The Southern Tyrol was also lost to the German Folk through the activity of these people, and the accursed weakness and impotence of our presentday bourgeois manic protesters. It is a contemptible falsification on the part of these so called national patriots if today they talk about a renunciation of the Southern Tyrol. No, dear gentlemen, don’t twist and squirm in such a cowardly way over the right word. Don’t be too cowardly to come right out and say that today it could only be a question of the conquest of the Southern Tyrol. For the renunciation, gentlemen of the National Leagues, was effected by your worthy presentday allies, the one time Marxist betrayers of their country, with all legal governmental forms. And the only ones who had the courage to take an open position against this crime at that time were not you, esteemed National Leaguers and bourgeois diplomatists, but rather the small National Socialist Movement and primarily myself. Indeed, sirs, when you were so quiet that nobody in Germany had an idea of your existence, so deeply had you crawled off into your mouse holes, it was then in the years 1919 and 1920 that I came forth against the shame of signing the peace treaties — and not secretly, behind four walls, but publicly. At that time, however, you were still so cowardly that never once did you dare to come to one of our meetings for fear of being cudgelled by your present foreign policy allies, the Marxist street tramps.
The men who signed the Peace Treaty Of Saint Germain were as little National Socialists as the signers of the Peace Treaty Of Versailles. They were the members of the parties who, by this signing, merely capped their decades long betrayal of their country. Whoever today wants to change the fate of the Southern Tyrol in any way cannot renounce anything that was already renounced in all forms by the presentday protesters. At most he can only reconquer it.
I am most fanatically opposed to this, to be sure, and I announce the most extreme resistance to this endeavour, and I shall fight with the utmost fanaticism against the men who are trying to drive our Folk into this adventure, as bloody as it is insane. I did not learn about the War at a restaurant table reserved for regular customers. Nor was I, in this War, one of those who had to give orders or to command. I was an ordinary soldier who was given orders for four and a half years, and who nevertheless honourably and truly fulfilled his duty. But I thereby had the good fortune to know war as it is, and not as one would like to see it. As a simple soldier, who had known only its dark sides, I was for this war up to the last hour because I was convinced that the salvation of our Folk could lie only in victory. Since, however, there is now a peace which others have perpetrated, I fight to the utmost against a war which would not benefit the German Folk, but instead only those who once before sacrilegiously traded the blood sacrifice of our Folk for their interests. I am of the conviction that one day I will not be lacking in the determination, to bear the responsibility even, if necessary, of staking the blood of the German Folk. But I fight against even a single German being dragged off to a battlefield, for fools or criminals to nourish their plans on his blood. Whoever reflects on the unprecedented horror and the frightful misery of a modern war, or considers the boundless demands on the nervous stamina of a Folk, must take fright at the idea that such a sacrifice could be demanded for a success which in the most favourable case could never be consonant with this enormous effort. And I also know that if today the people of the Southern Tyrol, so far as it thinks along exclusively German lines, were gathered in one front and the hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dead which our Nation would have to lay down in a struggle for their sake were to appear before these spectators, 300000 hands would rise protectingly toward heaven, and the foreign policy of the National Socialists would be justified.
What is most terrible about all this is that they play with this dreadful possibility without ever giving a thought to really wanting to help the Southern Tyroleans.
Since the struggle over the Southern Tyrol is being waged today by those who once surrendered all Germany to ruin, even the Southern Tyrol is to them only a means to an end which they use with ice cold unscrupulousness in order to be able to gratify their infamous anti German — in the most extreme sense of the word — instincts. It is the hate against the presentday nationally conscious Italy, and it is above all a hatred of the new political idea of this country, and most of all hatred against the towering Italian statesman, which induces them to stir up German public opinion with the help of the Southern Tyrol. For, in reality, how indifferent after all are these elements to the German Folk. While they lament the Southern Tyrol’s fate with crocodile tears in their eyes, they are driving all Germany toward a fate which is worse than that of the partitioned territory. While they protest against Italy in the name of national culture, they pollute the culture of the German nation within, destroy our whole cultural sensibility, poison the instinct of our Folk, and annihilate even the accomplishments of earlier times. Does an age which inside the country has depressed our whole theatre, our literature, our plastic arts to the level of swine, have the right to step forth against presentday Italy, or to protect German culture from her in the name of culture? The gentlemen of the Bavarian People’s Party, the German Nationalists, and even the Marxist defilers of culture, are concerned about the German culture of the Southern Tyrol, but, undisturbed, they let the culture of the Homeland be insulted by the most wretched bungling works, and surrender the German stage to the race shame of a Jonny Spielt Auf [note 11]. And, hypocritically, they lament the oppression of German cultural life in the Southern Tyrol, while they themselves most cruelly persecute those in the Homeland who want to protect German culture from a deliberate and intentional destruction. Here the Bavarian People’s Party incites the State power against those who raise a protest against the infamous defilement of our Folk’s culture.
What do these solicitous protectors of German culture in the Southern Tyrol do in Germany itself for the defence of German culture? They have let the theatre sink to the level of a brothel, into sites of demonstrated race defilement, and destroyed all the foundations of our Folk Life with movies holding honesty and morality up to ridicule; they connive at the cubistic and dadaistic infatuation of our plastic art, they themselves protect the fabricators of this base deception or madness, they let German literature sink into mud and filth, and surrender the whole intellectual life of our Folk to international Jewry. And the same contemptible pack is so brazen faced as to stand up for German culture in the Southern Tyrol, whereby the only aim they have in mind, naturally, is to incite two cultured Folks against each other so that in the end they can all the more easily reduce them to the level of their own cultural wretchedness.
Thus is it in everything, however.
They complain about the persecution of the Germans in the Southern Tyrol, and they are the same people who in Germany most cruelly wage war on anyone who understands being national as something other than defencelessly surrendering his Folk to syphilisation by Jews and Negroes. The same people who call for the freedom of conscience of Germans in the Southern Tyrol oppress it in Germany itself in the meanest way. Never before has the freedom of expression of one’s national outlook in Germany been so muzzled as under the rule of these mendacious party riffraff who presume to break a lance for the rights of conscience and national freedoms, of all things, in the Southern Tyrol. They wail over every injustice that is inflicted on a German in the Southern Tyrol, but they are silent about the murders that these Marxist street tramps commit from month to month in Germany against national elements. And their silence is shared by the whole fine national bourgeoisie including the Fatherland protesters. In a single year — that is to say, only five months of this year have gone by — nine men from the ranks of the National Socialist Movement alone were murdered under circumstances that in part were bestial, and over six hundred wounded. This entire mendacious brood is silent about this, but how they would roar if only one such deed were committed by Fascism against the German element in the Southern Tyrol. How they would summon the whole world to revolt if only one German in the Southern Tyrol were slaughtered by Fascists under conditions similar to those which the Marxist murder riffraff employs in Germany, without this calling forth the indignation of this fine phalanx for the salvation of the German Folk. And how indeed these same people, who solemnly protest against the government persecution of the German element in the Southern Tyrol, persecute the Germans who inconvenience them in Germany itself. Beginning with the U-boat heroes up to the saviours of Upper Silesia, the men who first staked their blood for Germany — how they dragged them in chains before the courts and finally sentenced them to the penitentiary, all because they had sacrificed their lives hundreds upon hundreds of times out of a fervent love for the Fatherland, whereas this contemptible riffraff of protesters had crawled off somewhere where they could not be found. Let them total the sentences which have been imposed in Germany for acts which in a national conscious State would be rewarded with the highest decorations. If Italy today puts a German in the Southern Tyrol in jail, the whole German national and Marxist newspaper pack straightaway screams bloody murder. But they completely overlook that in Germany one can go to jail for months merely on the basis of a denunciation, that house searches, violation of the mails, telephone tapping — that is, sheer anticonstitutional deprivation of the personal freedoms guaranteed by the civil rights of this State — are the order of the day. And let not our so called national parties say that this is possible only in Marxist Prussia. First of all, they fraternise arm in arm with these same Marxists in regard to foreign policy, and, second, they have taken the same part in the oppression of a real, self conscious nationalism. In national Bavaria they placed the mortally ill Dietrich Eckart [note 12] in so called protective custody, despite the available medical testimony, without even the trace of any wrongdoing on his part save, at most, that of his incorruptible national outlook. And he was kept in such custody for so long that he finally collapsed, and died two days after his release. Moreover, he was Bavaria’s greatest poet. Of course he was a national German and had not perpetrated any Jonny Spielt Auf, and in consequence he did not exist for these fighters for the national culture.