Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler

would long since have disappeared from the rest of our life if the army and its training had
not provided a continuous renewal of this primal force. We need only see the terrible
indecision of the Reich's present leaders, who can summon up the energy for no action
unless it is the forced signing of a new decree for plundering the people; in this case, to be
sure, they reject all responsibility and with the agility of a court stenographer sign everything
that anyone may see fit to put before them. In this case the decision is easy to take; for it is
dictated.
The army trained men in idealism and devotion to the fatherland and its greatness while
everywhere else greed and materialism had spread abroad. It educated a single people in
contrast to the division into classes and in this perhaps its sole mistake was the institution
of voluntary one-year enlistment. A mistake, because through it the principle of
unconditional equality was broken, and-the man with higher education was removed from
the setting of his general environment, while precisely the exact opposite would have been
advantageous. In view of the great unworldliness of our upper classes and their constantly
mounting estrangement from their own people, the army could have exerted a particularly
beneficial effect if in its own ranks, at least, it had avoided any segregation of the so-called
intelligentsia. That this was not done was a mistake; but what institution in this world
makes no mistakes? In this one, at any rate, the good was so predominant that the few
weaknesses lay far beneath the average degree of human imperfection.
It must be attributed to the army of the old Reich as its highest merit that at a time when
heads were generally counted by majorities, it placed heads above the majority. Confronted
with -the Jewish-democratic idea of a blind-worship of numbers, the army sustained belief in
personality. And thus it trained what the new epoch most urgently needed: men. In the
morass of a universally spreading softening and effeminization, each year three hundred and
fifty thousand vigorous young men sprang from the ranks of the army, men who in their two
years' training had lost the softness of youth and achieved bodies hard as steel. The young
man who practiced obedience during this time could-then learn to command. By his very
step you could recognize the soldier who had done his service.
This was--the highest school of the German nation, and it was not for nothing that the
bitterest hatred of those who from envy and-greed needed and desired the impotence of the
Reich and the defenselessness of its citizens was concentrated on it What many Germans in
their blindness or ill will did not want to see was recognized-by the foreign world: the German
army was the mightiest weapon serving the freedom of the German nation and the
sustenance of its children.
The third in the league, along with the state form and the army, was the incomparable civil
service of the old Reich.
Germany was the best organized and best administered country in the world. The German
government official might well be accused of bureaucratic red tape, but in the other countries
things were no better in this respect; they were worse. But what the other countries did not
possess was the wonderful solidity of this apparatus and the incorruptible honesty of its
members. It was better to be a little old-fashioned, but honest and loyal, than enlightened
and modern, but of inferior character and, as is often seen today, ignorant and incompetent.
For if today people like to pretend that the German administration of the pre-War period,
though bureaucratically sound, was bad from a business point of view, only the following
answer can be given: what country in the world had an institution better directed and better
organized in a business sense than Germany's state railways? It was reserved to the
revolution to go on wrecking this exemplary apparatus until at last it seemed ripe for being
taken out of the hands of the nation and socialized according to the lights of this Republic's