I still wish briefly to take a position on the question as to what extent the demand for soil and territory seems ethically and morally justified. This is necessary, since unfortunately, even in socalled folkish circles, all sorts of unctuous bigmouths step forward, endeavoring to set the rectification of the injustice of 1918 as the aim of the German nation’s endeavors in the field of foreign affairs, but at the same time find it necessary to assure the whole world of folkish brotherhood and sympathy.
I should like to make the following preliminary remarks: The demand for restoration of the frontiers of 1914 is a political absurdity of ssxch proportions and consegsxences as to make it seem a crime. Quite aside from the fact that the Reich’s frontiers in 19X4 were anything but logical. For in reality they were neither complete in the sense of embracing the people of German nationality, nor sensible with regard to geomilitary expediency. They were not the result of a considered political action, but momentary frontiers in a political struggle that was by no means concluded; partly, in fact, they were the results of chance. With equal right and in many cases with more right, some other sample year of German history could be picked out, and the restoration of the conditions at that time declared to be the aim of an activity in foreign affairs. The above demand is entirely suited to our bourgeois society, which here as elsewhere does not possess a single creative political idea for the future, but lives only in the past, in fact, in the most immediate past; for even their backward gaze does not extend beyond their own times. The law of inertia binds them to a given situation and causes them to resist any change in it, but without ever increasing the activity of this opposition beyond the mere power of perseverance. So it is obvious that the political horizon of these people does not extend beyond the year 1914. By proclaiming the restoration of those borders as the political aim of their activity, they keep mending the crumbling league of our adversaries. Only in this way can it be explained that eight years after a world struggle in which states, some of which had the most heterogeneous desires, took part, the coalition of the victors of those days can still maintain itself in a more or less unbroken form.
All these states were at one time beneficiaries of the German collapse. Fear of our strength caused the greed and envy of the individual great powers among themselves to recede. By grabbing as much of the Reich as they could, they found the best guard against a future uprising. A bad conscience and fear of our people’s strength is still the most enduring cement to hold together the various members of this alliance.
And we do not disappoint them. By setting up the restoration of the borders of 1914 as a political program for Germany, our bourgeoisie frighten away every pa rtner who might desire to leave the league of our enemies, since he must inevitably fear to be attacked singly and thereby lose the protection of his individual fellow allies. Each single state feels concerned and threatened by this slogan.
Moreover, it is senseless in two respects:
For it should scarcely seem questionable to anyone that ever the restoration of the frontiers of 1914 could be achieved only by blood. Only childish and naive minds can lull themselves in the idea that they can bring about a correction of Versailles by wheedling and begging. Quite aside from the fact that such an attempt would presuppose a man of Talleyrand’s talents, which we do not possess. One half of our political figures consist of extremely sly, but equally spineless elements which are hostile toward our nation to begin with, while the other is composed of goodnatured, harmless, and easygoing softheads. Moreover, the times have changed since the Congress of Vienna: Today it is not princes and princes’ mistresses who haggle and bargain over state borders; it is the inexorable Jew who struggles for his domination over the nations. No nation can remove this hand from its throat except by the sword. Only the assembled and concentrated might of a national passion rearing up in its strength can defy the international enslavement of peoples. Such a process is and remains a bloody one.
If, however, we harbor the conviction that the German future, regardless what happens, demands the supreme sacrifice, quite aside from all considerations of political expediency as such, we must set up an aim worthy of this sacrifice and fight for it.
The boundaries of the year 1914 mean nothing at all for the German future. Neither did they provide a defense of the past, nor would they contain any strength for the future. Through them the German nation will neither achieve its inner integrity, nor will its sustenance be safeguarded by them, nor do these boundaries, viewed from the military standpoint, seem expedient or even satisfactory, nor finally can they improve the relation in which we at present find ourselves toward the other world powers, or, better expressed, the real world powers. The lag behind England will not be caught up, the magnitude of the Union will not be achieved; not even France would experience a material diminution of her worldpolitical importance.
Only one thing would be certain: even with a favorable outcome, such an attempt to restore the borders of 1914 would lead to a further bleeding of our national body, so much so that there would be no worthwhile blood left to stake for the decisions and actions really to secure the nation’s future. On the contrary, drunk with such a shallow success, we should renounce any further goals, all the more readily as ‘national honor’ would be repaired and, for the moment at least, a few doors would have been reopened to commercial development.
As opposed to this, we National Socialists must hold unflinchingly to our aim in foreign policy, namely, to secure for the German people the land and soil to which they are entitled on this earth. And this action is the only one which, before God and our German posterity, would make any sacrifice of blood seem justified: before God, since we have been put on this earth with the mission of eternal struggle for our daily bread, beings who receive nothing as a gift, and who owe their position as lords of the earth only to the genius and the courage with which they can conquer and defend it; and before our German posterity in so far as we have shed no citizen’s blood out of which a thousand others are not bequeathed to posterity. The soil on which some day German generations of peasants can beget powerful sons will sanction the investment of the sons of today, and will some day acquit the responsible statesmen of bloodguilt and sacrifice of the people, even if they are persecuted by their contemporaries.
And I must sharply attack those folkish penpushers who claim to regard such an acquisition of soil as a ‘breach of sacred human rights’ and attack it as such in their scribblings. One never knows who stands behind these fellows. But one thing is certain, that the confusion they can create is desirable and convenient to our national enemies. By such an attitude they help to weaken and destroy from within our people’s will for the only correct way of defending their vital needs. For no people on this earth possesses so much as a square yard of territory on the strength of a higher will or superior right. Just as Germany’s frontiers are fortuitous frontiers, momentary frontiers in the current political struggle of any period, so are the boundaries of other nations’ living space. And just as the shape of our earth’s Furnace can seem immutable as granite only to the thoughtless softhead, but in reality only represents at each period an apparent pause in a continuous development, created by the mighty forces of Nature in a process of continuous growth, only to be transformed or destroyed tomorrow by greater forces, likewise the boundaries of living spaces in the life of nations.
State boundaries are made by man and changed by man.
The fact that a nation has succeeded in acquiring an undue amount of soil constitutes no higher obligation that it should be recognized eternally. At most it proves the strength of the conquerors and the weakness of the nations. And in this case, right lies in this strength alone. If the German nation today, penned into an impossible area, faces a lamentable future, this is no more a commandment of Fate than revolt against this state of affairs constitutes an affront to Fate. No more than any higher power has promised another nation more territory than the Gerrnan nation, or is offended by the fact of this unjust distribution of the soil. Just as our ancestors did not receive the soil on which we live today as a gift from Heaven, but had to fight for it at the risk of their lives, in the future no folkish grace will win soil for us and hence life for our people, but only the might of a victorious sword.
Much as all of us today recognize the necessity of a reckoning with France, it would remain ineffectual in the long run if it represented the whole of our aim in foreign policy. It can and will achieve meaning only if it offers the rear cover for an enlargement of our people’s living space in Europe. For it is not in colonial acquisitions that we must see the solution of this problem, but exclusively in the acquisition of a territory for settlement, which will enhance the area of the mother country, and hence not only keep the new settlers in the most intimate community with the land of their origin, but secure for the total area those advantages which lie in its unified magnitude.
The folkish movement must not be the champion of other peoples, but the vanguard fighter of its own. Otherwise it is superfluous and above all has no right to sulk about the past. For in that case it is behaving in exactly tbe same wav. The old German policy was wrongly determined by dynastic considerations, and the future policy must not be directed by cosmopolitan folkish drivel. In particular, we are not constables guarding the wellknown ‘poor little nations,’ but soldiers of our own nation.
But we National Socialists must go further. The right to possess soil can become a duty if without extension of its soil a great nation seems doomed to destruction. And most especially when not some little negro nation or other is involved, but the Germanic mother of life, which has given the presentday world its cultural picture. Germany will either be a world power or there will be no Germany. And for world power she needs that magnitude which will give her the position she needs in the present period, and life to her citizens.
And so we National Socialists consciously draw a line beneath the foreign policy tendency of our preWar period. We take up where we broke off six hundred years ago. We stop the endless German movement to the south and west, and turn our gaze toward the land in the east. At long last we break of the colonial and commercial policy of the preWar period and shift to the soil policy of the future.
If we speak of soil in Europe today, we can primarily have in mind only Russia and her vassal border states.
Here Fate itself seems desirous of giving us a sign. By handing P ussia to Bolshevism, it robbed the Russian nation of that intelligentsia which previously brought about and guaranteed its existence as a state. For the organization of a Russian state formation was not the result of the political abilities of the Slavs in Russia, but only a wonderful example of the stateforming efficacity of the German element in an inferior race. Numerous mighty empires on earth have been created in this way. Lower nations led by Germanic organizers and overlords have more than once grown to be mighty state formations and have endured as long as the racial nudeus of the creative state race maintained itself. For centuries Russia drew nourishment from this Germanic nucleus of its upper leading strata. Today it can be regarded as almost totally exterminated and extinguished. It has been replaced by the Jew. Impossible as it is for the Russian by himself to shake off the yoke of the Jew by his own resources, it is equally impossible for the Jew to maintain the mighty empire forever. He himself is no element of organization, but a ferment of decomposition. The Persian I empire in the east is ripe for collapse. And the end of Jewish rule in Russia will also be the end of Russia as a state. We have been chosen by Fate as witnesses of a catastrophe which will be the mightiest confirmation of the soundness of the folkish theory.
Our task, the mission of the National Socialist movement, is to bring our own people to such political insight that they will not see their goal for the future in the breathtaking sensation of a new Alexander’s conquest, but in the industrious work of the German plow, to which the sword need only give soil.
It goes without saying that the Jews announce the sharpest resistance to such a policy. Better than anyone else they sense the significance of this action for their own future. This very fact should teach all really nationalminded men the correctness of such a reorientation. Unfortunately, the opposite is the case. Not only in GermanNational, but even in ‘folkish’ circles, the idea of such an eastern policy is violently attacked, and, as almost always in such matters, they appeal to a higher authority. The spirit of Bismarck is cited to cover a policy which is as senseless as it is impossible and in the highest degree harmful to the German nation. Bismarck in his time, they say, always set store on good relations with Russia. This, to a certain extent, is true. But they forget to mention that he set just as great store on good relations with Italy, for example; in fact, that the same Herr von Bismarck once made an alliance with Italy in order to finish off Austria the more easily. Why, then, don’t they continue this policy? ‘Because the Italy of today is not the Italy of those days,’ they will say. Very well. But then, honored sirs, will you permit the objection that presentday Russia is not the Russia of those days either? It never entered Bismarck’s head to lay down a political course tactically and theoretically for all time. In this respect he was too much master of the moment to tie his hands in such a way. The question, therefore, most not be: What did Bismarsk do in his time? But rather: What would he do today? And this question is easier to answer. With his political astuteness, he would never ally himself unth a state that is downed to destruction.
Furthermore, Bismarck even then viewed the German colonial and commercial policy with mixed feelings, since for the moment he was concerned only with the surest method of internally consolidating the state formation he had created. And this was the only reason why at that time he welcomed the Russian rear cover, which gave him a free hand in the west. But what was profitable to Germany then would be detrimental today.
As early as 1920 21, when the young National Socialist movement began slowly to rise above the political horizon, and here and there was referred to as the movement for German freedom, the party was approached by various quarters with an attempt to create a certain bond between it and the movements for freedom in other countries. This was in the line of the ‘ League of Oppressed Nations,’ propagated by many. Chiefly involved were representatives of various Balkan states, and some from Egypt and India, who as individuals always impressed me as pompous bigmouths without any realistic background. But there were not a few Germans, especially in the nationalist camp, who let themselves be dazzled by such inflated Orientals and readily accepted any old Indian or Egyptian student from God knows where as a ‘representative’ of India or Egypt. These people never realized that they were usually dealing with persons who had absolutely nothing behind them, and above all were authorized by no one to conclude any pact with anyone, so that the practical result of any relations with such elements was nil, unless the time wasted were booked as a special loss. I always resisted such attempts. Not only that I had better things to do than twiddle away weeks in fruitless ‘conferences,’ but even if these men had been authorized representatives of such nations, I regarded the whole business as useless, in fact, harmful.