Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler

Always when in Germany there was an upsurge of political power, the economic conditions
began to improve; but always when economics became the sole content of our people's life,
stifling the ideal virtues, the state collapsed and in a short time drew economic life along with
it.
If, however, we consider the question, what, in reality, are the state-forming or even statepreserving
forces, we can sum them up under one single head: the ability and will of the
individual to sacrifice himself for the totality. That these virtues have nothing at all to do with
economics can be seen from the simple realization that man never sacrifices himself for the
latter, or, in other words: a man does not die for business, but only for ideals. Nothing proved
the Englishman's superior psychological knowledge of the popular soul better than the
motivation which he gave to his struggle. While we fought for bread, England fought for
'freedom'; and not even for her own, no, for that of the small nations. In our country we
laughed at this effrontery, or were enraged at it, and thus only demonstrated how
emptyheaded and stupid the so-called statesmen of Germany had becorne even before the
War. We no longer had the slightest idea concerning the essence of the force which can lead
men to their death of their own free will and decision.
In 1914 as long as the German people thought they were fighting for ideals, they stood firm;
but as soon as they were told to fight for their daily bread, they preferred to give up the game.
And our brilliant 'statesmen' were astonished at this change in attitude. It never became
clear to them that from the moment when a man begins to fight for an economic interest, he
avoids death as much as possible, since death wo lid forever deprive him of his reward for
fighting. Anxiety for the rescue of her own child makes a heroine of even the feeblest mother,
and only the struggle for the preservation of the species and the hearth, or the state that
protects it, has at all times driven men against the spears of their enemies.
The following theorem may be established as an eternally valid truth:
Never yet has a state been founded by peaceful economic means, but always and exclusively
by the instincts of preservation of the species regardless whether these are found in the
province of heroic virtue or of cunning craftiness; the one results in Aryan states based on
work and culture, the other in Jewish colonies of parasites. As soon as economics as such
begins to choke out these Instincts in a people or in a state, it becomes the seductive cause
of subjugation and oppression.
The belief of pre-war days that the world could be peacefully opened up to, let alone
conquered for, the German people by a commercial and colonial policy was a classic sign of
the loss of real state-forming and state-preserving virtues and of all the insight, will power,
and active determination which follow from them; the penalty for this, inevitable as the law of
nature, was the World War with its consequences.
For those who do not look more deeply into the matter, this attitude of the German nation-for
it was really as good as general-could only represent an insoluble riddle: for was not
Germany above all other countries a marvelous example of an empire which had risen from
foundations of pure political power? Prussia, the germ-cell of the Empire, came into being
through resplendent heroism and not through financial operations or commercial deals, and
the Reich itself in turn was only the glorious reward of aggressive political leadership and the
death defying courage of its soldiers. How could this very German people have succumbed to
such a sickening of its political instinct? For here we face, not an isolated phenomenon, but
forces of decay which in truly terrifying number soon began to flare up like will-o'-the-wisps,
brushing up and down the body politic, or eating like poisonous abscesses into the nation,
now here and now there. It seemed as though a continuous stream of poison was being
driven into the outermost blood-vessels of this once heroic body by a mysterious power, and
was inducing progressively greater paralysis of sound reason and the simple instinct of
selfpreservation .
As innumerable times I passed in review all these questions, arising through my position on
the German alliance policy and the economic policy of the Reich in the years 1912 to 1914-