Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler

To them belong, not only the truly great statesmen, but all other great reformers as well.
Beside Frederick the Great stands Martin Luther as well as Richard Wagner.
As I listened to Gottfried Feder's first lecture about the 'breaking of interest slavery,' I knew
at once that this was a theoretical truth which would inevitably be of immense importance
for the future of the German people. The sharp separation of stock exchange capital from the
national economy offered the possibility of opposing the internationalization of the German
economy without at the same time menacing the foundations of an independent national
self-maintenance by a struggle against all capital. The development of Germany was much
too clear in my eyes for me not to know that the hardest battle would have to be fought, not
against hostile nations, but against international capital. In Feder's lecture I sensed a
powerful slogan for this coming struggle.
And here again later developments proved how correct our sentiment of those days was.
Today the know-it-alls among our
bourgeois politicians no longer laugh at us: today even they, in so far as they are not
conscious liars, see that international stock exchange capital was not only the greatest
agitator for the War, but that especially, now that the fight is over, it spares no effort to turn
the peace into a hell.
The fight against international finance and loan capital became the most important point in
the program of the German nation's struggle for its economic independence and freedom.
As regards the objections of so-called practical men, they can be answered as follows: All
fears regarding the terrible economic consequences of the ' breaking of interest slavery ' are
superfluous; for, in the first place, the previous economic prescriptions have turned out very
badly for the German people, and your positions on the problems of national selfmaintenance
remind us strongly of the reports of similar experts in former times, for
example, those of the Bavarian medical board on the question of introducing the railroad. It
is well known that none of the fears of this exalted corporation were later realized: the
travelers in the trains of the new 'steam horse ' did not get dizzy, the onlookers did not get
sick, and the board fences to hide the new invention from sight were given up-only the board
fences around the brains of all so-called 'experts' were preserved for posterity.
In the second place, the following should be noted: every idea, even the best, becomes a
danger if it parades as a purpose in itself, being in reality only a means to one. For me and
all true National Socialists there is but one doctrine: people and fatherland.
What we must fight for is to safeguard the existence and reproduction of our race and our
people, the sustenance of our children and the purity of our blood, the freedom and
independence of the fatherland, so that our people may mature for the fulfillment of the
mission allotted it by the creator of the universe.
Every thought and every idea, every doctrine and all knowledge, must serve this purpose.
And everything must be examined from this point of view and used or rejected according to
its utility. Then no theory will stiffen into a dead doctrine, since it is life alone that all things
must serve.
Thus, it was the conclusions of Gottfried Feder that caused me to delve into the
fundamentals of this field with which I had previously not been very familiar.
I began to study again, and now for the first time really achieved an understanding of the
content of the Jew Karl Marx's life effort. Only now did his Capital become really intelligible
to me, and also the struggle of the Social Democracy against the national economy, which
aims only to prepare the ground for the domination of truly international finance and stock
exchange capital.
But also in another respect these courses were of the greatest consequence to me.