Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler

One day I asked for the floor. One of the participants felt obliged to break a lance for the
Jews and began to defend them in lengthy arguments. This aroused me to an answer. The
overwhelming majority of the students present took my standpoint The result was that a few
days later I was sent into a Munich regiment as a so-called 'educational officer.'
Discipline among the men was still comparatively weak at that time. It suffered from the
after-effects of the period of soldiers' councils. Only very slowly and cautiously was it possible
to replace voluntary obedience-the pretty name that was given to the pig-sty under Kurt
Eisner-by the old military discipline and subordination. Accordingly, the men were now
expected to learn to feel and think in a national and patriotic way. In these two directions lay
the field of my new activity.
I started out with the greatest enthusiasm and love. For all at once I was offered an
opportunity of speaking before a larger audience; and the thing that I had always presumed
from pure feeling without knowing it was now corroborated: I could 'speak.' My voice, too,
had grown so much better that I could be sufficiently understood at least in every corner of
the small squad rooms.
No task could make me happier than this, for now before being discharged I was able to
perform useful services to the institution which had been so close to my heart: the army.
And I could boast of some success: in the course of my lectures I led many hundreds, indeed
thousands, of comrades back to their people and fatherland. I 'nationalized' the troops and
was thus also able to help strengthen the general discipline.
Here again I became acquainted with a number of like-minded comrades, who later began to
form the nucleus of the new movement.