Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler

its life on this earth, the state, did not grow inwardly healthier, but obviously languished
more and more. All the illusory prosperity of the old Reich could not hide its inner weakness,
and every attempt really to strengthen the Reich failed again and again, due to disregarding
the most important question.
It would be a mistake to believe that the adherents of the various political tendencies which
were tinkering around on the German national body-yes, even a certain section of the
leaders-were bad or malevolent men in themselves. Their activity was condemned to sterility
only because the best of them saw at most the forms of our general disease and tried to
combat them, but blindly ignored the virus. Anyone who systematically follows the old
Reich's line of political development is bound to arrive, upon calm examination, at the
realization that even at the time of the unification, hence the rise of the German nation, the
inner decay was already in full swing, and that despite all apparent political successes and
despite increasing economic wealth, the general situation was deteriorating from year to year.
If nothing else, the elections for the Reichstag announced, with their outward swelling of the
Marxist vote, the steadily approaching inward and hence also outward collapse. All the
successes of the so-called bourgeois parties were worthless, not only because even with socalled
bourgeois electoral victories they were unable to halt the numerical growth of the
Marxist flood, but because they themselves above all now bore the ferments of decay in their
own bodies. Without suspecting it, the bourgeois world itself was inwardly infected with the
deadly poison of Marxist ideas and its resistance often sprang more from the competitor's
envy of ambitious leaders than from a fundamental rejection of adversaries determined to
fight to the utmost. In these long years there was only one who kept up an imperturbable,
unflagging fight, and this was the Jean His Star of David I rose higher and higher in
proportion as our people's will for self preservation vanished.
Therefore, in August, 1914, it was not a people resolved to attack which rushed to the
battlefield; no, it was only the last flicker of the national instinct of self-preservation in face of
the progressing pacifist-Marxist paralysis of our national body. Since even in these days of
destiny, our people did not recognize the inner enemy, all outward resistance was in vain and
Providence did not bestow her reward on the victorious sword, but followed the law of eternal
retribution.
On the basis of this inner realization, there took form in our new movement the leading
principles as well as the tendency, which in our conviction were alone capable, not only of
halting the decline of the German people, but of creating the granite foundation upon which
some day a state will rest which represents, not an alien mechanism of economic concerns
and interests, but a national organism:
A German State of the
German Nation