Centre, and according to various assertions the bastard son of a servant girl and a Jewish employer, was the German negotiator who affixed his name to a document which, compared and measured against the four and a half years of heroism of our Folk, seems incomprehensible if we do not assume the deliberate intention to bring about Germany’s destruction.
Matthias Erzberger himself had been a petty bourgeois annexationist, that is, one of those men who, especially at the beginning of the war, had tried to remedy the lack of an official war aim in their own way and manner.
For even though in August, 1914, the entire German Folk instinctively felt that this struggle involved their being or non being, nevertheless once the flames of the first enthusiasm were extinguished, they were not in any way clear either about the threatening non being, or the necessity of remaining in being. The enormity of the idea of a defeat and its consequences was slowly blotted out through a propaganda which had complete free rein within Germany, and which twisted or altogether denied the real aims of the Entente in a way that was as adroit as it was mendacious. In the second and especially in the third year of the War, it had also succeeded to some extent in removing the fear of defeat from the German Folk, since, thanks to this propaganda, people no longer believed in the enemy’s annihilatory will. This was all the more terrible as, conversely, nothing was allowed to be done which could inform the Folk of the minimum that had to be achieved in the interests of its future self preservation, and as a reward for its unprecedented sacrifices. Hence the discussion over a possible war aim took place only in more or less irresponsible circles and acquired the expression of the mode of thought as well as the general political ideas of its respective representatives. While the sly Marxists, who had an exact knowledge of the paralysing effect of a lack of a definite war aim, forbade themselves to have one altogether, and for that matter talked only about the reestablishment of peace without annexations and reparations, at least some of the bourgeois politicians sought to respond to the enormity of the bloodshed and the sacrilege of the attack with definite counterdemands. All these bourgeois proposals were purely border rectifications and had nothing at all to do with geopolitical ideas. At best they still thought of satisfying the expectations of German princes who were unemployed at the time by the formation of buffer States. Thus even the founding of the Polish State appeared as a wise decision in national political terms to the bourgeois world, aside from a few exceptions. Individuals pushed economic viewpoints to the foreground according to which the border had to be formed; for example, the necessity of winning the ore basin of Longwy and Briey; other strategical opinions, for example, the necessity of possessing the Belgian fortresses on the Meuse River, and so on.
It should be self evident that this was no aim for a State engaged in a war against twenty six States, in which the former had to take upon itself one of the most unprecedented bloodsheddings in history, while at home an entire Folk was literally surrendered to hunger. The impossibility of justifying the necessity for enduring the War helped to bring about its unfortunate outcome.
Hence when the collapse took place in the homeland, a knowledge of war aims existed even less, as their former weak representatives had meanwhile moved further away from their former meagre demands. And this was quite understandable. For to want to conduct a war of this unprecedented extent so that the borders instead of running through Herbesthal should run through Liege, or so that instead of a Czarist commissar or governor, a German princeling could be installed as potentate over some Russian province or other, would have been really irresponsible and monstrous. It lay in the nature of German war aims, so far as they were at all subject to discussion, that they were later altogether denied. Truly for such baubles a Folk should not have been kept for even an hour longer in a war whose battlefields had slowly become an inferno.
The sole war aim that the monstrous bloodshed would have been worthy of could consist only in the assurance to German soldiers of so and so many hundred thousand square kilometres, to be allotted to front line fighters as property, or to be placed at the disposal of a general colonisation by Germans. With that the War would have quickly lost the character of an imperial enterprise, and instead would have become a cause of the German Folk.
For, after all, the German grenadiers really had not shed their blood so that Poles might acquire a State, or so that a German Prince might be set on a plush covered throne.
Thus in 1918 we stood at the end of a completely senseless and aimless squandering of the most precious German blood.
Once more had our Folk infinitely staked its heroism, courageous sacrifice, indeed defiance of death and joyousness in responsibility, and nevertheless been forced to leave the battlefields weakened and beaten.
Victorious in a thousand battles and skirmishes, and in the end nevertheless defeated by those who had been beaten. This was the handwriting on the wall for the German domestic and foreign policy of the pre War time and the four and a half years of the bloody struggle itself.
Now after the collapse there arose the alarmed question, whether our German Folk had learned anything from this catastrophe, whether those who had deliberately betrayed it up to this time would still determine its fate, whether those who had so pitifully failed until this time would henceforth also dominate the future with their phrases, or whether finally our Folk would be educated to a new way of thinking about domestic and foreign policy and shift its action accordingly.
For if a miracle does not take place for our Folk, its path will be one of ultimate doom and destruction.
What is Germany’s present situation? And what are the prospects for her future? And what kind of a future will this be?
The collapse which the German Folk suffered in 1918 lies, as I want once more to establish here, not in the overthrow of its military organisation, or in the loss of its weapons, but rather in its inner decay which was revealed at that time, and which today increasingly appears. This inner decay lies just as much in respect to the worsening of its racial value as in the loss of all those virtues which condition the greatness of a Folk, guarantee its existence, and promote its future.
Blood value, the idea of personality, and the instinct for self preservation, slowly threatened to be lost to the German Folk. Internationalism triumphs in its stead and destroys our Folk value, democracy spreads by stifling the idea of personality, and in the end an evil pacifistic liquid manure poisons the mentality favouring bold self preservation. We see the effects of this vice of mankind appear in the whole life of our Folk. Not only does it make itself noticeable in the field of political concerns, no, but also in that of economy, and not least in that of our cultural life, so that, if it is not brought to a halt once and for all, our Folk will be excluded from the number of nations with a future.
The great domestic task of the future lies in the elimination of these general symptoms of the decay of our Folk.
This is the mission of the National Socialist Movement. A new nation must arise from this work which overcomes even the worst evils of the present, the cleavage between the classes, for which the bourgeoisie and Marxism are equally guilty.
The aim of this reform work of a domestic political kind must finally be the regaining of our Folk’s strength for the prosecution of its struggle for existence and thereby the strength to represent its vital interests abroad.
Our foreign policy is also presented by this with a task that it must fulfil. For the more domestic policy must furnish the Folkish instrument of strength to foreign policy, the more must also foreign policy, through the actions and measures it adopts, promote and support the formation of this instrument.
If the foreign policy task of the old bourgeois national State had primarily been that of the further unification in Europe of those belonging to the German Nation in order then to work up to a higher territorial policy viewed in Folkish terms, then the foreign policy task of the post War period must at the outset be one that promotes the forging of the internal instrument of power. For the foreign policy aspirations of the pre War period had at their disposal a State that perhaps was not very highly exigent in a Folkish sense, but which had a wonderful Army establishment. Even if Germany of that time had long since ceased to place such an emphasis on the military, as for example Old Prussia, and therefore was outmatched by other States, especially in the extent of the Army organisation, nevertheless the inner quality of the Old Army was incomparably superior to all other similar institutions. At that time this best instrument of the art of war stood at the disposal of a State leadership with a bold foreign policy. In consequence of this instrument as well as of the general high esteem which it enjoyed, the freedom of our Folk was not only a result of our factually proved strength, but rather of the general credit that we possessed in consequence of this remarkable Army instrument, as well as partly in consequence of the rest of the exemplarily clean State apparatus.
The German Folk no longer possesses this most important instrument for the defence of a nation’s interests,
