Readings on Fascism and National Socialism Part 6

In the theory of the folk-Reich _[volkisches Reich_], people and state are conceived as an inseparable unity. The people is the prerequisite for the entire political order; the state does not form the people but the people moulds the state out of itself as the form in which it achieves historical permanence....[14]

The State is a function of the people, but it is not therefore a subordinate, secondary machine which can be used or laid aside at will. It is the form in which the people attains to historical reality. It is the bearer of the historical continuity of the people, which remains the same in the center of its being in spite of all changes, revolutions, and transformations.[15]

A similar interpretation of the role of the _Volk_ is expounded by Gottfried Neesse in his _Die Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei--Versuch einer Rechtsdeutung_ (_The National Socialist German Workers Party--An Attempt at Legal Interpretation_), published in 1935. From the National Socialist viewpoint, according to Neesse, the state is regarded not as an organism superior to the people but as an organization of the people: "In contrast to an organism, an organization has no inherent legality; it is dependent upon human will and has no definite mission of its own. It is a form in which a living ma.s.s shapes itself into unity, but it has no life of its own."[16] The people is the living organism which uses the organization of the state as the form in which it can best fulfil its mission. The law which is inherent in the people must be realized through the state.

But the central and basic concept of National Socialist political theory is the concept of the people:

In contrast to the state, the people form a true organism--a being which leads its own life and follows its own laws, which possesses powers peculiar to itself, and which develops its own nature independent of all state forms....

This living unity of the people has its cells in its individual members, and just as in every body there are certain cells to perform certain tasks, this is likewise the case in the body of the people. The individual is bound to his people not only physically but mentally and spiritually and he is influenced by these ties in all his manifestations.[17]

The elements which go to make up a people are beyond human comprehension, but the most important of them is a uniformity of blood, resulting in "a similarity of nature which manifests itself in a common language and a feeling of community and is further moulded by land and by history."[18] "The unity of the people is increased by its common destiny and its consciousness of a common mission."[19]

Liberalism gave rise to the concept of a "society-people"

(_Gesellschaftsvolk_) which consisted of a sum of individuals, each of whom was supposed to have an inherent significance and to play his own independent part in the political life of the nation. National Socialism, on the other hand, has developed, the concept of the "community-people" (_Gemeinschaftsvolk_) which functions as a uniform whole.[20]

The people, however, is never politically active as a whole, but only through those who embody its will. The true will of a people can never be determined by a majority vote. It can only display itself in men and in movements, and history will decide whether these men or movements could rightly claim to be the representatives of the people's will.[21]

Every identification of the state with the people is false from a legal and untenable from a political standpoint ...

The state is the law-forming organization and the law serves the inner order of the community; the people is the politically active organism and politics serve the outward maintenance of the community ... But law receives its character from the people and politics must reckon with the state as the first and most important factor.[22]

The "nation" is the product of this interplay and balance between the state and the people. The original and vital force of the people, through the organization of the state, realizes itself fully in the unified communal life of the nation:

The nation is the complete agreement between organism and organization, the perfect formation of a naturally grown being. ... _Nationalism_ is nothing more than the outwardly directed striving to maintain this inner unity of people and state, and _socialism_ is the inwardly directed striving for the same end.[23]

Dr. Herbert Scurla, Government Councilor and Reich's Minister for Science, Education, and Folk Culture, in a pamphlet ent.i.tled _Die Grundgedanken des Nationalsozialismus und das Ausland (Basic Principles of National Socialism With Special Reference to Foreign Countries_), also emphasizes the importance of the _Volk_ in the National Socialist state. Dr. Scurla points out that National Socialism does not view the nation in the domocratic sense of a community to which the individual may voluntarily adhere.

The central field of force of the National Socialist consciousness is rather the folk, and this folk is in no case mere individual aggregation, i.e., collectivity as sum of the individuals, but as a unity with a peculiar two-sidedness, at the same time "essential totality" (M.H.

Boehm). The folk is both a living creature and a spiritual configuration, in which the individuals are included through common racial conditioning, in blood and spirit. It is that force which works on the individual directly "from within or from the side like a common degree of temperature" (Kjellen) and which collects into the folk whatever according to blood and spirit belongs to it. This folk, point of departure and goal at the same time, is, in the National Socialist world-view, not only the field of force for political order, but as well the central factor of the entire world-picture. Neither individuals, as the epoch of enlightenment envisaged, nor states, as in the system of the dynastic and national state absolutism, nor cla.s.ses, as conceived by Marxism, are the ultimate realities of the political order, but the peoples, who stand over against one another with the unqualifiable right to a separate existence as natural ent.i.ties, each with its own essential nature and form. [24]

Dr. Scurla claims that National Socialism and Fascism are the strivings of the German and Italian people for final national unification along essentially different national lines natural to each of them. "What took place in Germany," he a.s.serts, "was a political revolution of a total nature."[25] "Under revolution," he states, "we understand rather the penetration of the collective folk-mind [_gesamtvolkischen Bewusstseins_] into all regions of German life."[26] And, he concludes:

National Socialism is no invented system of rules for the political game, but the world-view of the German people, which experiences itself as a national and social community, and concedes neither to the state nor the cla.s.s nor the individual any privileges which endanger the security of the community's right to live.[27]

Some of the most striking expressions of the race concept are found in _Die Erziehung im dritten Reich_ (_Education in the Third Reich_), by Friedrich Alfred Beck, which was published in 1936. It is worthy of note that the tendency which may be observed in Huber (doc.u.ment I, _post_ p. 155) and Neesse to a.s.sociate the ideas of _Volk_ and race is very marked with Beck. "All life, whether natural or spiritual, all historical progress, all state forms, and all cultivation by education are in the last a.n.a.lysis based upon the racial make-up of the people in question."[28] _Race_ finds its expression in human life through the phenomenon of the _people_:

_Race_ and _people_ belong together. National Socialism has restored the concept of the people from its modern shallowness and sees in the people something different from and appreciably greater than a chance social community of men, a grouping of men who have the same external interests.

By _people_ we understand an entire living body which is racially uniform and which is held together by common history, common fate, a common mission, and common tasks.

Through such an interpretation the people takes on a significance which is only attributed to it in times of great historical importance and which makes it the center, the content, and the goal of all human work. Only that race still possesses vital energy which can still bring its unity to expression in the totality of the people. The people is the s.p.a.ce in which race can develop its strength. Race is the vital law of arrangement which gives the people its distinctive form. In the course of time the people undergoes historical transformations, but race prevents the loss of the people's own nature in the course of these transformations. Without the people the race has no life; without race the people has no permanence ... Education, from the standpoint of race and people, is the creation of a form of life in which the racial unity will be preserved through the totality of the people.[29]

Beck describes the politically spiritual National Socialist personality which National Socialist education seeks to develop, in the following terms:

Socialism is the direction of personal life through dependence on the community, consciousness of the community, feeling for the community, and action in the community; nationalism is the elevation of individual life to a unique (microcosmic) expression of the community in the unity of the personality.[30]

National Socialist education must stress the heroic life and teach German youth the importance of fulfilling their duty to the _Volk_.

Heroism is that force and that conviction which consecrates its whole life to the service of an idea, a faith, a task, or a duty even when it knows that the destruction of its own life is certain ... German life, according to the laws of its ideology, is heroic life ... All German life, every person belonging to the community of Germans must bear heroic character within himself. Heroic life fulfils itself in the daily work of the miner, the farmer, the clerk, the statesman, and the serving self-sacrifice of the mother.

Wherever a life is devoted with an all-embracing faith and with its full powers to the service of some value, there is true heroism ... Education to the heroic life is education to the fulfilment of duty ... One must have experienced it repeatedly that the inner fruition of a work in one's own life has nothing to do with material or economic considerations, that man keeps all of his faculties alive through his obligation to his work and his devotion to his duty, and that he uses them in the service of an idea without any regard for practical considerations, before one recognizes the difference between this world of heroic self-sacrifice and the liberalistic world of barter. Because the younger generation has been brought up in this heroic spirit it is no longer understood by the representatives of the former era who judge the values of life according to material advantage ... German life is heroic life. Germany is not a mere community of existence and of interests whose only function is to insure the material and cultural needs of its members, but it also represents an elemental obligation on the part of the members. The eternal Germany cannot be drawn in on the map; it does not consist of the const.i.tution or the laws of the state. This Germany is the community of those who are solemnly bound together and who experience and realize these eternal national values. This Germany is our eternal mission, our most sacred law ... The developing personality must be submerged in the living reality of the people and the nation from earliest youth on, must take an active and a suffering part in it. Furthermore the heroic life demands a recognition and experiencing of the highest value of life which man must serve with all his powers. This value can perhaps be recognized and presented theoretically in the schools but it can only be directly comprehended and personally experienced in the community of the people. Therefore all education must preserve this _direct connection with the community of the people_ and school education must derive from it the form and substance of its instruction.[31]

This nationalism, which is based upon the laws of life, has nothing in common with the weak and presumptuous patriotism of the liberalistic world; it is not a gift or a favor, not a possession or a privilege, but it is the form of national life which we have won in hard battle and which suits our Nordic-German racial and spiritual heritage. In the nationalistic personality the powers and values which have been established in the socialistic personality will be purposefully exerted for the perfection of the temporal and eternal idea of life.[32]

The National Socialist idea of totality, therefore, and its manifestation in life of the national community form the princ.i.p.al substance of education in the Third Reich:

This idea of totality must be radically distinguished from the liberalistic conception of the ma.s.s. According to the liberalistic interpretation the whole consists of a summation of its parts. According to the National Socialist organic conception the whole comes before the parts; it does not arise from the parts but it is already contained in the parts themselves; all parts are microcosmic forms of the whole. This organic conception of the whole is the deepest natural justification of the basic political character of all organic life.[33]

Education, Beck continues, must present this total unity as it is manifested in the racial character of the people. Race is the most essential factor in the natural and spiritual unity of a people, and it is also the main factor which separates one people from another.

The racial character of the people must determine the substance of education; this substance must be derived primarily from the life of the people.

Even in the specialized field of political science, n.a.z.i education is concerned not with the structure of the state but with the role of the individual in the life of the people:

National Socialist political science concerns itself not with education to citizenship but with preparation for membership in the German people.... Not the structure of the state but the strength of a people determines the value and the strength of an individual life. The state must be an organization which corresponds to the laws of the people's life and a.s.sists in their realization.[34]

Such indeed is the supreme goal of all National Socialist education: to make each individual an expression of "the eternal German":

Whoever wishes fully to realize himself, whoever wishes to experience and embody the eternal German ideal within himself must lift his eyes from everyday life and must listen to the beat of his blood and his conscience ... He must be capable of that superhuman greatness which is ready to cast aside all temporal bonds in the battle for German eternity ... National Socialist education raises the eternal German character into the light of our consciousness ...

National Socialism is the eternal law of our German life; the development of the eternal German is the transcendental task of National Socialist education.[35]

Racial Supremacy

The theory of the racial supremacy of the Nordic, i.e., the German, which was developed by Wagner and Stewart Chamberlain reaches its culmination in the writings of Alfred Rosenberg, the high priest of n.a.z.i racial theory and herald of the _Herrenvolk_ (master race).

Rosenberg developed his ideas in the obscure phraseology of _Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts_ (_The Myth of the Twentieth Century_) (doc.u.ment 3, _post_ p. 174). "The 'meaning of world history'," he wrote, "has radiated out from the north over the whole world, borne by a blue-eyed blond race which in several great waves determined the spiritual face of the world ... These wander-periods were the legendary migration of the Atlantides across north Africa, the migration of the Aryans into India and Persia; the migration of the Dorians, Macedonians, Latins; the migration of the Germanic tribes; the colonization of the world by the Germanic Occident."[36] He discusses at length Indian, Persian, Greek, Roman, and European cultures; in each case, he concludes, the culture is created by the ruling Nordic element and declines through the racial decay of the Nordics resulting from their intermixture with inferior races.

It has long been accepted, Rosenberg claims, that all the states of the west and their creative values have been generated by Germans; and it follows that if the Germanic blood were to vanish away completely in Europe all western culture would also fall to ruin.

Rosenberg acclaims the new faith of the blood which is to replace the non-German religion of Christianity. "A _new_ faith is arising today: the myth of the blood, the faith to defend with the blood the divine essence of man. The faith, embodied in clearest knowledge, that the Nordic blood represents that _mysterium_ which has replaced and overcome the old sacraments."[37]

Rosenberg accepts the cla.s.sic German view of the _Volk_, which he relates closely to the concept of race. "The state is nowadays no longer an independent idol, before which everything must bow down; the state is not even an end but is only a means for the preservation of the folk ... Forms of the state change, and laws of the state pa.s.s away; the folk remains. From this alone follows that the nation is the first and _last_, that to which everything else has to be subordinated."[38] "The new thought puts folk and race higher than the state and its forms. It declares protection of the folk more important than protection of a religious denomination, a cla.s.s, the monarchy, or the republic; it sees in treason against the folk a greater crime than high treason against the state."[39]

The essence of Rosenberg's racial ideas was incorporated in point 4 of the program of the n.a.z.i Party, which reads as follows: "None but members of the nation [_Volk_] may be citizens of the State. None but those of German blood, whatever their creed, may be members of the nation. No Jew, therefore, may be a member of the nation."[40] After the n.a.z.is came to power, this concept was made the basis of the German citizenship law of September 15, 1935.

Commenting upon point 4 of the n.a.z.i program in his pamphlet, _Nature, Principles, and Aims of the NSDAP_, Rosenberg wrote:

An indispensable differentiation must be made sometime in the German _Volk_ consciousness: The right of nationality should not represent something which is received in the cradle as a gift, but should be regarded as a good which must be earned. Although every German is a subject of the state, the rights of nationality should only be received when at the age of twenty or twenty-two he has completed his education or his military service or has finished the labor service which he owes to the state and after having given evidence of honorable conduct. The right to nationality, which must be earned, must become an opportunity for every German to strive for complete humanity and achievement in the service of the _Volk_. This consciousness, which must always be kept alive, will cause him to regard this earned good quite differently from the way it was regarded in the past and today more than ever.

The prevailing concept of state nationality completely ignores the idea of race. According to it whoever has a German pa.s.sport is a German, whoever has Czech doc.u.ments is a Czech, although he may have not a single drop of Czech blood in his veins ...

National Socialism also sees in the nature of the structure and leadership of the state an outflowing of a definite character in the _Volk_. If one permits a wholly foreign race--subject to other impulses--to partic.i.p.ate therein, the purity of the organic expression is falsified and the existence of the _Volk_ is crippled....

This whole concept of the state [parliamentary democracy] is replaced by National Socialism with a basically different concept. National Socialism recognizes that, although the individual racial strains in German-speaking territory differ, they nevertheless belong to closely related races, and that many mixtures among the members of these different branches have produced new and vital strains, among them the complex but still _German_ man, but that a mixture with the Jewish enemy race, which in its whole spiritual and physical structure is basically different and antagonistic and has strong resemblances to the peoples of the Near East, can only result in b.a.s.t.a.r.dization.[41]

True to the tradition of German imperialism, Rosenberg does not confine his ideas of racial supremacy to the Germans in the Reich alone. He even extends them to the United States, where he envisages the day when the awakening German element will realize its destiny in this country. In _Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts_, for example, he writes, "After throwing off the worn-out idea upon which it was founded ... i.e., after the destruction of the idea represented by New York, the United States of North America has the great task ... of setting out with youthful energy to put into force the new racial-state idea which a few awakened Americans have already foreseen."[42]

This idea was developed at length by the German geopolitician, Colin Ross. In his book _Unser Amerika_ (_Our America_) (doc.u.ment 4, _post_ p. 178), published in 1936, Ross develops the thesis that the German element in the United States has contributed all that is best in American life and civilization and urges it to become conscious of its racial heritage and to prepare for the day when it may take over complete control of the country.

Reference was made in the preceding section to Beck's _Education in the Third Reich_. On the subject of racial supremacy Beck points out that certain new branches of learning have been introduced into the National Socialist schools and certain old ones have been given a new emphasis. The most important of these are the science of race and the cultivation of race (_Ra.s.senkunde und Ra.s.senpflege_), which teach the pupil to recognize and develop those racial powers which alone make possible the fullest self-realization in the national community. An awakening of a true racial consciousness in the people should lead to a "qualitative and quant.i.tative" racial refinement of the German people by inducing a procreative process of selection which would reduce the strains of foreign blood in the national body. "German racial consciousness must have pride in the Nordic race as its first condition. It must be a feeling of the highest personal pride to belong to the Nordic race and to have the possibility and the obligation to work within the German community for the advancement of the Nordic race."[43] Beck points out that pupils must be made to realize "that the downfall of the Nordic race would mean the collapse of the national tradition, the disintegration of the living community and the destruction of the individual."[44]

Under the influence of war developments, which have given the n.a.z.is a chance to apply their racial theories in occupied territories, their spokesmen have become increasingly open with regard to the political implications of the folk concept. In an article on "The Structure and Order of the Reich," published late in 1941, Ernst Rudolf Huber wrote, "this folk principle has found its full confirmation for the first time in the events of this war, in which the unity of the folk has been realized to an extent undreamed of through the return to the homeland of territories which had been torn from it and the resettlement of German folk-groups. Thus the awakening of Germandom to become a political folk has had a twofold result: the unity of the folk-community has risen superior to differences of birth or wealth, of cla.s.s, rank, or denomination; and the unity of Germandom above all state boundaries has been consciously experienced in the European living-s.p.a.ce [_Siedlungsraum_]."[45]