ZWEITES BUCH quotations

General Philosophy

    Just as in ordinary life a man with a fixed life-goal that he tries to achieve at all events will always be superior to others who live aimlessly, exactly likewise is it in the life of nations.
    Adolf Hitler. Zweites Buch

    Regardless of how high the cultural importance of a people may be, the struggle for daily bread stands at the forefront of all vital necessities. To be sure, brilliant leaders can hold great goals before a people's eyes, so that it can be further diverted from material things in order to serve higher spiritual ideals.
    In general, the merely material interest will rise in exact proportion as ideal spiritual outlooks are in the process of disappearing. The more primitive the spiritual life of man, the more animal-like he becomes until finally he regards food intake as the one and only aim of life.
    Hence a people can quite well endure a certain limitation of material goals, as long as it is given compensation in the form of active ideals.
    Adolf Hitler. Hitler's Secret Book

    Whoever will not be a hammer in history, will be an anvil.
    In all its development up to now our German people has had a choice only between these two possibilities. When it itself wanted to make history, and accordingly joyfully and boldly staked all, then it was still the hammer.
    When it believed that it could renounce the obligations of the struggle for existence it remained, up to now, the anvil on which others fought out their struggle for existence, or it itself served the alien world as nutriment.
    Adolf Hitler. Hitler's Second Book

    Only under the forge-hammer of world history do a people's eternal values become the steel and iron with which history is made.
    But he who avoids battles will never attain the strength to fight battles. And he who never fights battles will never be the heir of those who struggle with each other in a military conflict.
    For the previous heirs of world history were not, for instance, peoples with cowardly concepts of neutrality but young peoples with better swords.
    Neither antiquity nor the Middle Ages nor modern times knows even a single example of any power-states coming into being save in permanent struggle.
    Adolf Hitler. Hitler's Secret Book

    General European democracy will either be replaced by a system of Jewish-Marxist Bolshevism, to which all states will succumb one after the other, or by a system of free and unlinked national states who in the free play of forces will set their stamp on Europe in accordance with the number and importance of their specific folkdom.
    Adolf Hitler. Hitler's Second Book

    Once a nation installs the 'majority' as the rulers of its life, that is to say, once it introduces present-day democracy in the Western conception, it will not only damage the importance of the concept of personality, but block the effectiveness of the personality value.
    [...]
    Compare the army organization, oriented to the highest degree toward authority and responsibility of the individual person, with our democratic civil institutions, especially in relation to the results of the leadership training on both sides, and you will be horrified.
    In one case an organization of men who are as courageous and joyous in responsibility as they are competent in their tasks, and in the other, incompetents too cowardly to assume responsibility.
    For four and a half years the German army organization withstood the greatest coalition of enemies of all times. The civil, democratically decomposed domestic leadership literally collapsed at the first thrust of a few hundred ragamuffins and deserters.
    [...]
    Nations must decide. Either they want majorities or brains. The two are never compatible. Up to now, however, brains have always created greatness on this earth, and what they created was again destroyed mostly through majorities.
    Adolf Hitler. Zweites Buch

    If the power of a nation really lay in its possession of arms and in its army as such, then a nation which has lost its army and weapons through any reasons whatsoever must be done for permanently.
    These bourgeois politicians themselves hardly believe that. By their very doubt of this they admit that weapons and army organization are things which can be replaced; and that consequently they are not of a primary character, that there is something which stands above them and which at least is also the source of their power.
    And so it is. Weapons and army forms are destructible and are replaceable. As great as their importance perhaps is for the moment, just so is it limited when viewed over longer periods of time.
    What is ultimately decisive in the life of a people is the will to self-preservation and the living forces that are at its disposal for this purpose. Weapons can rust, forms can be outdated; the will itself can always renew both and move a people into the form required by the need of the moment.
    The fact that we Germans had to give up our arms is of very slight importance, insofar as I look at the material side of it. And yet this is the only thing our bourgeois politicians see.
    What is depressing about the surrender of our arms at most lies at most, the attendant circumstances in which it took place, in the attitude which it made possible, as well as in the wretched manner of doing it which we experienced.
    It is outweighed by the destruction of the organization of our army. But even there the major misfortune is not the elimination of the organization as the bearer of the weapons we possess, but rather the abolition of an institution for the training of our people to manliness, which was possessed by no other state in the world and which, indeed, no people needed more than our Germans.
    [...]
    Thus, to be sure, our German people have lost possession of arms and their bearer. But this has been the case countless times in the history of nations, without the latter having perished because of it.
    On the contrary: nothing is easier to replace than a loss of weapons and every organizational form can again be created or renewed. What is irreplaceable is the spoiled blood of a people, the destroyed inner value. For in opposition to the present bourgeois conception that the Treaty of Versailles has deprived our people of arms I can reply only that the real lack of weapons lies in our pacifistic-democratic poisoning, as well as in internationalism, which destroys and poisons our people's highest sources of power.
    For the source of a people's whole power does not lie in its possession of weapons or in the organization of its army, but in its inner value which is represented through its racial significance, that is the racial value of a people as such, through the existence of the highest individual personality values, as well as through its healthy attitude toward the idea of self-preservation.
    Adolf Hitler. Hitler's Second Book

    No army with a high intrinsic value can be trained, if the preparation for war is not the aim of its existence. There are no armies for the maintenance of peace, but rather only for the victorious fighting of wars to the end. The more, in short, one tries finally to unhinge the Reichswehr [Reich Defense] from the inheritance of the old army, the more will it itself lose all traditions.
    [...]
    The German Reichswehr departs from the tradition of this glory in proportion as from year to year it ceases to be a representative of the national idea. The more it finally kills the conscious, national, hence nationalistic spirit in its own ranks, and removes its representatives, in order to give their posts to democrats and altogether ordinary ambitious persons, all the more will it become alien to the people.
    [...]
    Any military organization as such is deeply hated by this part of the German people, as long as it is indeed military and not the burglar-protection agency of international-pacifistic stock-exchange interests.
    The only part to which an army can have an inner relationship in a militarily valuable sense, is that nationally conscious core of our people which not only thinks in a soldierly manner out of tradition, but rather, out of national love, is also the only part ready to wear the gray tunic in defense of honor and freedom.
    It is necessary, however, that a military body maintain intimate relations with those from whom it itself in the hour of need can supplement itself and not with those who betray it at every opportunity. Hence the present leaders of our so-called Reichswehr can act as democratically as they please, nevertheless they will thereby never attain to a closer bond with the German people, because the German people for which this is appropriate is not to be found in the democratic camp.
    Adolf Hitler. Zweites Buch

    Today there are not a few men, especially the so-called educated ones, who, when they finally make up their minds to fall in line with a certain action or even to promote it, first carefully weigh the percentage of the probability of its success, in order then to calculate the extent of their active involvement likewise on the basis of this percentage.
    Thus this means: because, for example, any decision on foreign policy or domestic policy is not completely satisfying and hence does not seem certain to succeed, one should also not espouse it unreservedly with the full dedication of all his powers.
    These unhappy souls have no understanding at all of the fact that, on the contrary, a decision which I deem to be necessary, whose success however does not seem completely assured, or whose success will offer only a partial satisfaction, must be fought for with an increased energy so that what it lacks in the possibility of success in percentage points, must be made up for in the energy of its execution.
    Adolf Hitler. Hitler's Secret Book

    The Pan European Movement rests on the fundamental basic error that human values can be replaced by human numbers. This is a purely mechanical conception of history which avoids an investigation of all shaping forces of life, in order, in their stead, to see in numerical majorities the creative sources of human culture as well as the formative factors of history.

    This conception is in keeping with the senselessness of our western democracy as with the cowardly pacifism of our high economic circles. It is obvious that it is the ideal of all inferior or half breed bastards. Likewise, that the Jew especially welcomes such a conception. For, logically pursued, it leads to racial chaos and confusion, to a bastardisation and Negrification of cultural mankind, and thereby ultimately to such a lowering of its racial value that the Hebrew who has kept free of this can slowly rise to world domination. At least, he fancies that ultimately he will be able to develop into the brain of this mankind which has become worthless.
    Hitler's Second Book
National Socialism

    I am a German nationalist. This means that I proclaim my nationality. My whole thought and action belongs to it.
    I am a socialist. I see no class and no social estate before me, but that community of people who are linked by blood, united by a language, and subject to a same general fate.
    I love this people and hate only the majority of the moment, because I view the latter to be just as little representative of the greatness of my people as it is of its happiness.
    The National Socialist movement which I lead today views its goal as the liberation of our people within and without. Domestically, it aims to give our people those forms of life which seem to be suitable to its nature and to be a benefit to it as the expression of this nature.
    It aims thereby to preserve the character of this people and to further cultivate it through the systematic fostering of its best men and best virtues.
    Adolf Hitler. Zweites Buch

    The average man has the greatest fear of death and in reality thinks of it most rarely. The important man concerns himself with it most emphatically and nevertheless fears it the least. The one lives blindly from day to day, sins heedlessly, in order suddenly to collapse before the inevitable. The other observes its coming most carefully and, to be sure, looks it in the eye with calm and composure.
    Such is exactly the case in the lives of nations. It is often terrible to see how little men want to learn from history, how with such imbecilic indifference they gloss over their experiences, how thoughtlessly they sin without considering that it is precisely through their sins that so and so many nations and states have perished, indeed vanished from the earth.
    And indeed how little they concern themselves with the fact that even for the short time-span for which we possess an insight into history, states and nations have arisen which were sometimes almost gigantic in size but which two thousand years later vanished without a trace, that world powers once ruled cultural spheres of which only sagas give us any information, that giant cities have sunk into ruins, and that their rubble-heap has hardly survived to show presentday mankind at least the site at which they were located.
    The cares, hardships and sufferings of these millions and millions of individual men, who as a living substance were at one time the bearers and victims of these events, are almost beyond all imagination. Unknown men. Unknown soldiers of history.
    And truly, how indifferent is the present. How unfounded its eternal optimism and how ruinous its willful ignorance, its incapacity to see and its unwillingness to learn.
    And if it depended on the broad masses, the game of the child playing with the fire with which he is unfamiliar would repeat itself uninterruptedly and also to an infinitely greater extent.
    Hence it is the task of men who feel themselves called as educators of a people to learn on their own from history and to apply their knowledge practically, without regard to the view, understanding, ignorance or even the refusal of the mass.
    [...]
    The National Socialist movement would have no right to regard itself as a truly great phenomenon in the life of the German people, if it could not muster the courage to learn from the experiences of the past, and to force the laws of life it represents on the German people despite all resistance.
    Adolf Hitler. Zweites Buch

    The importance of the blood value of a people, however, only becomes totally effective when this value is recognized by a people, properly valued and appreciated.
    Peoples who do not understand this value, or who no longer have a feeling for it, will therefore also begin to lose it, due to a lack of a natural instinct.
    Blood mixing and lowering of the race are then the consequences which, to be sure, at the beginning are not seldom introduced through a so-called predilection for things foreign, which in reality is an under estimation of one's own cultural values as against alien peoples.
    Once a people no longer appreciates the cultural expression of its own spiritual life conditioned through its blood, or even begins to feel ashamed of it, in order to turn its attention to alien expressions of life, it renounces the strength which lies in the harmony of its blood and the cultural life which has sprung from it.
    It becomes torn apart, unsure in its judgment of the world picture and its expressions, loses the perception and the feeling for its own purposes, and in place of this it sinks into a confusion of international ideas, conceptions, and the cultural hodge-podge springing from them.
    Then the Jew can make his entry in any form, and this master of international poisoning and race corruption will not rest until he has thoroughly uprooted and thereby corrupted such a people. The end is then the loss of a definite unitary race value and as a result, the final decline.
    Hence every existing race value of a people is also ineffective, if not indeed endangered, as long as a people does not consciously remind itself of its own and nurse it with great care, building and basing all its hopes primarily on it.
    For this reason, international-mindedness is to be regarded as the mortal enemy of these values. In its place the profession of faith in the value of one's own people must pervade and determine the whole life and action of a people.
    Adolf Hitler. Hitler's Secret Book

    Human birth control wipes out the bearer of the highest values, emigration destroys the value of the average.
    Adolf Hitler. Hitler's Secret Book

    If this condition [dysgenic birth rates] should continue for just several hundred years, our German people would be, at the least, so weakened in its general importance that it would no longer be able to raise any kind of claim to be called a people of world consequence.
    In any case, it will no longer be in a position to keep pace with the deeds of the considerably younger, healthier American people. Then, because of a great number of causes, we ourselves will experience what not a few old cultural peoples prove in their historical development.
    Through their vices, and in consequence of their thoughtlessness, the Nordic blood-bearer was slowly eliminated as the most racially valuable element of the bearers of culture and founders of states, and thereby they left behind a human hodgepodge of such slight intrinsic importance that the law of action was wrested from their hands to pass over to other younger and healthier peoples.
    All of southeast Europe, especially the still older cultures of Asia Minor and Persia, as well as those of the Mesopotamian lowlands provide classroom examples of the course of this process.
    Thus, just as here history was slowly shaped by the racially more valuable peoples of the Occident, the danger likewise arises that the importance of racially inferior Europe slowly is leading to a new determination of the world's fate by the people of the North American continent.
    That this danger threatens all Europe has, after all, already been perceived by some today. Only few of them wish to understand what it means for Germany. Our people, if it lives with the same political thoughtlessness in the future as in the past, will have to renounce its claim to world importance once and for all. Racially, it will increasingly atrophy until it finally sinks to degenerate, animallike feed bags lacking as well the memory of past greatness.
    [...]
    This will be the end of the life of a people whose history has been two thousand years of world history. This fate will no longer be changed with stupid national-bourgeois phrases whose practical senselessness and worthlessness must already have been proved by the success of development up to now.
    Only a new reformation movement, which sets a conscious knowl edge against racial thoughtlessness and draws all the conclusions from this knowledge, can still snatch our people back from this abyss.
    It will be the task of the National Socialist movement to carry over into a policy applied in practice the knowledge and scientific insights of race theory, either already existing or in the course of development, as well as the world history clarified through it.
    Adolf Hitler. Hitler's Second Book