What applies to work as the foundation of human sustenance and all human progress is true to an even greater degree for the defense of man and his culture. In giving one’s own life for the existence of the community lies the crown of all sense of sacrifice. It is this alone that prevents what human hands have built from being overthrown by human hands or destroyed by Nature.
Our own German language possesses a word which magnificently designates this kind of activity: Pflichterfullung (fulfillment of duty); it means not to be self-sufficient but to serve the community.
The biological perspective on the human applies in other words not only to the purely physical, is not simply a question of hair color, eye color, skin color, height, and strength, but also of less tangible properties and ideals, which is to say of what traditionally is thought of as the spiritual side of man: this too is a matter of biology, race, and blood.
The objection that nature and culture are two separate entities, and that culture is superior to nature in exploiting it to its own ends, managing and mastering it, is countered by Hitler in the following argument:
Here, of course, we encounter the objection of the modern pacifist, as truly Jewish in its effrontery as it is stupid! “Man’s role is to overcome Nature!”
Millions thoughtlessly parrot this Jewish nonsense and end up by really imagining that they themselves represent a kind of conqueror of Nature; though in this they dispose of no other weapon than an idea, and at that such a miserable one, that if it were true no world at all would be conceivable.
But quite aside from the fact that man has never yet conquered Nature in anything, but at most has caught hold of and tried to lift one or another corner of her immense gigantic veil of eternal riddles and secrets, that in reality he invents nothing but only discovers everything, that he does not dominate Nature, but has only risen on the basis of his knowledge of various laws and secrets of Nature to be lord over those other living creatures who lack this knowledge – quite aside from all this, an idea cannot overcome the preconditions for the development and being of humanity, since the idea itself depends only on man. Without human beings there is no human idea in this world, therefore, the idea as such is always conditioned by the presence of human beings and hence of all the laws which created the precondition for their existence.
And not only that! Certain ideas are even tied up with certain men. This applies most of all to those ideas whose content originates, not in an exact scientific truth, but in the world of emotion, or, as it is so beautifully and clearly expressed today, reflects an “inner experience.” All these ideas, which have nothing to do with cold logic as such, but represent only pure expressions of feeling, ethical conceptions, etc., are chained to the existence of men, to whose intellectual imagination and creative power they owe their existence. Precisely in this case the preservation of these definite races and men is the precondition for the existence of these ideas.
If there are superior races, there must also be inferior races. And if high ideals and noble qualities are associated with biological race, lack of ideals and poor qualities must be too. In this system, where everything is biology and heredity, the big threat is therefore the degeneration of the race, which can happen from within, as a result of superior individuals mating with inferior, and from without, by means of an inferior race merging with a superior. Hitler gives an example of such blood-mingling and its dangers by pointing to the differences in North American and South American cultures, where in the former instance the population is largely made up of Germanic elements intermingled with inferior peoples only to a small extent, whereas in the latter instance the population is largely made up of Latin immigrants who often mixed with the original inhabitants, on a large scale, as he puts it.
Hitler divides mankind into three categories: founders of culture, bearers of culture, destroyers of culture. The Aryans represent the first, the Jews the last. The Jews possess a strongly developed instinct for self-preservation, but their readiness for sacrifice extends only seldom beyond the purely egotistical instinct of individual preservation. Their sense of solidarity, seemingly so robust, is in Hitler’s view nothing but the primitive instinct of the herd.
In the Jewish people the will to self-sacrifice does not go beyond the individual’s naked instinct of self-preservation. Their apparently great sense of solidarity is based on the very primitive herd instinct that is seen in many other living creatures in this world. It is a noteworthy fact that the herd instinct leads to mutual support only as long as common danger makes this seem useful or inevitable. The same pack of wolves which has just fallen on its prey together disintegrates when hunger abates into its individual beasts. The same is true of horses which try to defend themselves against an assailant in a body, but scatter again as soon as the danger is past.
It is similar with the Jew. His sense of sacrifice is only apparent. It exists only as long as the existence of the individual makes it absolutely necessary. However, as soon as the common enemy is conquered, the danger threatening all averted and the booty hidden, the apparent harmony of the Jews among themselves ceases, again making way for their old causal tendencies. The Jew is only united when a common danger forces him to be or a common booty entices him; if these two grounds are lacking, the qualities of the crassest egoism come into their own, and in the twinkling of an eye the united people turns into a horde of rats, fighting bloodily among themselves …
So it is absolutely wrong to infer any ideal sense of sacrifice in the Jews from the fact that they stand together in struggle, or, better expressed, in the plundering of their fellow men.
Here again the Jew is led by nothing but the naked egoism of the individual.
That is why the Jewish state – which should be the living organism for preserving and increasing a race – is completely unlimited as to territory. For a state formation to have a definite spatial setting always presupposes an idealistic attitude on the part of the state-race, and especially a correct interpretation of the concept of work. In the exact measure in which this attitude is lacking, any attempt at forming, even of preserving, a spatially delimited state fails. And thus the basis on which alone culture can arise is lacking.
Hence the Jewish people, despite all apparent intellectual qualities, is without any true culture, and especially without any culture of its own. For what sham culture the Jew today possesses is the property of other peoples, and for the most part it is ruined in his hands.
If this is the case, that human properties and race are connected, that culture and human ideals are in essence expressions of biology, that the lowest, the Jewish, exists within the highest, the Aryan, with no clearly defined boundaries between the two biological entities, then racial intermingling indeed represents the system’s greatest peril, overshadowing all other issues. The struggle to maintain racial purity overrides all other struggles.
Everything on this earth is capable of improvement. Every defeat can become the father of a subsequent victory, every lost war the cause of a later resurgence, every hardship the fertilization of human energy, and from every oppression the forces for a new spiritual rebirth can come – as long as the blood is preserved pure.
The lost purity of the blood alone destroys inner happiness forever, plunges man into the abyss for all time, and the consequences can nevermore be eliminated from body and spirit.
Only by examining and comparing all other problems of life in the light of this one question shall we see how absurdly petty they are by this standard. They are all limited in time – but the question of preserving or not preserving the purity of the blood will endure as long as there are men.
For Hitler, the Jewish question was in other words the single most important political issue in Germany in 1924, more important than poverty, more important than the Armistice and the Treaty of Versailles, inflation, and unemployment, because, in contrast to all those other issues, it was bound up with the notion of the authentic and the most fundamental of all things, life itself, huma
n life. As such, the body was drawn into the very center of the political field. The body was an expression of the state, whose purpose it was to keep the body pure and ensure it developed in a desirable manner, physically and morally, and that it did not propagate with those inferior to itself. The biological perspective was superordinate to the individual, the human being as a body came before the human being as a person, and the properties of the individual were unimportant, for regardless of how good and unselfish a Jew might be, regardless of how hard-working and innocent, he or she was nonetheless guilty by virtue simply of being a Jew. In this way, the individual Jew was absolved of guilt, he or she being unable to do anything about it, whereas the Jews collectively were condemned, associated with a whole range of properties they could never escape, and without having any say in the matter.
This is exactly how we have always regarded animals, which are condemned to expressing themselves by way of the properties of their species, a relationship they are unable to escape, a cat or a rat always at first being a cat or a rat and only then perhaps the cat or the rat. To conduct court proceedings against a cat or a rat would be meaningless, for they possess no guilt, are mere expressions of their species, without a say in the matter, a concept such as morality would be equally meaningless when applied to their lives. In the event of their doing something we find undesirable, making a nuisance of themselves in some way, nothing stands in the way of our removing them, for since they cannot possess guilt, they accordingly have no individual rights. Animals are outside the law, unless as a collective, a protected species for instance, but this too is independent of inherent properties, provided they are not directly harmful to man.
The biological perspective, whereby the human primarily is regarded in terms of race, a collective with certain properties, characteristics, and ideals and, secondly, in terms of individuals deemed worthy or unworthy according to the race to which they belong, and only then as people with particular names and faces, would, if it were to be applied in any future state, require the introduction of new legislation and a new system of law, the notion of individual responsibility and personal guilt standing so firmly in culture, with roots going back to the beginnings of civilization. The only exception to this rule of civilization would be war, only in war could individual responsibility and personal guilt be abolished, for in war every soldier on the other side was firstly an enemy, representative of a collective, who could be killed as a matter of course, and only then an individual. It is this collectivity that is signaled by the uniform, and which marching makes manifest: the one, the individual, the personal name and face are always subordinate to the community, the all, the name of the nation, and the flag. These two aspects, both canceling out the individual, one by construing the human in terms of biology, bound by the laws of nature, the other by seeing the human as a creature at war, a state in which the laws of civil society are nullified, are what makes Hitler’s reasoning as to the Jews in Mein Kampf possible. Both perspectives were common in the society in which he wrote, directly and indirectly. Alongside Henry Ford’s The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem, Günther’s Racial Typology of the German People, and the writings of Chamberlain, Eckart, and Rosenberg, the American writer Madison Grant’s book The Passing of the Great Race was likewise important to Hitler at this time. Ryback states that Hitler referred to it as “my Bible” and traces several lines of argument in Mein Kampf back to its pages.
But such racial thinking was more than paranoid, pseudoscientific theory, it was also widespread in serious scientific environments in academia, where it was presented as objective truth on a footing with other scientific truths, thereby lending legitimacy to Ford’s, Grant’s, and Hitler’s thoughts, for if they carried its consequences to the furthest extreme, they could nevertheless claim their ideas to be based on an accepted notion that race was a relevant compartmentalizer of human beings, and that racially pure and impure existed, based on facts that could be expressed in figures. In 1926, the year after Mein Kampf, a work came out in Sweden called The Racial Characters of the Swedish Nation, published by scholars of Uppsala University affiliated to the Swedish State Institute for Race Biology. It was a far-reaching and prestigious publication, setting standards for similar works that would subsequently see the light of day elsewhere. In one of its essays, “An Orientating Synopsis of the Racial Status of Europe,” Rolf Nordenstreng defines “race” as follows:
The meaning of the word race, from a scientific point of view, is a group of individuals of one and the same species, which differ from other individuals of this same species in showing a peculiar combination of certain hereditary characters. A race is always a product of selective factors in cooperation with still unknown factors, which in some way or other transform the hereditary characters.
A race is a purely anthropological concept, its characteristics are above all physical. To be sure, there must also be mental differences among the races, and these are by no means less important; but they are exceedingly difficult to find out and to prove. At present they are little more than guesswork, and though the attempts that have been made to define the mental characters of the races are likely to contain a great deal of truth, based upon good and sound observations, they also contain a considerable quantity of prejudiced and arbitrary statements. In time there may be developed something like a scientific racial psychology – at present nonexistent.
As rather certain we may venture to state the existence of the following five greater races: 1) the Nordic, 2) the East Baltic, 3) the Mediterranean, 4) the Alpine, and 5) the Dinaric. To these may be added, though they are not in the proper sense of the word European, but mainly Asiatic, the Anatolian (Armenoid, Anterior-Asiatic), and the Semitic (Araboid) race, the latter name being a bad one, because it is also a linguistic term, but inevitable, as no better one has been suggested.
The name of the Nordic race is not quite appropriate, the adjective being in many languages used also as a linguistic term, meaning “Scandinavian”; most persons of this race speak languages that are not Scandinavian. But the term is customary, and North Europe together with North Germany is the distributing center of the race, and it is in the northern countries, on the Scandinavian Peninsula, that it is found most commonly and in its relatively greatest purity. This race it is which one often hears called the “Teutonic” or “Germanic,” and it has also been termed the “Kymric.” German archaeologists sometimes call it the “row-grave-type,” Reihengräbertypus. Its characteristics are a light, translucent, rosy skin; a fair, sometimes reddish, soft, often wavy or curly hair; a rich beard-growth; clear blue or blue-gray eyes; a tall stature, with proportionately long legs and a firm, elastic gait with stretched legs; a strong frame; a long and rather narrow face with a narrow, usually high, straight, or somewhat bent nose, often with a little bump at the transition from the nasal bone to the cartilage; a narrow, high nasal root; very slightly or not at all prominent cheekbones; nonsalient jaws with the rows of teeth standing nearly vertically, each against the other; somewhat thin lips; a strongly projecting chin; a narrow, somewhat sloping forehead; weak, but quite perceptible eyebrow ridges; rather deep-set eyes; a long and rather narrow braincase (head length about 195 mm, cephalic index about 77) with a nearly horizontal crown line and strongly elongated occiput. It must, however, be observed that both the color of the hair and the shape of the nose vary a great deal. Nearly every imaginable shade of fair hair color occurs, from flaxen yellow through reddish yellow to light golden-brown and through light ashy-blond to the darker grayish-blond. And together with the straight and the bent noses there are somewhat cocked ones, with the tip turned a little upward and the bridge somewhat depressed in the middle – a shape widely distributed over the whole sweep of this race.
The Semitic race, which perhaps also might be called the Araboid race, because its characteristics seem to be more common among the Arabs than anywhere else, is considered to be an offshoot from the Mediterranean race. It differs from this race
mainly in having a higher, more bent, but also thin and narrow nose; fuller, though not thick lips; a rather light, though never rosy complexion; and an almond-shaped eye (the inner angle of the eye being more rounded, the outer angle more pointed). The hollow between the chin and the lower lip lies higher than in other races. There is a great deal of Semitic blood in the Sephardic Jews and less in the Ashkenazic ones, and very likely there must be some of it in the population of most South European countries.
Cephalic index is the percentile relation between head breadth and head length, German Kopfindex, not to be confounded with the corresponding relation for the cranium, German Schädelindex, as is stated in the introduction to one of the book’s chapters, full of tables, graphs, and diagrams detailing the results of the scientists’ fieldwork throughout the country. The Racial Characters of the Swedish Nation measures the cephalic index in all Swedish landskap (provinces), all Swedish län (counties), all Swedish rural and urban communities, the latter including the four biggest cities, mapping distributions according to occupation and social class and drawing comparisons across the other Scandinavian countries, and this is repeated for all other anthropological characteristics – trunk length, arm length, leg length, head breadth, head length, face breadth, morphological face height, morphological face index, jugo-frontal index and jugo-mandibular index, nose, ear, nasal bridge profile, eye color, eyebrow color, pubic hair color, all broken down into the various geographical and social divisions, all then correlated in a dedicated section on the relations between anthropological characters and indices revealing, for example, the relation between face height and arm length, rural community and province. The final part of the book consists of full-page plates, photographs of naked racial types, children, women, and men, a farmer from Norrbotten for instance appearing in the section East Baltic Types, Relatively Pure, a nomad from Jämtland in the section Lapp Prototype, Relatively Pure, a working man from Lappland in the section Race-Mixed Types, East Baltic-Lapp.
My Struggle, Book 6 Page 90
