Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler

We were exceptionally well informed in regard to our opponents' intentions, not only because
we allowed several of our party colleagues to remain members of the Red organizations for
reasons of expediency, but also because the Red wire-pullers, fortunately for us, were
afflicted with a degree of talkativeness that is still unfortunately very prevalent among
Germans. They could not keep their own counsel, and more often than not they started
cackling before the proverbial egg was laid. Hence, time and again our precautions were such
that Red agitators had no inkling of how near they were to being thrown out of the meetings.
This state of affairs compelled us to take the work of safeguarding our meetings into our own
hands. No reliance could be placed on official protection. On the contrary; experience showed
that such protection always favoured only the disturbers. The only real outcome of police
intervention would be that the meeting would be dissolved, that is to say, closed. And that is
precisely what our opponents granted.
Generally speaking, this led the police to adopt a procedure which, to say the least, was a
most infamous sample of official malpractice. The moment they received information of a
threat that the one or other meeting was to be broken up, instead of arresting the would-be
disturbers, they promptly advised the innocent parties that the meeting was forbidden. This
step the police proclaimed as a 'precautionary measure in the interests of law and order'.
The political work and activities of decent people could therefore always be hindered by
desperate ruffians who had the means at their disposal. In the name of peace and order State
authority bowed down to these ruffians and demanded that others should not provoke them.
When National Socialism desired to hold meetings in certain parts and the labour unions
declared that their members would resist, then it was not these blackmailers that were
arrested and gaoled. No. Our meetings were forbidden by the police. Yes, this organ of the
law had the unspeakable impudence to advise us in writing to this effect in innumerable
instances. To avoid such eventualities, it was necessary to see to it that every attempt to
disturb a meeting was nipped in the bud. Another feature to be taken into account in this
respect is that all meetings which rely on police protection must necessarily bring discredit to
their promoters in the eyes of the general public. Meetings that are only possible with the
protective assistance of a strong force of police convert nobody; because in order to win over
the lower strata of the people there must be a visible show of strength on one's own side. In
the same way that a man of courage will win a woman's affection more easily than a coward,
so a heroic movement will be more successful in winning over the hearts of a people than a
weak movement which relies on police support for its very existence.
It is for this latter reason in particular that our young movement was to be charged with the
responsibility of assuring its own existence, defending itself; and conducting its own work of
smashing the Red opposition.
The work of organizing the protective measures for our meetings was based on the following:
(1) An energetic and psychologically judicious way of conducting the meeting.
(2) An organized squad of troops to maintain order.
In those days we and no one else were masters of the situation at our meetings and on no
occasion did we fail to emphasize this. Our opponents fully realized that any provocation
would be the occasion of throwing them out of the hall at once, whatever the odds against us.
At meetings, particularly outside Munich, we had in those days from five to eight hundred
opponents against fifteen to sixteen National Socialists; yet we brooked no interference, for
we were ready to be killed rather than capitulate. More than once a handful of party
colleagues offered a heroic resistance to a raging and violent mob of Reds. Those fifteen or
twenty men would certainly have been overwhelmed in the end had not the opponents known
that three or four times as many of themselves would first get their skulls cracked. Arid that
risk they were not willing to run. We had done our best to study Marxist and bourgeois
methods of conducting meetings, and we had certainly learnt something.
The Marxists had always exercised a most rigid discipline so that the question of breaking up
their meetings could never have originated in bourgeois quarters. This gave the Reds all the