rise-and-fall-of-the-third-reich-william-shirer-pdf

78 THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICHa few passages which he convinced the author were politically objectionable.The third adviser was Josef Czerny, of Czech origin, who worked on the Nazinewspaper, Voelkischer Beobachter, and whose anti-Jewish poetry endeared himto Hitler. Czerny was instrumental in revising the first volume of Mein Kampffor its second printing, in which certain embarrassing words and sentences wereeliminated or changed; and he went over carefully the proofs of Volume Two.Nevertheless, most of the meanderings remained. Hitler insisted on airinghis thoughts at random on almost every conceivable subject, including culture,education, the theater, the movies, the comics, art, literature, history, sex,marriage, prostitution and syphilis. Indeed, on the subject of syphilis, Hitlerdevotes ten turgid pages, declaring it is ”the task of the nation – not just onemore task,” ∗ to eradicate it. To combat this dread disease Hitler demandsthat all the propaganda resources of the nation be mobilized. ”Everything,” hesays, ”depends on the solution of this question.” The problem of syphilis andprostitution must also be attacked, he states, by facilitating earlier marriages,and he gives a foretaste of the eugenics of the Third Reich by insisting that”marriage cannot be an end in itself, but must serve the one higher goal: theincrease and preservation of the species and the race. This alone is its meaningand its task.” 109And so with this mention of the preservation of the species and of the racein Mein Kampf we come to the second principal consideration: Hitler’s Weltanschauung,his view of life, which some historians, especially in England, haveseen as a crude form of Darwinism but which in reality, as we shall see, has itsroots deep in German history and thought. Like Darwin but also like a wholearray of German philosophers, historians, kings, generals and statesmen, Hitlersaw all life as an eternal struggle and the world as a jungle where the fittestsurvived and the strongest ruled – a ”world where one creature feeds on theother and where the death of the weaker implies the life of the stronger.”Mein Kampf is studded with such pronouncements: ”In the end only theurge for self-preservation can conquer . . . Mankind has grown great in eternalstruggle, and only in eternal peace does it perish . . . Nature . . . puts livingcreatures on this globe and watches the free play of forces. She then confers themaster’s right on her favorite child, the strongest in courage and industry . . .The stronger must dominate and not blend with the weaker, thus sacrificing hisown greatness. Only the born weakling can view this as cruel . . . ” For Hitlerthe preservation of culture ”is bound up with the rigid law of necessity and theright to victory of the best and strongest in the world. Those who want tolive, let them fight, and those who do not want to fight, in this world of eternalstruggle, do not deserve to live. Even if this were hard – that is how it is!” 110And who is ”nature’s favorite child, the strongest in courage and industry” onwhom Providence has conferred ”the master’s right”? The Aryan. Here inMein Kampf we come to the kernel of the Nazi idea of race superiority, of theconception of the master race, on which the Third Reich and Hitler’s New Orderin Europe were based.All the human culture, all the results of art, science and technologythat we see before us today, are almost exclusively the creativeproduct of the Aryan. This very fact admits of the not unfounded∗ The italics are Hitler’s.