Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler

strength, thus making us seem uradesirable as an ally. For not only are we ourselves aware
of the element of weakness lying in our fifteen million Marxists, detmocrats, pacifists, and
Centrists; it is recognized even more by foreign countries, which measure the value of a
possible alliance with us according to the weight of this burden. No one allies himself with a
state in which the attitude of the active part of the population toward any determined foreign
policy is passive, to say the least.
To this we must add the fact that the leaderships of these parties of national treason must
and will be hostile to any resurrection, out of mere instinct of self-preservation. Historically it
is just not conceivable that the German people could recover its former position without
settling accounts with those who were the cause and occasion of the unprecedented collapse
which struck our state. For before the judgment seat of posterity November, 1918, will be
evaluated, not as high treason, but as treason against the fatherland.
Thus, any possibility of regaining outward German independence is bound up first and
foremost with the recovery of the inner unity of our people's will.
But regarded even from the purely technical point of view, the idea of an outward German
liberation seems senseless as long as the broad masses are not also prepared to enter the
service of this liberating idea. From the purely military angle, every officer above all will
realize after a moment's thought that a foreign struggle cannot be carried on with student
battalions, that in addition to the brains of a people, the fists are also needed. In addition, we
must bear in mind that a national defense, which is based only on the circles of the so-called
intelligentsia, would squander irreplaceable treasures. The absence of the young German
intelligentsia which found its death on the fields of Flanders in the fall of 1914 was sorely felt
later on. It was the highest treasure that the German nation possessed and during the War
its loss could no longer be made good. Not only is it impossible to carry on the struggle itself
if the storming battalions do not find the masses of the workers in their ranks; the technical
preparations are also impracticable without the inner unity of our national will. Especially
our people, doomed to languish along unarmed beneath the thousand eyes of the Versailles
peace treaty, can only make technical preparations for the achievement of freedom and
human independence if the army of domestic stoolpigeons is decimated down to those whose
inborn lack of character permits them to betray anything and everything for the well-known
thirty pieces of silvery For with these we can deal. Unconquerable by comparison seem the
millions who oppose the national resurrection out of political conviction-unconquerable as
long as the inner cause of their opposition, the international Marxist philosophy of life, is not
combated and torn out of their hearts and brains.
Regardless, therefore, from what standpoint we examine the possibility of regaining our state
and national independence, whether frost the standpoint of preparations in the sphere of
foreign policy, from that of technical armament or that of battle itself, in every case the
presupposition for everything remains the previous winning of the broad masses of our
people for the idea of our national independence.
Without the recovery of our external freedom, however, any internal reform, even in the most
favorable case, means only the increase of our productivity as a colony. The surplus of all
socalled economic improvements falls to the benefit of our international control commissions,
and every social improvement at best raises the productivity of our work for them. No
cultural advances will fall to the share of the German nation; they are too contingent on the
political independence and dignity of our nation.
Thus, if a favorable solution of the German future requires a national attitude on the part of
the broad masses of our people, this must be the highest, mightiest task of a movement
whose activity is not intended to exhaust itself in the satisfaction of the moment, but which
must examine all its commissions and omissions solely with a view to their presumed
consequences in the future.
Thus, by 1919 we clearly realized that, as its highest aim, the new movement must first
accomplish the nationalization of the masses.