Unknown men. Unknown soldiers of history. And truly, how indifferent is the present. How unfounded its eternal optimism, and how ruinous its wilful ignorance, its incapacity to see, and its unwillingness to learn. And if it depended on the broad masses, the game of the child playing with the fire with which he is unfamiliar would repeat itself uninterruptedly and also to an infinitely greater extent. Hence it is the task of men who feel themselves called as educators of a Folk to learn on their own from history, and to apply their knowledge in a practical manner [now], without regard to the view, understanding, ignorance or even the refusal of the mass.
The greatness of a man is all the more important, the greater his courage, in opposition to a generally prevailing but ruinous view, to lead by his better insight to general victory. His victory will appear all the greater, the more enormous the resistances which had to be overcome, and the more hopeless the struggle seemed at first.
The National Socialist Movement would have no right to regard itself as a truly great phenomenon in the life of the German Folk, if it could not muster the courage to learn from the experiences of the past, and to force the laws of life it represents on the German Folk despite all resistance. As powerful as its inner reform work will be in this connection, equally it must [may] never forget that in the long run there will be no resurgence of our Folk if its activity in the sphere of foreign policy does not succeed in securing the general precondition for the sustenance of our Folk. Hence it has become the fighter for freedom and bread in the highest sense of the word.
Freedom and bread is the simplest and yet, in reality, the greatest foreign policy slogan that can exist for any Folk: the freedom of being able to order and regulate the life of a Folk, according to its own interests, and the bread that this Folk requires for its existence.
If today, therefore, I come forward as a critic of our Folk’s leadership in the sphere of foreign policy both past and present, I am aware that the errors which I see today have also been seen by others. What distinguishes me from the latter perhaps is only the fact that in most cases it has only involved critical perceptions having no practical consequences, whereas, on the basis of my insight into the errors and faults of former and present German domestic and foreign policy, I strive to deduce proposals for a change and improvement and to forge the instrument with which these changes and improvements can some day be realised.
For example, the foreign policy of the Wilhelminian period was in many cases viewed by not a few people as catastrophic and characterised accordingly. Innumerable warnings came, especially from the circles of the Pan German League of that time, which were justified in the highest sense of the word. I can put myself in the tragic situation that befell all these men who raised their voices in warning, and who saw how and in what a Folk perishes, and yet were not able to help. In the last decades of the unfortunate foreign policy of the pre War period in Germany, parliament, that is, democracy, was not powerful enough to choose the heads for the political leadership of the Reich by itself. This was still an imperial right, whose formal existence no one yet dared to shake. But the influence of democracy had grown so strong, however, that a certain direction already seemed to be prescribed to the imperial decisions. Hence this had disastrous consequences, for now a national minded man who raised his voice in warning, on the one hand, could no longer count on being invested with a very responsible post against the pronounced tendency of democracy, whereas, conversely, on the basis of general patriotic ideas, he could not fight against His Majesty The Kaiser with the final weapon of opposition.
The idea of a March On Rome in pre War Germany would have been absurd. Thus the national opposition found itself in the worst of situations. Democracy had not yet triumphed, but it already stood in a furious struggle against the monarchic conceptions of government. The monarchical State itself responded to the struggle of democracy, not with the determination to destroy the latter, but rather with endless concessions.
Anyone who at that time took a stand against one of the two institutions ran the danger of being attacked by both. Anyone who opposed an imperial decision on national grounds was proscribed by patriotic circles as much as he was abused by the adherents of democracy. Anyone who took a position against democracy was fought by democracy and left in the lurch by the patriots. Indeed, he ran the danger of being most ignominiously betrayed by German officialdom in the wretched hope that through such a sacrifice it could gain Jehovah’s approval, and temporarily stop the yelping of the pack of Jewish press hounds. Under the conditions of that time, there was no prospect at hand of making one’s way to a responsible position in the leadership of the German Government against the will of the democrats or against the will of His Majesty The Kaiser, and thereby being able to change the course of foreign policy. Further, this led to the fact that German foreign policy could be contested exclusively on paper, which consequently launched a criticism that necessarily took on the characteristic features of journalism, the longer it continued. The consequence of this, however, was that increasingly less value was placed on positive proposals, in view of the lack of any possibility of their realisation, whereas the purely critical consideration of foreign policy occasioned the innumerable objections that one could adduce in all their fullness, all the more so because it was hoped that thereby one could overthrow the bad regime responsible. To be sure this was not achieved by the critics of that time. It was not the regime of that time which was overthrown, but the German Reich and consequently the German Folk. What they had foretold for decades had now come to pass. We cannot think of these men without a deep compassion, men condemned by fate to foresee a collapse for twenty years, and who now, having not been heeded and hence in no position to be of help, had to live to see their Folk’s most tragic catastrophe.
Aged in years, care worn and embittered, and yet full of the idea that, now, after the overthrow of the Imperial Government, they had to help, they again tried to make their influence felt for the resurgence of our Folk. For ever so many reasons this was futile, to be sure.
When the revolution shattered the Imperial sceptre and raised democracy to the throne, the critics of that time were as far from the possession of a weapon with which to overthrow democracy as formerly they had been from being able to influence the Imperial Government. In their decades of activity, they had been geared so much to a purely literary treatment of these problems that they not only lacked the real means of power to express their opinion on a situation which was only a reaction to the shouting in the streets; they had also lost the capacity to try to organise a manifestation of power which had to be more than a wave of written protests if it were to be really effective. They had all seen the germ and the cause of the decline of the German Reich in the old parties. With a sense of their own inner cleanliness, they had to scorn the suggestion that they too now wanted to play the game of the political parties. And yet, they could carry out their view in practice only if a large number gave them the opportunity of representing it. And even though they wanted a thousand times to smash the political parties, they still indeed first had to form a party which viewed its task as that of smashing the other parties. That such did not come to pass was due to the following reasons: the more the political opposition of these men was forced to express itself purely journalistically, the more it adopted a criticism which, though it exposed all the weaknesses of the system of that time and shed light on the defects of the individual foreign policy measures, failed to produce positive proposals because these men lacked any possibility of personal responsibility, especially since in political life there is naturally no action which does not have its dark as well as its bright sides. There is no political combination in foreign policy that we can ever regard as completely satisfactory. For as matters stood then, the critic, forced to view his main task as the elimination of a regime recognised as altogether incompetent, had no occasion, outside of the useful critical consideration of this regime’s actions, to come forward with positive proposals, which in consequence of the objections attached to them could just as easily have been subjected to a critical elucidation. The critic will never want to weaken the impact of his criticism by bringing forward proposals which themselves could be subjected to criticism. Gradually, however, the purely critical thinking of those who then represented the national opposition became such a second nature that even today they consider domestic and foreign policy critically, and deal with it only critically. Most of them have remained critics, who therefore cannot even today make their way to a clear, unambiguous, positive decision, neither in domestic nor in foreign policy, partly because of their insecurity and irresoluteness, partly because of their fear of thereby furnishing the enemy with ready ammunition for criticism of themselves. Thus they would like to bring about improvements in a thousand things, and yet cannot decide upon taking a single step because even this very step is not completely satisfactory, and possesses doubtful points; in short it has its darker sides which they perceive and which make them fearful. Now, leading a nation from a deep and difficult illness is not a question of finding a prescription that itself is completely free of poison; not seldom it involves destroying a poison through an antidote. In order to eliminate conditions recognised as deadly we must have the courage to make and carry out decisions which contain dangers in themselves. As a critic I have the right to examine all the possibilities of a foreign policy and to take them apart in detail according to the doubtful aspects or possibilities they bear in themselves. As the political leader, however, who wants to make history, I must decide upon one way, even if sober consideration a thousand times tells me that it entails certain dangers and that it also will not lead to a completely satisfying end. Hence I cannot renounce the possibility of success because it is not a hundred percent certain. I must neglect no step for the reason that perhaps it will not be a full one, if the spot in which I momentarily find myself might bring my unconditional death the next instant. Neither, therefore, may I renounce a political action for the reason that, besides benefiting my Folk, it will also benefit another Folk. Indeed, I may never do this when the benefit to the other Folk will be greater than that to my own, and when in the case of a failure to take action the misfortune of my Folk remains with absolute certainty.