Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler

national instinct of self-preservation, the will for self-preservation, were lacking. The best
weapon is dead, worthless material as long as the spirit is lacking which is ready, willing,
and determined to use it. Germany became defenseless, not because arms were lacking, but
because the will was lacking to guard the weapon for national survival.
If today more than ever our Left politicians are at pains to point out the lack of arms as the
necessary cause of their spineless, compliant, actually treasonous policy, we must answer
only one thing: no, the reverse is true. Through your anti-national, criminal policy of
abandoning national interests, you surrendered our arms. Now you attempt to represent the
lack of arms as the underlying cause of your miserable villainy. This, like everything you do,
is lees and falsification.
But this reproach applies just as much to the politicians on the Right. For, thanks to their
miserable cowardice, the Jewish rabble that had come to power was able in 1918 to steal the
nation's arms. They, too, have consequently no ground and no right to palm off our present
lack of arms as the compelling ground for their wily caution (read ' cowardice '); on the
contrary, our defenselessness is the consequence of their cowardice.
Consequently the question of regaining German power is not: How shall we manufacture
arms? but: How shall we manufacture the spirit which enables a people to bear arms? If this
spirit dominates a people, the will finds a thousand ways, every one of which ends in a
weapon ! But give a coward ten pistols and if attacked he will not be able to fire a single shot.
And so for him they are more worthless than a knotted stick for a courageous man.
The question of regaining our people's political power is primarily a question of recovering
our national instinct of self preservation, if for no other reason because experience shows
that any preparatory foreign policy, as well as any evaluation of a state as such, takes its cue
less from the existing weapons than from a nation's recognized or presumed moral capacity
for resistance. A nation1s ability to form alliances is determined much less by dead stores of
existing arms than by the visible presence of an ardent national will for self-preservation and
heroic death-defying courage. For an alliance is not concluded with arms but with men.
Thus, the English nation will have to be considered the most valuable ally in the world as
long as its leadership and the spirit of its byroad masses justify us in expecting that brutality
and perseverance which is determined to fight a battle once begun t04 victorious end, with
every means and without consideration of time and sacrifices; and what is more, the military
armament existing at any given moment does not need to stand in any proportion to that of
other states.
If we understand that the resurrection of the German nation represents a question of
regaining our political will for self-preservation, it is also clear that this cannot be done by
winning elements which in point of will at least are already national, but only by the
nationalization of the consciously anti-national masses.
A young movement which, therefore, sets itself the goal of resurrecting a German state with
its own sovereignty will have to direct its fight entirely to winning the broad masses.
Wretched as our so-called ' national bourgeoisie ' is on the whole, inadequate as its national
attitude seems, certainly from this side no serious resistance is to be expected against a
powerful domestic and foreign policy in the future. Even if the German bourgeoisie, for their
well-known narrowminded and short-sighted reasons, should, as they once did toward
Bismarck, maintain an obstinate attitude of passive resistance in the hour of coming
liberation- an active resistance, in view of their recognized and proverbial cowardice, is never
to be feared.
It is different with the masses of our internationally minded comrades. In their natural
primitiveness, they are snore inclined to the idea of violence, and, moreover, their Jewish
leadership is more brutal and ruthless. They will crush any German resurrection Just as
they once broke the backbone of the German army. But above all: in this state with its
parliamentary government they will, thanks to their majority in numbers, not only obstruct
any national foreign policy, but also make impossible any higher estimation of the German