Please see the introduction to this and other articles by Prof. Dr. med. Walter Groß which can be viewed here. That page gives a more detailed reference to this pieces.
Der Rassegedanke des Nationalsozialismus (The Racial Idea of Nationalsocialism) by Prof. Dr. med, Walter Groß, April 1934.
Rassegedanke des Nationalsozialismus (The Racial Idea of Nationalsocialism) is an April 1934 article by Dr. med. Groß.
[Source: Der Schulungsbrief, Vol. I, (April 1934), No. II, pp. 6-20.]
“The word “race” is on everyone’s lips today; nowhere else has the tremendous upheaval of the past year been as dramatically apparent as in the change in attitude toward this word, which was still considered heretical only yesterday. The number of books on racial issues that appeared on the market last year is almost impossible to overlook – speeches, lectures, and newspaper articles follow one another in rapid succession, and we are not far from a situation where every new word on this now seemingly outdated topic is rejected with utter disdain.
That is the picture today—but we would do well to take a look back at the beginning of our educational work and convince ourselves that this unanimous enthusiasm for racial matters is, on the whole, only a phenomenon of the last year; the danger of fast-moving times is that we too easily forget the path of yesterday, and thus the struggle that alone reveals the deeper historical meaning of things.
Until the day of the breakthrough of the National Socialist revolution, the word “race” was a slogan in the struggle for a new world, and it was met with hatred, contempt, and rejection from all sides of the old order; this applies not only to the political press of all past orientations, right or left, but also to the scientific world, which today sometimes wants to give the impression that the truth and essence of racial thinking have been a matter of course for decades; it is good to remember that even the mere study of the historical development of racial thinking earned a distinguished researcher, Prof. Schemann in Freiburg, the wrath of Severing and led to the withdrawal of support from the Emergency Association of German Science; it is also good to remember that the scholarly world silently accepted this brutal interference with the right to free research without finding the courage to protest vehemently against such arbitrariness; it is even good to remember that until a year ago, the word “race” was hardly ever found in the books and publications of physicians and biologists, and that, indeed, a strange zeal was seriously attempted to remove it from the only place where it had gained a modest foothold: I am referring to the efforts to eradicate the term “racial hygiene” and replace it with the more colorless term “eugenics,” which came to us from England.
All this must be remembered today if we do not want to forget that, in truth, there are fundamental decisions behind the issues of race, which found their outward expression in yesterday’s bitter rejection of even the word itself; only if we remain aware of this fact can the current flood of publications and lectures on all these issues be of value to us in the long run.
To understand this fully, a further consideration seems appropriate here:
At present, our practical demographic policy is far more prominent in the treatment of racial issues; the development of birth control, the law on the prevention of hereditary diseases, and the scientific foundations of racial studies make up the essential part of public concern with racial issues, and accordingly, physicians, biologists, and anthropologists are at the forefront in this field. However, this entirely welcome, objective, scientific examination of racial issues harbors an enormous danger: that the ideological significance of the scientific facts will be overlooked; that is, that the consideration of individual building blocks will overshadow the understanding of the structure as a whole.
This danger is a genuine legacy of the bygone liberal era – science, and natural science in particular, owes its tremendous upswing precisely to its loving preoccupation with the individual parts and particles of the world and of life. Its method was to break phenomena down into fragments as far as possible, to investigate each of them individually, and only rarely and hesitantly to look at the whole. This approach has resulted in admirable expertise in individual areas, but also in what we now consider an intolerable overestimation of the individual and an intolerable lack of an overall view. The pride of liberal scholarship in knowledge for its own sake, in the knowledge of individual facts, has become incomprehensible to us; what we seek and long for is an overall picture of the world that is true and strong enough to prove its worth as a guide in the daily life of the people and of the individual; all the individual scientific facts that together form the basis of the new racial thinking are only of value to the public insofar as they contribute to this overall picture. They are worthless to the non-specialist, however, and do not deserve to be learned and known if they lack a connection to the fundamental and general principles of a worldview.
This is the criticism we must level at the flood of publications in this field: with relatively few exceptions, they all represent diligent and commendable compilations of scientific facts that are of very limited value to the general public, because they lack the broad intellectual and ideological framework that alone can unite them into a whole and thus give them value.
This is where the educational and training work of the party comes in – when the Deputy Leader tasked me on November 17th with overseeing and standardizing training and propaganda work in this area, it was not out of concern that scientifically incorrect views might be spread somewhere, but the thousand times greater and more justified concern that the one-sided flooding of the public with purely scientific discussions could cause the view of what is essential and fundamental in this field to be lost; that is why we must speak here of the intellectual and revolutionary significance of racial thinking before presenting in detail, (in the next training letters), the facts that are of importance in our field.
***
When, in 1918, an order that had been taken for granted for decades was shattered, and suddenly the German people were faced with the necessity of creating a completely new order to life, the time had come when all serious people had to give account of questions that never came to the fore in peaceful and secure times; the decisive question was obviously what forces shape and sustain states, for it was these forces that had to be awakened and used as weapons in the struggle for the rebirth of Germany.
Let us quickly recall the views that were expressed at that time:
The oldest view, which has basically survived from ancient Rome to the present day, saw the state itself as a force that shaped history and believed in the direct divine origin of the state.
Whether it was based on medieval ideas of the Church or conservative thinking that granted princes absolute power, in both cases a divine right of kings of a constitutional nature was the bearer of historical life and thus also of all historical power; in the years after the war, various parties attempted to draw political conclusions from this conviction. Indeed, to this day, the idea lives on in the two forms mentioned above, living a last dying life in our sister country Austria, where it has become the cause of the turmoil and convulsions of recent months.
A bourgeois-democratic development of the aforementioned views is represented by the formal legal opinion of some constitutional lawyers, who now, of course, denied divine powers to individuals, but replaced them with formal law as it had developed in the course of history as state and international law, and who now believed that the essence and power of historical life were expressed in questions of constitution and the legal structure of the state.
In contrast to these convictions, which basically always boiled down to rigid state thinking, a new movement had emerged since the middle of the previous century which, overwhelmed by the tremendous upswing in economic life, increasingly focused on the economy and its forms and ultimately regarded it as the driving force of history – Marxism on the one side and liberal high capitalism on the other are the representatives of such views, which found their classic expression in Rathenau’s fateful words: “Economy is destiny.”
It is well known how, in the years after the war, the struggles between the parties and factions were essentially struggles between the fundamental views outlined above. As different as they were from one another and as bitterly as they fought out their differences, they all had one thing in common: a complete lack of understanding of the value that we and millions of others who march with us have dimly experienced since the war as the highest historical and political concept: the value of the people themselves.
The word ‘people’ has had a chequered history over the last three generations, and this history is a significant part of the intellectual history of that period as a whole:
A century ago, ‘people’ was the battle cry in the struggle of one class against another – the people demanded rights, the people demanded a share in the government of the state, the people rebelled against the exclusive rule of princes, priests, and squires.
At that time, the democratic bourgeoisie, which was struggling for recognition, also belonged to the people. When they achieved their goal, when the third estate was incorporated into the government by the constitution; when the citizens abandoned the banner of revolution and swung over to the property-owning, state-preserving estate, the newly emerging proletariat, the fourth estate, was left behind and continued the struggle against the ruling forces with bitterness in the name of the people; the term “people” remained a battle cry of one class, and the bourgeoisie continued to recognize this character of the word – having counted themselves among “the people” as long as they were rebels against the existing order, they now, counting themselves among the masters, moved far away from it and left the word and the concept to their successors in the revolutionary struggle.
It is good to remember in our time how thoroughly desecrated was, for decades, every word that today embodies for all of us the highest value of historical life – “the people”, as a slogan in a bitter class struggle, spoken with the fervor of proletarian indoctrination, soon spoke with the pitying contempt of the sated bourgeois—that was still reality in Bismarck’s time; it was so self-evidently practical that it caused a huge stir when the chancellor himself one day indignantly hurled his own confession against this desecration of the term: “People! People! What does “the people” mean? We all belong to the people! I too belong to the people!” No wonder that this statement by the great chancellor provoked opposition on the one hand and incomprehensible mockery on the other – it expressed a new concept that was only reborn in the battle thunder of the World War.
It is no coincidence that the pre-war period had no word for the wholeness of the nation extending beyond all classes, strata, and estates, for it did not possess the concept or experience of the whole, but, in accordance with the liberal attitude, only an understanding of fragments and parts, down to the last indivisible fragment, down to the “individual,” which in the end became the content of experience and the fulcrum of all action; its ever-increasing dissolution represents the essential intellectual development of the liberal era, and it found its end and its overcoming in the experience of war.
At the front, the feeling of fateful togetherness, of community in the great whole to which we all belong, whose law stands above us and rules us in life and death, in happiness and suffering, was reborn. In the experience of the front, the realization reawakened that this indissoluble community is not the result of a voluntary union, a contract of mutuality, or whatever other rationalistic phrases there may be, but a fateful law from which we can never escape; the postwar period found its spiritual meaning in transferring this experience, born in the storms of steel of the front and created in a unique and extraordinary historical situation, into the everyday life of the entire nation as a new sense of community – as a German form of socialism. This gave the word “people” a completely new and at the same time ancient meaning.; from a slogan of class struggle, it became a symbol of the indissoluble, fateful community into which every individual human being is born. The self-centered thinking of the pre-war period was suddenly replaced by the life, thoughts, and feelings of 70 million mighty people, who live or die as a whole, are rich or poor, happy or desperate as a whole, and in this destiny of the whole encompass all the small events of individual human beings. The individual human being, indispensable as part of this whole and yet at the same time small and insignificant in relation to it, has moved out of the center of the world and reintegrated himself into the people as a particle of that 70 million; he became necessary and meaningless at the same time, like a drop of water in the great sea.
As tremendous as this change in perspective is compared to the pre-war period, it does not represent the end of this intellectual development.
The people of 70 million are great and worthy of life and death – but under National Socialism, an even greater idea broke through and allowed us to see even further. Before the 70 million who make up the German people of our generation stand their fathers and mothers, their parents, generation after generation through centuries and centuries, back into a remote past; after the 70 million of today will come children and grandchildren, century after century, millennium after millennium, into a misty distant future. Through the ups and downs of state history, through the rise and fall of cultural forms, through war and murder, through peace and tranquility, as recounted in the books of history, the stream of our people’s blood flows from an unknown past toward a known future.
As great as the people of 70 million are in comparison to the fate of the individual, they are small in comparison to this stream of blood flowing through the millennia; if it seemed to us just a moment ago that we were floating in a sea in which we drift as drops, the fate, happiness, or misfortune of an entire generation of 70 million, seen from the height of this new perspective, becomes as small as a wave in the stream, which rises and sinks again, only to be replaced by the next; it is random and meaningless, and only one thing is important – that the stream itself continues to flow toward its distant goal…
The recovery of the concept of the people as a great community of destiny was the first stage on the path to a new way of thinking; the second will be reached at the moment when we see behind the temporal people of 70 million the greater unity that we call the eternal people of Germany.”
The Awakening of a New Spirit
“This way of thinking, in terms of generations, marks a decisive turning point of not only an intellectual, but also practical and political nature, and this seemingly simple and self-evident idea has implications that are controversial and significant in the midst of today’s political debates.
The concept of the people has acquired a character that is fundamentally different from the meaning still associated with the term in international law today; it is clear that, in the sense developed above, descent, i.e., blood ties and historical affiliation, are decisive for belonging to a people. In the political world, the term “people” has been and continues to be understood in a completely different way; much more superficial factors are decisive for belonging to a people, primarily, even today, formal legal citizenship. In the present day, under this definition, state borders run right through the middle of ethnic groups, which are to be maintained rigidly and inviolably, not only out of political calculation, but also out of fundamental ideological conviction that is historically justified and therefore politically necessary. For formal legal thinking, the Galician Jew was a member of the German people as soon as he paid his taxes here instead of in Lodz, and he should have become French or English if he had naturalized in Paris or London. As senseless as such a view is, it still lives on in a weakened form among us today in all those bourgeois minds that now, of course, deny with us the significance of a citizenship certificate in determining nationality, but nevertheless believe in the decisive role of language, for example, in determining ethnic affiliation. Anyone who, as the scientific literature on democracy has attempted, conceives of a people as merely a linguistic and cultural community, completely disregarding blood ties, is just as far removed from our organic, i.e., blood-based biological concept of a people.
Here we have reached the point where scientific ideas and concepts relate to the political and historical thinking of the new era – whereas in the past all state life was a matter of formal law more or less detached from human beings, and whereas the individual was at the same time a phenomenon belonging to the realm of purely spiritual or religious-ecclesiastical ideas, today we see human beings once again as the creators and bearers of the essential content of the state; at the same time we see human beings and peoples as a physical, spiritual, and emotional unity which can never be understood if one attempts to approach it exclusively from the perspective of the pure spirit; thus we understand that the physical, biological, and scientific facts of human and ethnic life also belong to the sphere of every consideration that strives for a complete understanding of historical life. The natural history of man joins intellectual and cultural history as an indispensable prerequisite for a picture of the world, and serves as history that does justice to the practical necessities and spiritual needs of our time.
It should be mentioned here, only briefly, that the beginnings of such a view are basically ancient – since Plato wrote about the state 3,000 years ago, clear-minded individuals have repeatedly recognized that state life is inconceivable without physical health. With the rise of scientific knowledge in the last century, increasing attention began to be paid to these connections; while [Arthur de] Gobineau made the first major attempt to explain the diversity of cultural and historical phenomena by the racial differences of creative peoples, but at the same time the kinship of cultural achievements by the elements of the same blood, [Francis] Galton laid the foundation for understanding the biological destruction of peoples and at the same time raised scientifically based demands for the avoidance of such dangers. Galton, based on this recognition, became the founder of ‘eugenics’, which we in Germany have known for decades as ‘racial hygiene’.
In rapid succession, scientific findings that had remained unproven in these first attempts at a completely new way of thinking were vitalized, and the first heralds of the new biologically justified view of history appeared among thinkers: Nietzsche passionately repeated demands that corresponded to this new spirit, [Ludwig] Schemann and [Ludwig] Woltmann continued Gobineau’s work, and at the dawn of the 20th century, Houston Stewart Chamberlain gave us the first major outline of a racial view of history in his “The Foundations of the 19th Century”, which remained a decisive work for two decades, dividing public and private opinion.
While natural science once again brings new insights, a fundamentally new picture of the forces and forms of historical life grows in the minds and hearts of our newly awakened people, often unconsciously and only slowly becoming clearer, which then finds its political and practical expression in Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist movement, but at the same time its intellectual and scientific expression in Alfred Rosenberg’s “The Myth of the Twentieth Century”.
Measured against earlier ideas, this biological view of history represents a revolution of the mind on the grandest scale.”
What Is Causing The People To Perish?
“As long as people have been interested in the history of past times and past peoples, they have always been preoccupied with the big question of the causes of decline and the fall of states and cultures; despite all attempts to reconcile history, what remains is a shocking and depressing picture: somewhere, as if out of nowhere, a people entered history, became great and powerful, conquered countries, built a state, created works of art and faith, and in just a few centuries enriched humanity with values that we still admire and are grateful for today. After a period of rise and prosperity, a time of stagnation came, which was soon followed by the first signs of disintegration and decline. The power of the state waned, art decayed, spirit and faith fell from their lofty heights, until finally, the once proud people were reduced to a shadow of their former selves, and their history was wiped out by the rise of another. The great empires of Aryan India, the Persians, the Greeks, and the Romans have sunk into the grave, and often only decaying ruins, overgrown by the jungle or covered by the sand of the desert, remind us of the great deeds of past peoples whom history has passed over.
Time and again, the human spirit has searched for the causes of these events, and such questions are by no means fruitless or idle; on the contrary, politicians in particular must ask themselves these questions at the beginning of their careers, because the nature and meaning of their goals depends on those answers.
For a long time, attempts to attribute the decline of great civilizations to political or economic causes were in vain – none of these answers were satisfactory, and they were therefore ultimately rejected by the weary belief of a resigned era, which in our time has come to regard the passing of peoples not as the result of any individual causes, but as the fateful necessity of the life of peoples themselves. The exaggeration that the lifetime and vitality of peoples and their creations are as limited as those of the individual human being, and that therefore decline must inevitably follow rise and prosperity, and old age and decline must follow youth and creative manhood, led to the doctrine of the decline of the West, and thus became the inner prerequisite for the moral and ethical decline of the postwar period, which we have all experienced with horror. If the end and downfall of our people are predestined and inevitable, then the sacrifices and renunciations demanded by the struggle for the future are no longer worthwhile, and thoughtlessness, selfishness, and the unrestrained satisfaction of all one’s own desires are justified by the futility of all greater goals for the future.
Germany would never have been able to experience the turnaround of the last year if that tired doctrine of renunciation of the fateful end of our people had found general acceptance; instead, it was shaken, indeed, had already been overcome when it found its loudest advocates—it was overcome by the insights of a racial view of history which, guided by healthy instinct and confirmed by the latest science, answers the questions about the causes of the decline of peoples in the course of history in a fundamentally different way; it teaches us that it is not economics and politics, not natural disasters or constant struggles that can destroy peoples in the long run, but that behind every national decline in history there is a biological cause that broke the strength and health of the race. It is not the favorable or unfavorable conditions of the environment that determine the fate of peoples, not climate, economy, or politics in themselves, but solely the strength of the race and the health of its blood, in which both its rise and fall are determined. As long as the peoples of the earth have watched over these foundations of their existence and protected and preserved them, their works have endured, and every defeat in war or every crop failure with its consequences could be overcome.
Only a people whose race has been destroyed are lost forever, for the strength and health of the blood are given to a race only once, and once they have decayed, they can never be rebuilt like destroyed cities or devastated fields. If we look back at history with this view, which modern science has taught and confirmed to us, a completely new picture suddenly unfolds before us, and countless individual examples suddenly make it clear how, always and everywhere, the beginning of the decline of great peoples has had its causes in the destruction of their racial substance;on closer inspection, we recognize that such biological decline, which is closely followed by political decline, is possible in three different ways, which, of course, always occur simultaneously in the reality of historical events, but which, for the sake of clarity, should be separated for a moment in this consideration:
The first process of biological decline is a decrease in numbers. All life on earth is threatened by endless dangers and hardships, and humans and peoples are no exception – wars claim countless men in the prime of their youth, epidemics depopulate entire countries, and natural disasters and famines have often left vast areas of land deserted; life in this world of struggle and danger would long since have been destroyed if nature had not found protection in the ferocity of its creatures. Every autumn, it scatters billions of tiny beings across the earth; even if millions upon millions of them are destroyed, there are still enough left to take root and grow into the bearers of life.
In humans, the will to live beyond oneself, the instinct to reproduce and multiply, has been instilled in us so that through all the dangers and hardships and catastrophes of human life, new generations can always take up the work of their ancestors and continue into a distant future. No matter how heavy a fate may have befallen the peoples of the earth, no matter how great a proportion of living human beings may have been destroyed in the moment, in a few generations they recovered to rise again, as long as their will to live was healthy and their fertility undiminished – from the bosom of a defeated race, the avengers and liberators grew up in crowds of healthy children, and at the same time the source that gave new greatness and prosperity to culture sprang forth.
But woe to the people who forgot that the way to the future leads only through children – when families become small, where the number of children merely replaces the number of deaths, every casualty of war or every period of economic hardship is a catastrophe that strikes at the very heart of the life of the people, for this leads to a decline in numbers, and thus to a weakening of strength, triggering new threats from stronger neighbors, which all too easily lead to their final downfall. History does not tolerate empty spaces, and where the will to live of a people has declined and its national strength has been broken, another, stronger people will, according to eternal laws, take its place and wipe it out, because strength and power are God-given values of life.
However important the number of people may be, the biological fate of a people is far from being decided by its preservation; it is not numbers in themselves that determine value in life, but solely the number of those who possess strength, ability, health and performance. It is precisely for this reason that nature created such abundance and superabundance of living beings, because from its infinite supply, through the harsh law of selection, it can continually raise and improve the value and performance of its creatures.
In the life of peoples, the danger of a reversal in the form of a perverted selection process arises time and again – it consists in the fact that instead of the best and most capable, it is precisely the weak and sick who are given special care; a people is, after all, a multitude of hereditary lines, all of which have different values and different capacities. It is decisive for the historical fate of a people whether, in the course of the centuries, the hereditary lines that are the bearers of the highest and most capable values increase in number and thus elevate the people, or whether, on the contrary, they are destroyed and cut off, and in their place those hereditary strains predominate that harbor inferior and unsuitable predispositions.
The medical aspect of the question is by no means the most important consideration; in ancient times there was not yet an exaggerated sense of humanity that in our days preserves even the most serious hereditary burdens until their reproduction and thus their repetition in ever new generations. In their time, hereditary strains with severe degenerations died out sooner or later, and yet the value and performance of a people shifted toward the unfavorable side due to incorrect selection, for even in the realm of the normal and healthy, there is no equality among human beings. Some individuals exceed the average in strength of mind or body, while others lag behind them without being pathological or abnormal – woe to the people who, in the course of their history, use up those few families with particularly high-quality heredity until they are extinct, instead of jealously preserving them! The result is that gradually the outstanding talents disappear, while on the other side the less valuable ones gain in importance; sooner or later this inevitably means the decline of the state and its culture. The number of people remains the same, or may even increase; the language may be the same, the borders of the country are unchanged, but the people who fill them have become different. They no longer create new values from the inexhaustible source of racial efficiency, as the generations before it did, but is content to preserve what has been handed down, until even this is no longer possible, and finally a degenerate race of imitators allows the achievements of their ancestors to fall into decay, because the power of their creators no longer lives in their blood.
***
All these dangers of numerical decline and hereditary deterioration of a people through false selection only acquire their ultimate and deepest meaning when we are clear about the role that race, in the narrower sense, plays in the history of peoples.
The word “race” is used today in two different senses, and this explains many of the misunderstandings that are found in its definition – until now, we have spoken of race in the sense of all those characteristics that are hereditary in humans, that is, in all humans, and are therefore not determined by environmental influences but solely by heredity; science has introduced the term “vital race” to describe this. Alongside this, however, there is the concept of race in the proper sense, the systematic race of the scientist, with which we designate a group of people who are similar in essential physical and mental hereditary characteristics; thus, we speak of the various major races of humanity and contrast them as groups that belong together.
If we look at the peoples who have played a role in the course of history, we see that they mostly consisted of people of different racial origins. However, it was not racial mixing that caused such diversity to grow together into a people, but always started first with racial stratification.
The ancient civilized states owe their existence to the Aryan people of Nordic blood, who created them and their cultures; wherever they encountered foreign inhabitants of the country, they did not mix with them, but subjugated them and placed their fellow tribesmen over them as a ruling class. From this class of Nordic conquerors came everything that the ancient peoples produced in terms of values and achievements, and their greatness lasted only as long as the Nordic blood that created them remained strong and influential enough. As soon as the feeling and purity of the blood for the differences between the races was lost, and foreign blood seeped in, the decline of cultures and states began, and we can follow with shock throughout history how the intrusion of foreign blood is accompanied by the decomposition of customs, beliefs, values of character, and morals, thereby irretrievably destroying the foundations on which the edifice of a flourishing culture was once built.
Everything we see in the course of the history of such a collapsing people in terms of political aberrations and economic turmoil is basically nothing more than the consequence of the destruction of biological strength, which became weak because the purity and unity of the blood has been irresponsibly abandoned.”
Nature or Nurture?
“The overview just given of the forms of biological decline among peoples, which is itself the cause and ultimate content of historical decline in general, can only be understood in its full significance if we take another moment to look separately at the last two processes mentioned, counter-selection and racial mixing, for while the significance of numerical decline is immediately apparent, the two processes mentioned above raise a question that requires thorough examination: the question of the equality or inequality of human beings.
It is well known how, after the French Revolution, the dogma of “equality of all human beings” began its triumphal march through the world in the wake of Marxism. The conviction of the equality of human beings, that is, of the complete absence of all essential differences, has been widespread throughout the ancient world to a much greater extent than it appears at first glance; we will soon discuss the serious consequences that arose from this conviction. Before then, however, we must first answer the question of how it was possible to arrive at and adhere to a view that so drastically contradicts everyday observation, for every glance at life itself shows that people are not equal – a Frisian farmer is different from a Negro or an Eskimo, but also that even within the German people, for example, the physique, talents, and character of each individual are different from those of others. It is therefore extremely important for us to understand the intellectual tool that enabled Marxism and liberalism to cling to their dogma of equality despite these obvious differences: the doctrine of the environment, or milieu theory.
The meaning of milieu theory is as follows: it was believed that all living beings were decisively shaped and determined in their development by the forces of the environment in which they grew up; the same environment, it was believed, had to lead to the same results of development, and different environmental influences inevitably produced differences in peoples. These differences were only external, accidental, and could be changed at any time by a change in environmental conditions; this made it possible to hold fast to the conviction of the fundamental equality of all human beings without having to deny the unmistakable differences between living forms.
This environmental doctrine and the doctrine of equality it supports have now provided the seemingly scientific basis for a whole series of political and intellectual conclusions; domestically, all democratic thinking was based on it, for if there are no essential differences between human beings, then there can be no essential differences in rights and duties: equal rights for all was then a logical demand. Democracy, parliamentarianism, irresponsibility, and the destruction of all individuality were the consequences of this view, and what they meant in practice was experienced by Germany in the postwar period, but to an even more terrible extent by Russia itself.
Where, with the best will in the world, the dogma of equal rights could no longer be upheld, where the deviation of an individual from the norm became so great that, even with the worst will in the world it could no longer be overlooked, Marxism attempted to intervene with completely inadequate means in the spirit of environmentalism: the born criminal, the cold-blooded murderer, who from early youth had lived his life as a social parasite with antisocial instincts, was in the past merely a “victim of his environment”, and it seemed appropriate not to brutally destroy such dangerous individuals, but to carefully educate and reform them by transferring them to a ‘better environment’. The beginnings of a “modern” penal system spoke for themselves: prisons with radios, billiards, and libraries, where murderers led a hundred times more comfortable lives than the hard-working laborers of the country—that was the logical conclusion of the belief that it was possible to decisively influence or even change human nature through external influences.
It should not be forgotten at this point that such an absurd error was not only at home in the Marxist world, but basically filled the world of the bourgeoisie as well – the overestimation of education and upbringing, which led to class snobbery and senseless educational mania, has its roots in the belief in the possibility of shaping human beings through environmental forces. It was only because the bourgeois world saw the guarantee of human value in proven school and university education that it was convinced that human values were imparted by the intellectual environment in which people grew up.
At the time when Rousseau became the pioneer of modern educational demands, or when Marx placed the decision about rise or decline in economic conditions or in the environment, this whole milieu-theoretical thinking could still be regarded as scientifically possible; however, natural science has since shown us its complete untenability. The science of heredity, which is now practically only a generation old, has taught us irrefutably that the decisive factor in the development of living beings, including humans, is first and foremost the genetic material they receive from their parents at birth – no power of the environment can change this in any significant way. It may promote the development of predispositions in one area, and inhibit or hinder it in another, but no force of the environment, whether material or spiritual, can ever decisively change the innermost essence of predispositions, and thus the nature of human beings themselves.
The full significance of this insight becomes clear to us when we consider the conclusions that follow from it; at the same time, it becomes understandable why it is useful to familiarize ourselves with the scientific facts of heredity, at least in broad outlines and in detail, for they overturn a world that until recently seemed unshakable.
Human values, both good and evil, are no longer the result of a ‘good or bad environment’, but are instead an expression of hereditary factors that lie in human blood and have been passed on from fathers and mothers. We cannot change them, nor can we recover those that have been lost, or create them arbitrarily. Instead, based on our current knowledge, we must imagine that a people enters its history with a set of predispositions, and that these predispositions continue to circulate within that people until the flow of blood is interrupted, leading to a part of the original predispositions being destroyed forever.
The vast majority of people will originally have useful, average predispositions; a small number will rise above them in physical, mental, and character traits, and a small number may be burdened with inferior and diseased predispositions – all this, let it be said once again, not for reasons of different environmental forces, such as social position, but according to the will of fate, which here reigns as heredity.
With this in mind, the important concept of selection becomes understandable: if the predispositions that rise above the average are carefully nurtured, if their bearers are protected, if their number is increased over the course of generations, then the value of the nation is raised through the selection of the most capable. Conversely, it will decline through counter-selection, when those with above-average abilities are destroyed or reduced in number while the inferior are promoted and increased. Decisive for understanding this process, whose significance for history we mentioned above, is therefore the fact of heredity, which at the same time shows us the insight that it is impossible to create new valuable abilities from outside through arbitrary human measures, or to improve defective or inferior ones through environmental influences.
This also gives decisive significance to the visible differences between people, which manifest themselves in physical, mental, and character traits – they are an expression of the natural essence of their bearers and demand the attention that was denied them in the past. We therefore recognize inequality as a universal phenomenon of all life and must also take it into account in the existence of the state.
With this break with all democratic and parliamentary concepts, it means that we take on a truly aristocratic attitude – it means enshrining the principle of leadership and a different distribution of duties and rights according to the abilities of the individual. The phrase “equal rights for all” is now replaced by the National Socialist principle: to each his own—that is, the rights and duties, and their influence and responsibility that corresponds to his particular abilities.
In foreign and cultural policy, the recognition of human diversity has equally serious consequences. Yesterday, essential differences were denied and attempts were made to explain those that were observed by environmental influences; the differences between peoples and races were said to be due to climate, diet, or education, and thus to be only superficial and insignificant. It was believed that beneath this, the general human nature and the equality of mankind would prevail – this is the basis, with apparent justification, for all the international efforts we have seen in politics, economics, and culture in the past. If peoples and races are fundamentally the same, then the borders between states lose their meaning and remain nothing more than arbitrary coincidences of historical development; this has also been the historical justification to demand that the borders between today’s states be abolished in the same way that the toll gates between the cities and principalities of the colorful German Middle Ages were gradually abolished in the past.
Over the course of history, tribes, cities, countries, and states have become the great empires of the present; it seemed logical to present the merging of these empires into an even larger entity, a world state, as the inevitable end of this development. Many groups in the old world consciously or unconsciously served such a goal, whether they pursued it with Stresemann on the path of an “economic Pan-Europe,” with Trotsky’s revolutionary struggle for the “United States of Europe”, (as a precursor to the United States of the World), or, like other groups, continued to dream the old dream of the Roman Empire. Alongside these political and economic aspirations, however, the same goal existed in the cultural and intellectual spheres: here too, the aim was to bridge all differences between cultures and intellectual expressions of peoples that were considered merely external and accidental; scientists dreamed of an international republic of scholars, a one true science that would be the same across all national boundaries, while in art, the search was on for “the” beauty in itself, which in Europe as in Japan, in America as in Africa, must have basically the same laws and forms. If in the rationalistic world of yesterday there was still room for belief in divine powers and a sense of their worship, then one could not help thinking that the belief in God and its forms would one day take on a single form for all people on earth.
It is well known that serious efforts were made to realize such fantasies, such as the League of Nations commissions negotiating the foundations of a unified European history book, or the Marxists repeatedly advocated a unified language such as the artificially invented “Esperanto”; in ecclesiastical circles, voices were raised in all seriousness for a time in favor of reviving Church Latin as a living world language.
With the discoveries of heredity, all these impossible goals have been deprived of their foundation – this is their true significance. The diversity of human forms that we see before our eyes as human races is not the result of different environmental influences and cannot be transformed into a uniform type of “human being” by eliminating these influences. Instead, we recognize the racial differences between the large groups of humanity as an immutable, hereditary, and fateful law, just like the differences in talents within a people, and it follows that our political and cultural will is only natural, that is, historically correct, as long as it takes into account this immutable fact of racial differences. This may mean the end of the dream of a world empire, but also the end of the false ideal of a human culture or art that could be valid in the same forms and norms throughout the world. Instead, we recognize the natural conditionality of national cultures and nation states, the diversity of ideals of beauty and the surrounding forms of artistic expression, and we understand that it is precisely in the deepest depths and highest heights of the human spirit that the old dream of supra-ethnic unity and uniformity will forever remain a dream.
The findings of modern science and its theory of heredity lead to such conclusions, which are revolutionary in the truest sense of the word; only those who have recognized and affirmed these conclusions know anything about their significance.”
The Nordic Race
“The doctrine of equality repeatedly gave rise to a view of history that sought to demonstrate a uniform cultural life, even in the past. All the diverse historical phenomena of the past millennia were seen as expressions of the development of “humanity,” which was supposed to progress from the simplest to the highest, thus presenting a linear development from the most primitive conditions of the Stone Age to the modern present; as a result, every historical or cultural-historical phenomenon that had ever been a reality anywhere on Earth was forcibly falsified into a stage of development of our own spirit. For example, children in German schools had to learn the names and dates of the Jewish past year after year; they had to recite prophets and psalms and believe that every word about it was a piece of the history of our own culture.
Today we see the indelible differences between the races and the blood-based conditioning of all the historical forms of the millennia. What instinct has always resisted, our scientific insight now also rejects with good reason: there is no uniform, unbroken line of historical advancement of mankind, but only cultures that are different from one another, yet each bound by blood, and thus expressing the essence of a race or a mixture of races, between which there are unbridgeable gaps because they are again racially determined.
Nevertheless, in a large number, indeed in most cultures of human history, a series of similarities and correspondences remain unmistakable: the world of Indian thought, Persian heroism, Greek art, and Roman statehood, in their heyday, are so similar and related to the Germanic-Germanic type in countless ways that we had to search for a common source of all these phenomena. Racial science has taught us with surprising clarity that the assumption already so emphatically defended by Gobineau was correct – it has revealed to us the presence of the Nordic race, which is also the defining element in the racial mixture of the German people and unites us all, biologically, as the great bearer of culture in human history. Today we know and can prove step by step what was still more of a guess in the days of Gobineau and Chamberlain: in massive migrations, originating from Northern Europe, groups of people of Nordic blood have repeatedly crossed the globe and became the founders of states and cultures, whose similarities can be traced back to this common Nordic blood, but whose differences and variations can be traced back to the different racial admixtures of the subjugated indigenous peoples. Their creations lived and flourished until the aforementioned forms of biological decay finally destroyed the bearers of the creative Nordic blood.
With this in mind, the German people of today must also seriously guard the Nordic components of their racial mixture in order not to fall prey to the same fate. We are also aware that, according to the laws of heredity, physical characteristics alone do not allow any binding conclusions to be drawn about a person’s racial makeup, and that the degree of Nordic heredity can ultimately not be judged by the shape of the head or the color of the hair – it can only be judged by the degree of achievement with which a person responds to a task assigned to them in accordance with Nordic values.”
Materialism?
“Until recently, various parties have accused National Socialism of racialism, claiming that it denies spiritual and ideological values and is a materialistic, physical worldview that must lead to the death of all true culture. Nothing could be more false and hypocritical than this accusation – it is all the more hypocritical because it was precisely the non-racially minded past that sought to derive spiritual values in their most vulgar form from material conditions in their doctrine of social milieus.
It should be remembered that in the 1860s, the Englishman [Henry Thomas] Buckle, in his “History of Civilization in England”, seriously attempted to understand the spirit and form of the literature of different peoples by studying the chemical composition of their food; the French philosopher [Hippolyte] Taine, in his “Philosophy of Art”, was seriously convinced that one could produce any number of gifted artists at any time simply by saturating people with the spirit of their age; even today, in a widely read cultural history, one can find the outbreak of the German Reformation explained, in all seriousness, by pointing to the outflow of currency that the sale of indulgences meant for Germany, while at the same time representing an influx of financial resources for Italy: contentment beyond the Alps, but rebellion and religious strife on this side of the Alps…!
If we want to speak of materialism, then this accusation applies to the forces of yesterday, not to the racial thinking of the present. None of us sees race as a merely material and physical phenomenon; none of us believes that spirit and culture are a “function of the skull.” Rather, in full agreement with science, we see in the concept of race the wholeness of human life, in which body and spirit, matter and soul, are bound together in a higher unity. Whether one determines the other, whether the physical form is shaped by the soul or, conversely, the spirit is conditioned by matter, is a metaphysical question that goes beyond what is scientifically known and knowable; however, the fact is that both sides of human nature are closely related and the reality of the concept of race can no longer be disputed today.
The concept of race, which compels us to reshape our entire view of history and the world, is not a presumptuous materialistic “explanation,” but merely a scientifically accurate description of actual facts. and National Socialism is well aware that beyond this knowledge of the differences between races and their value lies the world of the unknown, before which we bow in humility.”
The Task
“In the preceding pages, we have outlined the National Socialist view of race and contrasted it with the ideological and political convictions of the past. We have shown how significant the individual findings of natural science and biology are, which will be discussed frequently in future issues of this journal; at the same time, however, we have shown how their true significance does not lie in themselves as individual scientific facts, but only in their value as individual building blocks in the great edifice of a new worldview.
In National Socialist educational work, certain details will have to be taught and learned; knowledge of a whole range of facts will be necessary, especially for practical population policy. However, we must never forget the fundamental connections mentioned in the introduction, and we must therefore never allow people to become teachers in this field who, although they have comprehensive knowledge of the details of population statistics, heredity, racial hygiene, and scientific racial studies, are unable to see the totality of ideological and political issues, or who even inwardly reject the conclusions that National Socialism draws from the scientific knowledge of our day. This is why we have a difficult and responsible task ahead of us, all of us who are working to educate the party and the nation. The great revolution of the spirit, and with it the true fulfillment of the National Socialist struggle, is not at an end, but only just beginning – its outcome will be decided in the struggle for racial thinking.”