Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler

the actual existence of a race which is endowed with the gift of cultural creativeness. There
may be hundreds of excellent States on this earth, and yet if the Aryan, who is the creator
and custodian of civilization, should disappear, all culture that is on an adequate level with
the spiritual needs of the superior nations today would also disappear. We may go still
further and say that the fact that States have been created by human beings does not in the
least exclude the possiblity that the human race may become extinct, because the superior
intellectual faculties and powers of adaptation would be lost when the racial bearer of these
faculties and powers disappeared.
If, for instance, the surface of the globe should be shaken today by some seismic convulsion
and if a new Himalaya would emerge from the waves of the sea, this one catastrophe alone
might annihilate human civilization. No State could exist any longer. All order would be
shattered. And all vestiges of cultural products which had been evolved through thousands of
years would disappear. Nothing would be left but one tremendous field of death and
destruction submerged in floods of water and mud. If, however, just a few people would
survive this terrible havoc, and if these people belonged to a definite race that had the innate
powers to build up a civilization, when the commotion had passed, the earth would again
bear witness to the creative power of the human spirit, even though a span of a thousand
years might intervene. Only with the extermination of the last race that possesses the gift of
cultural creativeness, and indeed only if all the individuals of that race had disappeared,
would the earth definitely be turned into a desert. On the other hand, modern history
furnishes examples to show that statal institutions which owe their beginnings to members
of a race which lacks creative genius are not made of stuff that will endure. Just as many
varieties of prehistoric animals had to give way to others and leave no trace behind them, so
man will also have to give way, if he loses that definite faculty which enables him to find the
weapons that are necessary for him to maintain his own existence.
It is not the State as such that brings about a certain definite advance in cultural progress.
The State can only protect the race that is the cause of such progress. The State as such may
well exist without undergoing any change for hundreds of years, though the cultural faculties
and the general life of the people, which is shaped by these faculties, may have suffered
profound changes by reason of the fact that the State did not prevent a process of racial
mixture from taking place. The present State, for instance, may continue to exist in a mere
mechanical form, but the poison of miscegenation permeating the national body brings about
a cultural decadence which manifests itself already in various symptoms that are of a
detrimental character.
Thus the indispensable prerequisite for the existence of a superior quality of human beings is
not the State but the race, which is alone capable of producing that higher human quality.
This capacity is always there, though it will lie dormant unless external circumstances
awaken it to action. Nations, or rather races, which are endowed with the faculty of cultural
creativeness possess this faculty in a latent form during periods when the external
circumstances are unfavourable for the time being and therefore do not allow the faculty to
express itself effectively. It is therefore outrageously unjust to speak of the pre-Christian
Germans as barbarians who had no civilization. They never have been such. But the severity
of the climate that prevailed in the northern regions which they inhabited imposed conditions
of life which hampered a free development of their creative faculties. If they had come to the
fairer climate of the South, with no previous culture whatsoever, and if they acquired the
necessary human material – that is to say, men of an inferior race – to serve them as working
implements, the cultural faculty dormant in them would have splendidly blossomed forth, as
happened in the case of the Greeks, for example. But this primordial creative faculty in
cultural things was not solely due to their northern climate. For the Laplanders or the
Eskimos would not have become creators of a culture if they were transplanted to the South.
No, this wonderful creative faculty is a special gift bestowed on the Aryan, whether it lies
dormant in him or becomes active, according as the adverse conditions of nature prevent the