees it as desirable that European states at least stop fighting among themselves in foreign policy and present a united front against the rising non-White world. Rosenberg mentions that there were those who fantasized that European unity would empower the Catholic Church, but considers that an unlikely prospect. The main question ultimately was whether and how some kind of unity could be established without facilitating plutocratic subjugation of Europe.

The answer to that question, as it has turned out in 1940 and again in the 21st century, seems to be that if there is to be a united Europe, Germany’s dominance of that union is the viable alternative to Jewish dominance, since the Germans were and are the strongest nation on the continent.

United States of Europe?

Alfred Rosenberg

Völkischer Beobachter, 13/14 December 1925

Translated 2014 by Hadding Scott

In recent months, concurrent with the propaganda for the “League of Nations,” the activity of the so-called “Pan-European Association” is also increasing, At the same time various press-agencies conducted polls among politicians and writers on how they regard this so-called “United States of Europe.” Thus the Neue Wiener Journal has just conducted such an inquiry, and asked a series of famous personalities of all states their opinion on the following questions:

1. Do you consider the creation of the United States of Europe necessary?

2. Do you consider the ratification of the United States of Europe possible?

To these inquiries the French finance-minister Caillaux answered that the patriotism of the 20th century would amalgamate with Europeanism. The “Easter of the European Union” would come; it would come, just as inevitably as there are physical laws. Ignatz Seipel, the former federal chancellor of Austria, hopes the same and wishes a general “revision of the concept of the state”! A similar view was expressed by Anton Svelah, the minister-president of Czechoslovakia.

Jacob Lippowitz, the Jewish editor of the Neue Wiener Journal, declares: the boundary-markers of the European states have proven to be torture-stakes for every citizen of a European state. Similar statements came from Maximilian Harden, Albert Einstein, Alfred Kerr, and of course Dr. Gerhart Hauptmann, Heinrich Mann, and Dr. Thomas Mann!¹

As we see, quite a list of personages finds this buzzword, the United States of Europe, agreable. Yet it is naturally clear that most of them understand something entirely different by it. Herr Lippowitz and his consorts are certainly thinking of a single Jewish private syndicate, as Walther Rathenau also had visualized. All nation-states would then have to fit into this. Ignatz Seipel however surely dreams of the Mediaeval reign of the church, and the others meanwhile pursue their highest real-world foreign-policy goals.

But whatever the motives of the individual may be, the fact of a strong movement somehow to bring about a European federation is there, and we therefore have to concern ourselves with this problem and to declare our position on it.

Without doubt an awakening is manifesting in the entire world. The awakening of the Near and Far East, and indeed upon a racial backdrop, is plain to see, and even the Black portion of the Earth has begun to announce its demands in a similar manner. Only a fool can believe that this pressure from outside of Europe does not also require a common European stance. This awakening of the Near and Far East is the response to the robber-economy and the corrupting influences that mercantile Europe has brought with its political conquests to India and China. But this unbridled robber-economy and robber-politics has not only fostered all bad instincts in the colonies or quasi-colonial lands, but unleashed them also in Europe itself, where they are deliberately stoked further by clever politicians.

Coudenhove-Kalergi

The present-day propaganda for the “United States of Europe,” which originates from the circles of the stock-exchange and the Jewish press, means nothing more than a logical continuation of this same robber-economy, sanctioned by a politically strengthened federation. It is thus self-evident that we stand in the sharpest opposition to this new fraud. Fact is, on the other hand, that there is a growing awareness in foreign policy that mutual warring of the European nations also means the end of every single national culture. This awakening sense of a European solidarity in foreign policy is exploited and bastardized today by the same politicians that all European peoples can thank for their present-day misery.

The “United States of Europe” would have to be rejected by us already just on the grounds that such a character as the half-Asian Count Coudenhove-Kalergi is its leading exponent. This man preaches, instead of adherence to what is organic, to race and national tradition, absolute racial mishmash, and is thus to be treated as a new herald of European decline.

Nevertheless the recognition of the necessity for Europe to be unified in foreign policy stands apart from the question of whether it must bring a whole series of grievous problems in its wake. But one ought to consider that if we face an either/or – destruction of the Eveningland or Europe’s security in the world – ways would have to be found to accomplish this goal. At the top stands a demand without the fulfillment of which all is in vain: the exclusion [Ausscheidung] of the Jews from all states of Europe. This in turn can only be the consequence of an awakening of racial feeling, of a new state-idea, and of a reconceptualization of economic life.
_________________________________________

1. In this list of six supporters of European unification, the first three names belong to ethnic Jews. Einstein, the promulgator of a theory of relativity and admirer of Joseph Stalin, everybody knows as a Jew, because Jews want everybody to know it. The Jew Maximilian Harden was named Felix Witkowski at birth but changed his name and converted to Protestantism, becoming a sometime newspaper-columnist and publisher of a magazine called Die Zukunft from 1892 until 1923. Politically Harden/Witkowski seems to have been an opportunist, a warmonger in 1914 but a supporter of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. The Jew Alfred Kerr was born with the surname Kempner, calling himself Kerr from the age of 20 and becoming a theater-critic. Of the non-Jews listed, Heinrich Mann’s political views were such that he was planning to settle in the Communist “German Democratic Republic” at the time of his death in 1950, and was honored by that government with a postage-stamp. Younger brother Thomas Mann was so wicked that he actually made broadcasts against his homeland during the Second World War and became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1944, at a time when aerial bombardment by the United States was incinerating tens of thousands of German civilians in thousand-plane raids. Gerhart Hauptmann was a Social-Democrat who had been considered subversive by the Hohenzollerns prior to the First World War, and was noted immediately after the war as a pacifist. In 1933 however Hauptmann applied for membership in the NSDAP (but was rejected).

A Struggle of Worldwide Importance

Hadding — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 07:43:00 +0000

Already in the early 1920s, Alfred Rosenberg complains that various political persuasions accused National-Socialism of being the extreme antithesis of whatever they themselves happened to be: capitalist according communists, communist according to capitalists. We still see this today. This kind of distortion has the convenient feature that it avoids the recognition that there could be such thing as serious political thinking not rooted in the Enlightenment.

Rosenberg’s claim that the National-Socialist struggle has become a worldwide struggle may be an allusion to Mussolini, who had come to power about three months prior to this essay. The Beer-Hall Putsch (8-9 November 1923), an imitation of the March on Rome, was attempted slightly more than a year after Mussolini’s takeover and about nine months after this essay, but the attempt to duplicate the Fascists’ rise through force and intimidation failed. Rosenberg thus turns out to have been completely correct when he said in this essay that the strength of National-Socialism was in the idea itself.

Despite what Rosenberg wrote at the time, it seems that Italian Fascism was influencing the course of the German struggle during 1923 much more than the reverse. This influence was of course curtailed after it produced a disastrous result: thereafter the NSDAP would use only lawful methods to come to power.

In 1934 and 1935, with the NSDAP in power, it would become necessary to play down the worldwide influence of National-Socialism that Rosenberg emphasized in 1923.

National-Socialism in the Global Struggle

Alfred Rosenberg

Völkischer Beobachter, 27 January 1923

(Translation by Hadding Scott, 2012)

The same has happened to National-Socialism as to every great new thought: unnoticed at first, then combated by all powers of a dissolute age with defamation, scorn, and violence, it nonetheless grew into an avalanche. Enraged, all the parties and personages that have lived on the deception of the German people look on and see themselves more and more unmasked. Clueless and terrified the charred shapes of the old national life stand there and fail to comprehend the new spirit of the German future. Calcified in heart and brain, they are completely unprepared to think the thought: that all must somehow be at fault for Germany’s misfortune; that one must sense that, today, the impossible can, must, and will be possible, and the irreconcilable be reconciled.

And thus all that is awakening supports the new popular uprising, the existence of which already proves today that the hour of German freedom someday will strike. For, in it, life has become what alone is able to beget life: faith, spirit of sacrifice [Opfersinn], and unlimited will to struggle for a great idea.

This unerring energy has in the course of years yielded its fruits. The opponents of the new people’s movement had to argue against it in spite of themselves [wider Willen]; the scales fell from the eyes of many questioners from all camps, and the struggle of global powers and worldviews suddenly appeared to them in a completely different light than previously. Ever more thorough essays appeared in the various newspapers that attempted an analysis of the growing giant. At the same time however came the defamation-campaign. One side called National-Socialism big-capitalist, monarchist, and reactionary; another saw in it a variety of Communism; the third designated it as Bavarian separatism; the fourth as an extreme unitarist movement. Meanwhile National-Socialism had answered only one question: what is of use to the entire productive German people, and what accords with its nature? – without regard for top and bottom, right and left.

If old forms shatter and the times become ripe for a rebirth of the soul [seelische Neugeburt], then all lying and defamation, indeed even all honest and sincere opposition, is in vain. The new form [Gestalt] grows and pushes aside or crushes whatever stands in its way.

Many in Germany struggle against us; many get excited about “putsches” or “planned assassinations” etc. But only very few know that National-Socialism for today’s world is much more dangerous than a putsch. It is the herald of a new age for all Europe, for the White Race everywhere.

The German struggle in turn has become a global struggle, even if nothing broader guides the German National-Socialists than unlimited love for the German people.

Thus we gather during one of the most difficult hours of the German people, in order to testify to our invincible faith in this people and to vow to apply all our strength for its resurrection from shame and humiliation.

The final victory is certainly ours.

Paul de Lagarde: Banking should be a Government Enterprise

Hadding — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 01:07:00 +0000

Paul de Lagarde (1827 – 1891) was a professor at the University of Göttingen and highly respected in the field of ancient Near-Eastern languages. He was chiefly concerned with elucidation of the Bible, but also wrote books about the ancient Persians and Armenians, among others. He urged that Christianity be purged of Semitic elements.

He was a member of the Conservative Party, and the original proponent (in 1885) of the mass-deportation of Jews from Europe to Madagascar.

Paul de Lagarde and the Banks

Alfred Rosenberg

Völkischer Beobachter, 8 May 1921

Not infrequently have nationalist leaders had to struggle with the reproach: “Why do you people come forth with your demands only now? Why didn’t you tell us this before?” And always the response then must be that almost all the demands were already made decades ago, but nobody paid attention to those lone strugglers, because the entire world was intoxicated with cheap slogans and liberal mantras.

Even nationalization, which means governmental control of the entire banking system, as the fundamental prerequisite for a national economy that would be independent from Jewish speculators, is an old demand. In this context it is an honor-bound duty also to remember the man who was one of the most determined and righteous Germans that the 19^th century gave us: Paul de Lagarde.

According to Lagarde, the Reich had to secure for itself, in addition to all other monopolies, the monopoly of money and credit:

This answers the requirements for a steady source of revenue to cover regular governmental expenditures, first, in regard to the fact that money and credit worth the same as money [are] used by everybody*, so that what is meant to serve all according to their share in the economic life of the state is likewise absorbed proportionally….

The postal service, telegraph, railroad, are all entirely in the hands of the Reich. The transactions of people with each other and the movement of wares has grown into such a big thing that there is nobody that does not take part in it. Everything however that concerns all of us is the prerogative of the state. Therefore, just like the three modes of transaction, so should money and credit be under the administration of the government.^[1]

How to implement the necessary arrangements is easy to discover:

If the so-called Reichsbank – a private institution strongly entangled with Jewry – has main and branch-offices throughout the entire Reich, so too can a genuine, completely judain-free Reichsbank – a state institution – have main and branch offices throughout the entire Reich. If there are post-office savings-banks, so can there also be Reich savings-banks.^[2]

Furthermore, the monopoly on credit will bring in more money for the government, while cutting out the noxious intermediary Jews:

What the Reich gains, the Jews of course will not gain.^[3]

A further advantage of the monopoly on credit would be the limitation of financial trading. Many shady stockmarket-players would refrain from their unclean business if Reich officials had the right to investigate their arbitrages [Differenzgeschäfte].

The need of creditworthy borrowers for money would be satisfied by impartial officials of the Reich, not by bloodsuckers of foreign nationality, whereas loans would be denied to unreliable and weak hands. Through the latter, only seemingly harsh measures, that misery would be averted which the Jewish money-man so often now calls forth by lending to rash youth in the expectation of eventually forcing the borrower’s honorable but poor family to cover his ill-considered debts to preserve their reputation….^[4]

Compensation would not be granted to the owners of currently outstanding debts. The sponge has soaked up entirely enough so as no longer to be in need of water. Whomever anger about our injustice would drive from our borders, yes indeed he should go; he does us a favor by his absence.^[5]

As one sees, Lagarde discerned long ago the point where the lever should be placed so as to move the German people to recovery. With just a few others he stood alone; the octopus of the banks however embraced the folk with tentacles becoming ever tighter. And thus the German folk entered the war in 1914 and – something that worried the cadre of resistance against a world of enemies – was handed over to the Jews’ banks. The Ballin-Rathenau System subjected Germany to usury and undermined the foundation of the German house. Discontent grew. This discontent was in turn stoked by Jews and, with the help of all the Jew media, urged onto the wrong track. As Rathenau later cynically stated: world history would have lost its meaning if Germany had won!^[6] These words no German should forget.

Regarding Ballin-Rathenau, I refer to the disturbing book by D. Arnim: Die Juden in den Kriegsgesellschaften. What is to be noted concerning the banks, is that 280 Jewish bank and exchange houses constitute the basis of Berlin’s entire monetary system, among them the firms Warschauer, Mendelsohn, Bleichröder, Oppenheim, Heinemann, and Goldschmidt. The 100 banks of Frankfurt are almost all Jewish. Hamburg has around 40, Hannover 30, Munich 20, Leipzig 12, Nuremberg 25 Jew-banks. Besides those, another 400 of Germany’s banks are found in the hands of the Chosen People. The situation is exactly the same in all other countries.

The takeover of the banks by the government – provided that German men form the government – is the first nationalist demand after the dismissal of all Jewish civil servants.

Among the most courageous pioneers of this national-socialist idea should be counted, even ahead of others, Paul de Lagarde. German posterity will erect a monument to him.

____________________________

1. Deutsche Schriften, p. 378.

2. Ibid., p. 497. Judainfrei seems to be a word that Lagarde invented. Since Judain would mean some distilled Jewish essence, Lagarde’s word judainfrei means free of Jewish poison. That word appears in the essay, “Die nächsten Pflichten deutscher Politik” (1885). Friedrich Nietzsche was probably in some way imitating Lagarde when he coined the word moralinfrei (free of moral poison), which appears in Der Antichrist (1888).

3. Ibid., p. 498.

4. Ibid., p. 498.

5. Ibid., p. 499.

6. Ibid., p. 499. What Rathenau said in the fall of 1914 was: “The moment will never come when the Kaiser and his Paladins on their white chargers ride victorious through the Brandenburg Gate. On that day world history would have lost all meaning.” Ludendorff understood this as an expression of defeatism, but Rathenau’s defenders have claimed that it only indicated his disapproval of the Kaiser. It seems to show a lack of enthusiasm for the German cause in any case.

*Literally it says “all the world,” but since only Germany is meant, I take it to be a calque of French tout le monde, thus carrying the same connotation, “everybody.”

Finance-Capitalism vs. Honor and Folk

Hadding — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 03:43:00 +0000

Introduction

The focus here is not on Jews or Marxism or the Underman, although all are mentioned. Rosenberg here is focused on the fact that Capitalism is destructive to the national ethos. This seems to be a more fundamental problem than Jews, Marxists, and the ascent of the Underman. This essay is about how the Germans must straighten out their own ethos.

Rosenberg says that the Germans must get back their sense of honor, if they are to survive as a people. The honor to which Rosenberg refers includes unwillingness to suffer grievous insults and unjust treatment of one’s folk. Where Rosenberg uses the term German-consciousness (Deutschbewußtsein) it amounts to a synonym for honor.

When pursuit of money becomes the highest value, it undermine the sense of nationality and the sense of honor. Rosenberg sees Capitalism as thus preparing the way for the rule of the Underman. Furthermore, he sees the Social-Democrats as deliberately using Capitalism for that purpose.

With a quote from Frederick the Great, Rosenberg implies that the corrosion of national honor under Capitalism was what had induced Germany to accept a highly unfavorable armistice in 1918. After that, the attack on national honor was continued with more direct means, such as inflicting guilt for alleged war-crimes, and presentation of entertainment that humiliates the nation.

There is a significant parallel here with what has happened since the United States’ ignominious retreat from Vietnam. We too need to change our way of thinking.

Hadding Scott, 2011

Paragraphs 1-5: On the symbiosis of Marxism and Finance that brought Germany to ruin, and the mendacity of newspapers.

Paragraphs 6-11: The rule of the Underman in Germany.

Paragraphs 12-20: The origin of the national-socialist worldview.

Germany’s Future:

The National-Socialist Movement
Alfred Rosenberg

Völkischer Beobachter, 26-27 February 1928

Translation by Hadding Scott, 2011

We are all more or less enthusiastic readers of the Münchener Neuesten Nachrichten (Munich’s Latest News). We know that this international newspaper has established correspondents in all states; therefore we were quite astonished a few days ago to read in it that only now was it learned that any relationship existed between Marxism and World Capitalism. It says that the world was advised of that only after the announcement appeared in the current issue of the Süddeutsche Monatshefte^[1] three weeks ago!

One can perhaps accept such admissions with some humor. Nevertheless we must state that it is an insolence beyond compare that in a city where this problem was fought and battled eight years ago^[2] under the eyes of the editorial staffs of the biggest newspapers, only today is it announced in this newspaper that something of that sort occurred. This is only one example among thousands of how the so-called national upper class of the folk and the so-called “major media” behave toward vital questions, and how they try to silence every new rising power as soon as it touches a problem that hitherto was considered off-limits. Here in Munich hundreds upon hundreds of gatherings have taken place; every day our newspaper struggles to enlighten the public about questions that here in the Münchener Neueste Nachrichten are supposedly being revealed now for the first time.^[3]

Moltke the Elder

In this regard we must declare that even we, who struggle as a people’s movement for this enlightenment, are not the first to illuminate this relationship between Marxism and Capitalism. We know thanks to those Germans of the past who already indicated these things with a prophetic eye: there was the great Moltke, who, seeing the dress-rehearsal for the Bolshevik Revolution, the Paris Commune, declared openly in the Reichstag that the Paris Communards had stormed the small businesses while the palaces of the Rothschilds were protected by special garrisons; meanwhile Eugen Duehring and Paul de Lagarde were lonely prophets who did not reach the mass of the people. Only now our age is called to bring their names again to honor. But even the leaders of the Social-Democracy have known very clearly not only today but since decades ago what a close relationship their movement had to those powers that today rule the entire world. In the year 1903 the big capitalist and Social-Democrat Paul Singer^[4] proclaimed in the Reichstag with open cynicism that the Social-Democratic Party would protect the stock-exchange in order thereby to hasten the social revolution. Marx declared that he supported free trade because it would cause the social revolution to erupt^[5].

The leaders knew very clearly that the stock market and its capital represented a subversive element in national and economic life. On 9 November 1918 came the test of whether these arrangements had been understood merely as ways to undermine the old system. The Social-Democratic leaders did not impose a heavy tax on the stock market, which they knew to be subversive; rather they proclaimed brotherhood with it before the entire people. The Berliner Tageblatt^[6] today can dare before the eyes of millions of workers to call Herr Scheidemann^[7] a friend and comrade in the common struggle. In fall 1924 the Vorwärts^[8] ventured, as the abhorrent Dictate of Versailles was hung over Germany on behalf of stock-finance, to present the rising sun^[9] and the dollar-sign together, and proudly to proclaim that this development lay in the evolution of Social-Democratic politics. Since that day German workers and the German people have labored and paid eight million goldmarks per day for the satisfaction of these brothers and friends of Social-Democracy.

If earlier some great men had indicated the danger of the undermining of German-consciousness, they nonetheless did not reach the people with it. After 9 November 1918, in the midst of the deepest catastrophe of the German people, arose the uneasy question of how this collapse was possible, and which powers had had a part in it. The feeling was in the air even in small and middle-sized cities at that time, but nowhere more clearly and consciously than in Munich, that this collapse could not have been an accident, not a military failure, but was the consequence of a movement consciously directed, determined by instinct, and pushed for decades.

If today we look back on our eight years of struggle, we are entitled to say that eventually it will be designated a political miracle that, in the midst of the deepest catastrophe of a people, its most conscious element picks itself up undiscouraged so as to go about constructing a new state based on a new theory of government [Staatsgedanken]. Everybody sensed at the time that we were living in one of those periods when the old [order] was shattered, the old society reduced to rubble, and old traditions had to give way to new ideas of life, and we have sensed looking back that, while such epochs of revaluation have often occurred in our contemporary history, like deep chasms separating different ways of life, nonetheless an essential difference exists between the past and the present.

Today we stand before the fact that all powers of the Underman have been set free so as to destroy [vernichten] the last substance, in moral and racial regards, of Germandom. The 9th of November 1918 signified the rising of the yeast, the ferment of the scum that is present in every people, which through envy and high treason seizes power, and today this less-valuable Underman rules over the valuable forces of the German people.

In what manner all racial and moral values of the German nation today are being deliberately buried, we can observe daily in the Berlin press, in Berlin’s weekly newspapers and monthly magazines, whose assault is directed no longer as previously against certain externalities; instead, at stake are the deepest and greatest values that in general have sustained the German people. We can see that in the Jewish-run “international newspapers” the German officer corps is depicted as a cesspool of the nation, and that it is very often said: beat the German officer corps to death; only then is room created for a German culture. In the Jewish Weltbühne (World Stage) Ignaz Wrobel^[10] calls German soldiers “patriotic asses, brutal death-officers, and progeny of a Ludendorff … beastly soldiers, bulldogs and sergeants of the Kaiser’s army.” By no German court has this man been brought to account; he was the Paris correspondent of the Vossische Zeitung^[11].

Notorious traitors to our country sit on kangaroo committees of inquiry and judge whether German soldiers in dire straits had shot spies before the court could get involved. We witness the remarkable fact that in all these “kangaroo murders” it is not investigated whether the one shot really was a spy or not. We see it as a deliberate trampling of the national sense of honor when men who have bled from sixty-four wounds are later locked up as “kangaroo murderers” in cells where previously a sex-killer sat.

Those are the signs that consciously and deliberately, day by day, something of the core of the nation is being eroded in order to destroy it so that in the future resistance will be no longer possible. A former president of the Senate, Baumbach, says that today justice has become the maidservant of politics. This statement is consistent with the brutal frankness of the National-Socialists. And if we ask ourselves, how is it possible that today all German values are thus trampled underfoot, we must answer: Because we have forgotten that without the idea of honor no folk can exist.

Today we stand before the fact that the highest values of Germandom are no longer present in the life of the state and in the administration of justice. The Germanic legal system developed from self-help to the honor of the clan and to the honor of the tribe, and then the defense of honor was taken over by the state, which bears legitimacy to the degree that it is able to defend the honor of a totality. We can see that an insult to Germandom could be prosecuted by a government attorney. We can also see that the Weltbühne is able to speak of a “Whore Germania” without anyone lifting a finger to seize this lad by the collar. That is the deepest calamity that a people can experience.

Nevertheless on 9 November 1918 in thousands of Germans something new came to life, and the highest value arose, which should bind us all together today. Here for the first time was born that which appears to us today as the highest and holiest: a racial and type-based folkdom.

This worldview led us not only to contemplate today’s situation under a new illumination, but also to view history in a different light. Thus we see that the frequently mentioned Light from the East has faded, that all culture-creating deeds have progressed from West to East, and it is certain that before the Germanic peoples founded all the states of Europe, quite long before that, Nordic waves went over the Alps to Rome, Greece, Persia, and India,^[12] where racially characteristic cultures and racially characteristic art arose, and that only the Germanic Eveningland ever created similar values again, although in new forms.

For the National-Socialist movement two fundamental demands derive from that: the unconditional vigorous defense of the race and the unconditional defense of national honor. The former is the physical substance, the latter the innermost value. What economic program and political possibilities will result later, no man can know. Ultimately it is not programs that we want to cultivate. At the beginning and end of the National-Socialist movement stands the Germanic person, outwardly healthy and inwardly valuable. From this fundamental awareness again two other demands result: active nationalism, which means the securing of the entire territory against hostile neighbors, the protection of seventy-million Germans amid the various races and peoples of Europe, and in another direction, a just-as-active socialism, which means securing the individual against any exploitation by private powers.

Nationalism pertains mainly to foreign policy while socialism is the domestic complement. Corresponding manifestations are the army and the police. We want to bring together the two currents that splash around the middle, the strongly nationalist movement and the strongly socialist movement purged of Marxism. Therefore National-Socialism distinguishes itself from the religion of the Second Reich — from National-Liberalism — which is distinguished on the one side by unlimited exploitation, on the other by charity. On one side the ladle of finance scoops away small savings; on the other side nursing homes and hospitals appear. This is most evident today in America, where exploitation has already become a condition that is encouraged. The stock-jobber who has robbed a people for 60 years, in the 65th year builds a hospital for his victims.

Against this age led today by Marxism we have declared a struggle to the end. National-Socialism clearly distinguishes itself in terms of worldview, and cultivates personality in the knowledge that it is soil-bound and race-bound, and that its ultimate goal is service to the organism of the folk [Volksorganismus]. If somebody declares to us that the German should sacrifice himself for the great European Idea, we declare that all Europe could go to ruin if the German folk must suffer harm.

Anti-White Propaganda

Whenever such thoughts are pronounced, then come the Men of Darkness [Dunkelmänner] from all camps and say, That is idolatry of the nation. They, who today have only one idol, their party and their moneybag, who look on daily as all German values are trampled in the mud, dare to proclaim that. Indeed while the film about Luther was banned, the same ministry declared that it found no reason to ban the Negro opera Jonny Spielt Auf (Jonny Strikes Up). This disgraceful Black piece is being presented at sixty German opera-houses. It culminates in the glorification of the Negro atop the globe carrying the stolen violin of a German, and at his side an Aryan girl that has been raped [ein vergewaltigtes arisches Mädchen].


Luther (1928) with Eugen Klöpfer, was banned by the Weimar Republic.

Several weeks ago a wonderful book appeared, the Briefe (Letters) of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, that great man, to whom we owe a fine interpretation [Weltbild] of our history, and who at the end of his life strongly supported Adolf Hitler. We see that this tireless fighter for Germany’s honor and greatness knew precisely the weakness up in the diplomatic classes, and with a bleeding heart how he complained that, while strong personalities were creatively active in all fields, nonetheless in the upper classes a decadence prevailed that could result in catastrophe. “The day is approaching,” he wrote, “when that society will be swept away. By what method this will happen, I know not, but it must be and it will therefore be.”

The National-Socialist movement will always acknowledge that the point of origin already contained within it all possibilities for the future. It cannot be otherwise. If one pursues a definite direction from the start and beholds the vision of a new state, one will be able to find many fine things along the way. But fulfillment remains already determined in the point of origin, in the preservation of the type-based folk, in the preservation of those character-values that for millennia have been fruitful everywhere that Germanic life determined them. If all great men of the German past — Bismarck, Freiherr vom Stein, Lagarde — could look down on this honorable, character-filled struggle that our movement has been conducting for eight years, they would bless this movement. Frederick the Great, in the greatest need after a lost battle, once wrote the following words:

“Never will I experience the moment that would compel me to conclude a disadvantageous peace. No speech, however clever, will bring me to the point of undersigning my disgrace. I will either have myself buried among the drummers of my fatherland, or, if Destiny, which persecutes me, begrudges me even this consolation, I myself will make an end to my misfortune, if it will be no longer possible for me to endure it.”

And true to the legacy of the greatest German king, we National-Socialists say: Never will come the time when we would make a shameful peace with the honorless worldview of Democracy and of Marxism. Better to pack up the whole movement than to submit. If today one speaks of a German united front, we recognize that it means the National-Socialist German Workers’ Party.
______________________
1. The Süddeutsche Monatshefte (South-German Monthly) was a monarchist periodical that was unfriendly toward the NSDAP but shared with the NSDAP the views that Germany had not been guilty for the war and had lost due to a “stab in the back.”

2. Rosenberg here refers to the short-lived “Bavarian Soviet Republic” (April-May 1919) which was quashed by the Freikorps and still-loyal elements of the German Army.

3. The dominant political party in 1920s Bavaria, the Bayerische Volkspartei (Bavarian People’s Party) represented views similar to those of the Süddeutsche Monatshefte. The editors of the Münchener Neuesten Nachrichten may have suddenly realized in 1928 that it behooved them to treat those views with some respect. The fact that the ban on Adolf Hitler’s participation in politics had ended the previous year may or may not be relevant.

4. Paul Singer (1844-1911) was a Jew prominent in the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands in the late 19th century, even during the period when it was banned.

5. “But, in general, the protective system of our day is conservative, while the free trade system is destructive. It breaks up old nationalities and pushes the antagonism of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to the extreme point. In a word, the free trade system hastens the social revolution. It is in this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, that I vote in favor of free trade.” (Karl Marx, Discours sur la Question du Libre Échange, Brussels, February 1848; this passage is found in Florence Wischnewetzky’s1888 English translation on page 42. )

6. The Berliner Tageblatt (Berlin Daily Paper) (1872-1939) was primarily a newspaper catering to business.

7. Philipp Scheidemann (1865– 1939) was a prominent Social-Democrat who proclaimed what came to be known as the Weimar Republic on 9 November 1918, following the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II, which had been expected to lead to the accession to the throne of one of his grandsons. The declaration of the republic was Scheidemann’s own unilateral decision. When the NSDAP came to power in 1933, Scheidemann left Germany.

8. The Vorwärts (Forward) was the official newspaper of the Social-Democratic Party.

9. The rising sun was a symbol used by the Social-Democratic Party. The NSDAP did not fail to subsume this poweful symbol into its own propaganda, placing a swastika on the sun.

10. Ignaz Wrobel was a pseudonym of Jewish journalist Kurt Tucholsky.

11. The Vossische Zeitung (Voss Times) (1721–1934) was a previously venerable Berlin newspaper of the liberal bourgeoisie that was perceived after the First World War as not very patriotic.

12. To say that Aryan man passed “over the Alps to Rome, Greece, Persia, and India” is a bit different from the late twentieth century’s mainstream scholarly view of where the original Aryan homeland was and the routes that the Aryans took on their way to creating those cultures. There is however some evidence that the Aryans could have originated in Northern Europe. The greatest concentration of blonds in the world is in Sweden and Finland, and the modern language that most resembles the theorized original Aryan language is only a short distance away, in Lithuania. Only the route to Rome is likely to have involved crossing the Alps.

Alfred Rosenberg explains National-Socialism

Hadding — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 17:51:00 +0000

Overview of Alfred Rosenberg’s Essay, Nationalsozialismus

by Hadding Scott

The German people in the past had folkish (i.e. national) community. The folkish community has become divided as a consequence of the growth of an industrial proletariat in the age of the machine. National-Socialism is about the restoration of the folkish community.

The problems between the classes have been exacerbated by Marxism, a Jewish instrument of subversion.The current German intelligentsia, lacking the healthy instinct of Fichte and Arndt a century earlier, has aided Marxism.

The German upper classes are also at fault for neglecting German workers and driving them to the Marxists, and for being insufficiently nationalist themselves, for example marrying Jewish bankers’ daughters.

National-Socialism is a new movement that advocates the unity of all Germans. Like the bold fortress built by a mediaeval knight and his servants, the NSDAP will be the force around which the German people will rally.

While the main focus is a vertical unification of the German people, healing class divisions to restore a harmonious order within Germany, at the end Rosenberg drops the word Großdeutschland, Great Germany, which means the unification of Germany with Austria.

National-Socialism

by Alfred Rosenberg

Völkischer Beobachter, 28 July 1921

(translated by Hadding Scott, 2011)

Upon a mountain, a knight with his servants constructed a proud fortress. All around this fortress gathered settlers seeking protection; houses were built, ramparts and walls erected, trenches dug. A community existed between knights and citizens: individuality and polity [Gemeinwesen].

From the jumble of little houses the cathedral stretches upward toward Heaven. A great artist has designed it. Thousands have hewn the stones, hundreds of thousands have sacrificed things of value for it, and then in this house they performed this prayer: personality and folk-soul.

The sense or recognition of the economic and spiritual community of the whole of a people, [combined with] the acknowledgment of the role of the individual within the community, is today called National-Socialism.

There have been class-struggles as far back in history as we can trace. Many a people has already perished from them. There have been class-struggles even in the German past, and neither will they disappear in the future. The existence of struggle everywhere is no misfortune. But in the consideration of one of life’s phenomena our spiritual attitude matters. If we recognize a folk as a kind of body [etwas Körperhaftes], we will try, not to bolster artificially the natural struggle of a particular part of it, but to give forms to it that more highly cultivate [züchten] and toughen [stählen] each of the parts. If I aim only at the immediate goals of one of the struggling parts, sooner rather than later a sickening of the whole must occur, which weakens the body, indeed can bring about its death.

The age of the machine brought conditions of life that created the soil for a doctrine that with consistent implementation signifies the ruin of entire peoples: Marxism. No peoples, no states, only classes: a worldview that stands far below that of a Zulu, but for the victim of the machine, the industrial laborer, nonetheless signified an idea, even if muddled. The traditionless proletarian, torn from his soil, alienated from nature, entered into world-history. The subjection to a brutal power, which he understandably saw embodied in the entrepreneur – indeed he could not observe the banker standing behind this man — prevented instinct from perceiving that this man was a folk-comrade. It is not the laborer’s fault if he succumbed to the seductive temptations of subversive Jewry! It is the fault of the German intelligentsia!

The Fichtes and Arndts^[1] appear to have died out. Intellectual scholars alienated from nature, with blue pencils in their hands, studied the fat books of Marx and his comrades, drew analogies from their foggy verbiage to Kant, Goethe, and Indian philosophy, drew off the stale Jewish spirit into bottles, and made Marxism socially acceptable [gesellschaftsfähig]. Other professors, and not infrequently Lutheran ministers, were masters of the chair^[2] and spoke in secret lodges about “humanity,” and about “liberty, equality, and fraternity.” Large parts of the German people that must have recognized what was developing [das Wuchshafte] nonetheless let themselves be embittered by the gigantic Marxist propaganda and strengthened their class-identity. Thus was the German folk split asunder. The year 1914 showed however, that in all Germans a spark was still alive that must have slumbered longingly in each one, so as to be able to blaze up into such a holy flame. But the decades had not been without effect. The misleaders of the people, having fallen silent for a short time, soon started in anew, and again the spirit was turned in a direction that finally precipitated the collapse of 9 November 1918. Faith to fight for a good cause was taken from the German and in him was cultivated a faith in slogans and ideas that were nothing but weapons of the trickery of our enemies. Never should the German people forget the names of the men that talked to them, amid the struggle over their destiny, about “international solidarity of the proletariat,” “League of Nations,” “conscience of the world,” etc!

The misfortune came, and bitter disappointment therewith.

Nothing is more unjustified at present than the satisfaction of the German-Nationals^[3] that the workers had perceived the stupidity of internationalism and were ultimately halfway “sensible.” These gentlemen should rather beat themselves on the breast and ask themselves what they did to strengthen the national feeling for the German worker! Did they go to him, Did they give him spiritual nourishment, enlightenment, or did they hand him over to outright troublemakers and Jewish deceivers? Have they regarded the worker as a folk-comrade of equal value, or have they not valued him all too often as a human being of the second or third rank? Have they at least within their class itself advocated the worthiness of their folk, or have they not married Jewish bankers’ daughters and contaminated the German people?

The recognition of their guilt in regard to the German folk has dawned upon many individuals among the conservatives, but certainly still not in the “nationalist parties.” They designate themselves even today as “bourgeois” in opposition to the “socialistic,” and the attempts of the German-Nationals to win the workers through a few old master bakers is a hopeless undertaking. As long as German conservatism does not openly and honestly swear a confession of guilt and vigorously take up the struggle against the Jewish and judaized parasitism outside and inside its ranks, and the struggle for German essence and interest in an all-encompassing sense, so long will it attract no manual laborer into its ranks. Like the Social-Democrats, the Conservatives are burdened with a heavy chain of class-tradition. They have forfeited the entitlement to be leaders; they must first win that for themselves.

Therefore a new movement is needed, which treats the whole German folk as an indissoluble unity, which accepts no class-antagonisms within the folk, for which the starting-point and final goal is what pertains to the folk, and which strives for a natural economic order instead of the current parasitic foreign bloodsucking. The unification of all genuinely productive persons of German blood and spirit, whether laborer, student, officer, civil servant, artist, or scholar, the gathering of all strugglers acting without regret for one Great Germany out of all strata of the German people: today that is called National-Socialism.

It will become the proud fortress, around which other Germans can build their houses. That is the way of the future!
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1. Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762 – 1814) was an early German idealist philosopher and a founder of German nationalism. He became associate professor of philosophy at the University of Jena. In his Addresses to the German Nation (1808) he urged the Germans to have national pride, and warned against giving citizenship to Jews. Ernst Moritz Arndt (1769 – 1860) was a German nationalist author and poet, and extraordinary professor at the University of Greifswald. Arndt became chairman of the history department in 1806 but had to flee to Sweden later that year for writing Geist der Zeit, which urged Germans to rebel against Napoleon. Arndt also agitated for the abolition of serfdom, and was noted for some strong anti-Jewish statements. These are the kinds of scholars that Rosenberg says in 1921 seem to have died out.

2. Stuhlmeister is a Freemasonic title equivalent to worshipful master, designating the president of a lodge.

3. German-Nationals refers to members of the Deutschnationale Volkspartei, or DNVP, a nationalist and monarchist party favored by landowners and industrialists. Eventually, because of inadequate public support for this party of the nationalist rich, the DNVP aligned itself with the NSDAP.

Alfred Rosenberg’s Critique of Oswald Spengler

Hadding — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 05:45:00 +0000

Oswald Spengler, author of Decline of the West

Oswald Spengler

by Alfred Rosenberg

originally published in Der Weltkampf, May 1925.

(English translation by Hadding Scott, 2011.)

The personality of Oswald Spengler has stood for years, since the appearance of his chief work The Decline of the West [in 1918], at the center of public interest. Without question this famous work is riddled with many flaws. There is no question that next to fascinating ideas, often platitudes are found. Without a doubt there is something embarrassing about receiving many views of other people served up ostensibly as Spengler’s intellectual property. In spite of everything however, the attack on our school wisdom has had a refreshing effect and set in motion many agreeing and opposing forces, thus begetting life. And in the spiritual quagmire of the present, that is in any case to be welcomed.

I do not want to discuss the Spenglerian worldview in general here. Let only one question be selected: Spengler is supposedly an irrationalist (i.e. he is averse to purely rational judgment). He seeks soul and form, but in the course of his work turns into a purely naturalistic dogmatist who arrives at his finding of the inner and outer decline of our culture on the basis of more or less bald, rational observations, and therein overlooks precisely the form and soul of the Eveningland.

Spengler regards the rise and fall of cultures as an occurrence similar to the life and death of a plant, but forgets in the adducement of this richly superficial comparison that races of plants as such do not die out if they are not destroyed, crippled, mixed with inimical types. The “race” of the fir tree persists although the single fir dies. The “race” of the linden tree is still the same as many thousands of years ago. And the races of men as such could remain just as eternally young, if hostile blood is not mixed with them, if unassimilable spiritual opposites do not clash and mix with them, without being able to be blended.

Thus Spengler’s treatment of history remains stuck in a somewhat exalted environmental theory; his doctrine of the cultural group [Kulturkreislehre] lacks the essential thing: the organic-racial prerequisites, and, bound with them, the embodiment of the spiritual forces that created this cultural group.

It is significant above all that Spengler vigorously combats the folkish idea, dismisses anti-Semitism, and yet, despite all these protests … succumbs, and truly in such a scope that he makes almost all folkish political positions into his own, without however admitting this, even with a single word.

In the first place Spengler is united with us in the rejection of the spiritual and political orientation of our political parties collectively. Democracy is also for him inwardly dead; Parliamentarism is damned for all eternity; Marxism has decayed into the Mark, hostile to life. Only an unscrupulous mob of parties has remained, for the assessment of which Spengler finds only words like cowardice [Feigheit], vulgarity [Gemeinheit], villainy [Schurkerei], etc. About the German republic born on 9 November 1918 he says in his book Reconstruction of the German Reich:

“From fear about the share of loot arose upon the velvet grand-ducal thrones and in the bar-rooms of Weimar the German Republic, not a form of government but a business.”

“They (the parties) had made the constitution for themselves and their constituency, not for the nation, and they began to conduct a disgraceful commerce in everything from which it was possible to derive advantage, in the ruins of the state, in the remnants of our economy, in our honor, our soul, our will-power.”

“From now on there was no longer any law that the authors themselves would not have trampled underfoot, like the one about presidential elections; there was no filth, no cowardice, no lie, that would not have become an everyday occurrence. And as the indignation, the derision in the land conjured the fear that someday we might no longer contain ourselves, they created the Protection Law [Schutzgesetz], the law for the protection of this business.”

Spengler continues then and also attacks the nationalist side, and indeed at a vulnerable point. He says that “ethos” and experience in governing are there, but also a deficiency of intelligence, of understanding of the world [Welteinschaetzung], of breadth of vision. Both the landed nobility and the representatives of industry had begotten no talent whatsoever for the art of politics; the strength of the nationalist parties would remain a mere episode.

And then Spengler embarks upon a criticism of the folkish parties.

He begins with a parallel from the French Revolution, in which between 1794 and 1799 a regression into a bloody, frightening age occurred, when the awakening “Jeunesse dorée” (Gilded Youth) wanted to make policy with fists and cudgels – and wrought destruction. The same role, according to Spengler, is played by today’s folkish, who through “sincerity and small-mindedness” would bring disaster, would [inadvertently] labor for France.

“Childish opinions,” says Spengler, “sever the folkish movement and therewith the mighty striking-power [gewaltige Stoßkraft] residing in it so completely from everything that is to be taken seriously politically and economically by talent, experience, power, and connections [Beziehungen]” that a dangerous countercurrent must take place. It is wrong, he says, to wish to build realpolitik upon racial feeling [Rassegefühl] and not to wish to treat existing financial powers as powers. Politics are not made from long skulls but from what is retained in them. Not through drummers and pipers can one rule nations. Parades and spectacles are not the way; rather the avoidance of them, since even Bismarck functioned only in the most solitary seclusion, says Spengler.

While Spengler leans toward the Action Française and Fascism as the new style of politics, he ridicules the same will in his own folk. Spengler does not grasp what Hitler has done! This man recognized that he must position himself in the midst of the people; he must create a people’s movement, give the disillusioned a new faith, set a new goal. Supported by this people’s movement as a force, he could gain political influence that otherwise never would have been possible. How a foreign policy in the possession of this force would have been conducted, has been understandably not much discussed; that it would have had to be very cautious in accord with the situation, would not need to be stressed. It is certain however that in domestic policy other principles would have been established than rule today.

Already in this question Spengler shows that characteristic shape-shifting of thought-processes that begin with one assertion and end in a completely different one. For, after rejecting the Jeunesse dorée, after agreeing with the Fascist principle, he praises the “astute youths” among us as “our future,” as “youngest Germany” etc. And now Spengler should ask himself after all in which camp these “astute youths” already stand today!

On the question of race, Spengler is just as ambiguous. For, no sooner has he refused with marked derision to acknowledge racial instincts as determining factors, than he speaks of “Germanic world-feeling,” refers to a quantity of “magnificent men of race” among us, speaks of a right that is “born from blood,” and declares that the “Nordic life-feeling” of the Goths, Franks, and Saxons has created the type of the present nations. Justice was supposedly born from “Germanic fundamental feeling,” fed from a spring that does not derive purely from purposeful contemplations. Indeed, Spengler gets carried away to the point of exclaiming that the so-called “youngest Germany” has awakened as the best heir [Erbe] from the years of the rise of the Reich.

In addition, he has also contradicted himself here, explicitly even, when he designates British politics as an effluence of the Norman essence, and at the same time praises the English instinct that put the Jew Disraeli-Beaconsfield in charge. That this man himself admitted that he was conducting Jewish racial politics in combination with English power, Spengler seems to be unaware. The connection of high finance with the London stock exchange has been tightly bound since this time.

That Spengler is in many respects unfortunately correct with his assertion that sincerity is paired with small-mindedness in the folkish camp, comes primarily from the fact that the infinitely clever ones only stand on the sidelines for years, because, although they quite gladly distill an idea from butcheries of past centuries while sitting at a desk, in the present struggle they only wait nobly to see what ultimately will become of “childish opinions.” Once it has “become something,” then the learned scholar will prove with hairsplitting precision that it could only have turned out thus and not otherwise. Only a few of those men so rich in “talent and experience” have let their instinct speak and joined the fermenting movement, and struggled for its means of fulfillment. But soon that will change, and even Spengler will not be able to escape the organic power, and then of course he will proclaim that we have fulfilled his ideas.

Alfred Rosenberg on the relationship of National-Socialism to Totalitarianism

Hadding — Sat, 11 Dec 2010 02:53:00 +0000

One emphasized the state; one emphasized race.

By 1934 the supporters of the NSDAP included many recent converts from other ideologies, some of whom had supported the old order of the Prussian Monarchy, others (like Goebbels) who had been Marxists. The Italian Fascist state had already appeared for twelve years as a great success, supported by neohegelianism, a modification of the hegelian thought-system which had supported the Prussian State until its demise in 1918 (when it was succeeded by the Weimar Republic). Hegelianism and neohegelianism justified the state as an end in itself. National-Socialism did not regard the state as an end in itself, but because the examples of Prussia and Fascist Italy loomed large at the time, it was tempting for people not thoroughly familiar with national-socialism to see it in this light (and even today it is not unusual for careless sources to mislabel national-socialism as “fascism”). The liberal age which Rosenberg mentions began with the Enlightenment of the 18th century, and found expression in ideologies ranging from democratic-republicanism to hegelianism to marxism. In this piece published in the Völkischer Beobachter of January 9, 1934, Alfred Rosenberg shows that he is not against the use of a powerful state as a tool, but explains that it is important to distinguish the essential ideas of national-socialism from ideas rooted in the liberal age, so as to avoid a recurrence of the idolatry of the state that liberal ideas engender. (Translation and introduction by Hadding Scott.)

“The State is only a means to an end. Its end and its purpose is to preserve and promote a community of human beings who are physically as well as spiritually kindred.” — Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf

Total State?
Alfred Rosenberg

Völkischer Beobachter, 9 January 1934

In recent months, in many speeches and essays, the view has been expressed that from now on instead of the multi-party state, instead of the liberally splintered form of government, there is the “total state.” It is said that this state seizes at once the whole political, economic, and cultural life of the nation, that it is the guardian, leader, and commander of all expressions of life, so as to secure thereby the necessary unity of Germany in all fields. In all these utterances it has been overlooked that the abstract state has been thoroughly an idea of the liberal age, which was set up as a technical instrument of power apart from economy and culture as a thing existing for itself, and was accordingly worshiped or, by other tendencies, passionately combatted. In reality it was such that the representatives of the state, before the war, often no longer had any sense of being a servant of the people, but instead regarded the state as a thing for itself, which hovered over the nation and whose representatives possessed the claim of exaltation over all other citizens.This abstract concept of the state had still not changed after 1918, but had merely acquired another attribute.

The revolution of January 30, 1933 is not by any means the continuation of the absolutist state with yet another attribute; rather the state is now cast into a completely different relationship to our people and national character. What has been accomplished in the past year and yet will be accomplished to a greater extent, is not the so-called totality of the state but the totality of the National-Socialist movement. The state is no longer something which should exist apart from the people and apart from the movement, be it as a mechanistic apparatus, be it as a ruling instrument; rather it is a tool of the National-Socialist worldview.

This appears to be only a small distinction between the emphases in the main thrust of a political or epistemological conception. And yet the clarification of ideological assumptions is of enormous importance, because on the basis of a false development of concepts — perhaps not at first, but surely in the course of time — a practical consequence for the conduct of policy will occur. If we spoke continuously of the total state, in this way the concept of the state in itself would gradually move back to the center among younger National-Socialists and coming generations, and the affairs of the state would be perceived as the primary thing. But if we emphasize already today with utmost clarity that it is a specific political worldview and movement which claims the right of totality, so will the gazes of generations focus precisely on this movement and regard the relationship between the state and the NSDAP in a completely different light, than if one designated the state in itself as the highest thing.

The National-Socialist movement is the formed power of the thought of the 20th century, formed for the preservation of the whole German people, its blood and its character. At the disposal of this movement the state stands as its most powerful and manly tool, and must always receive anew its vital powers and impulses from the movement, whereby it remains flexible and enduring, and escapes the danger of bureaucratization, ossification, and alienation from the people. Once it is seen in this relationship, the national-socialist concept of the state becomes properly infused with blood, and we believe that the state thus receives for the first time its consecration, its inner strength, and its authority in a higher degree than if, led perhaps by energetic individuals*, it could become a goal in itself, and consequently ossified.

On all these grounds it is recommended for all National-Socialists to speak no longer of the total state, rather of the completeness (totality) of the National-Socialist worldview, of the NSDAP as the body of this worldview, and of the National-Socialist state as the tool for the preservation of the soul, spirit, and blood of National-Socialism as the powerful phenomenon which made its beginning in the 20th century.
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* Mussolini of course would have been the most obvious example.