Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler

y the Revolution, but rather that they were meant exclusively to support our struggle for the
creation of a new Germany.
In the beginning this body was merely a guard to maintain order at our meetings. Its first
task was limited to making it possible for us to hold our meetings, which otherwise would
have been completely prevented by our opponents. These men were at that time trained
merely for purposes of attack, but they were not taught to adore the big stick exclusively, as
was then pretended in stupid German patriotic circles. They used the cudgel because they
knew that it can be made impossible for high ideals to be put forward if the man who
endeavours to propagate them can be struck down with the cudgel. As a matter of fact, it has
happened in history not infrequently that some of the greatest minds have perished under
the blows of the most insignificant helots. Our bodyguards did not look upon violence as an
end in itself, but they protected the expositors of ideal aims and purposes against hostile
coercion by violence. They also understood that there was no obligation to undertake the
defence of a State which did not guarantee the defence of the nation, but that, on the
contrary, they had to defend the nation against those who were threatening to destroy nation
and State.
After the fight which took place at the meeting in the Munich Hofbräuhaus, where the small
number of our guards who were present won everlasting fame for themselves by the heroic
manner in which they stormed the adversaries; these guards were called The Storm
Detachment. As the name itself indicates, they represent only a detachment of the
Movement. They are one constituent element of it, just as is the Press, the propaganda,
educational institutes, and other sections of the Party.
We learned how necessary was the formation of such a body, not only from our experience on
the occasion of that memorable meeting but also when we sought gradually to carry the
Movement beyond Munich and extend it to the other parts of Germany. Once we had begun
to appear as a danger to Marxism the Marxists lost no opportunity of trying to crush
beforehand all preparations for the holding of National Socialist meetings. When they did not
succeed in this they tried to break up the meeting itself. It goes without saying that all the
Marxist organizations, no matter of what grade or view, blindly supported the policy and
activities of their representations in every case. But what is to be said of the bourgeois
parties who, when they were reduced to silence by these same Marxists and in many places
did not dare to send their speakers to appear before the public, yet showed themselves
pleased, in a stupid and incomprehensible manner, every time we received any kind of setback
in our fight against Marxism. The bourgeois parties were happy to think that those
whom they themselves could not stand up against, but had to knuckle down to, could not be
broken by us. What must be said of those State officials, chiefs of police, and even cabinet
ministers, who showed a scandalous lack of principle in presenting themselves externally to
the public as 'national' and yet shamelessly acted as the henchmen of the Marxists in the
disputes which we, National Socialists, had with the latter. What can be said of persons who
debased themselves so far, for the sake of a little abject praise in the Jewish Press, that they
persecuted those men to whose heroic courage and intervention, regardless of risk, they were
partly indebted for not having been torn to pieces by the Red mob a few years previously and
strung up to the lamp-posts?
One day these lamentable phenomena fired the late but unforgotten Prefect Pöhner – a man
whose unbending straightforwardness forced him to hate all twisters and to hate them as
only a man with an honest heart can hate – to say: "In all my life I wished to be first a
German and then an official, and I never wanted to mix up with these creatures who, as if
they were kept officials, prostituted themselves before anybody who could play lord and
master for the time being."
It was a specially sad thing that gradually tens of thousands of honest and loyal servants of
the State did not only come under the power of such people but were also slowly
contaminated by their unprincipled morals. Moreover, these kind of men pursued honest