Just as these national patriots first murdered him, likewise did they kill his work with silence, for after all he was a German and a good Bavarian in addition, and no international Jew polluter of Germany. In that case he would have been holy to this league of patriots, but here they acted in accordance with their national bourgeois outlook, and the open statement in the München police administration: Croak, national pig! But these are the same German conscious elements who mobilise the indignation of the world when someone in Italy stupidly does no more than throw a German in jail.
When a few Germans were expelled from the Southern Tyrol, these people again summoned the German Folk to blazing indignation. They forgot only to add, however, that the greatest incitement was being directed against Germans in Germany itself. Under a bourgeois national government, national Bavaria has expelled dozens and dozens of Germans, and all only because they did not politically suit the corrupt ruling bourgeois stratum in consequence of their uncompromising nationalism. Suddenly one no longer took cognisance of the clan brotherhood with German Austria, but only of the foreigner. But it was not at all limited to the expulsion of so called alien Germans. No, these same bourgeois national hypocrites who hurl flaming protests against Italy because a German is expelled from the Southern Tyrol and packed off to another province, have expelled from Bavaria dozens and dozens of Germans with German citizenship who fought for Germany in the German Army for four and a half years, and who had been severely wounded, and won the highest decorations. Indeed, this is how these bourgeois national hypocrites look who now bluster indignantly against Italy, whereas they themselves have burdened themselves with shame upon shame among their own Folk.
They moan over the denationalisation in Italy, and at the same time they denationalise the German Folk in their own Homeland. They fight against anyone who opposes poisoning of our Folk with regard to blood, indeed they persecute every German who does battle against the de Germanisation, Negrification, and Judaisation of our Folk in the big cities, which they themselves instigate and sponsor, and in the most shameless and ruthless way.
And by means of the mendacious allegation of a danger to religious establishments, they try to send them to jail.
When an overexcited Italian in Merano damaged the Empress Elizabeth’s Monument there, they raised a wild clamour, and could not be pacified even though an Italian court punished the culprit with two months in prison.
That the monuments and mementos of the past greatness of our Folk are uninterruptedly defiled in Germany itself, interests them not at all. That France has almost entirely destroyed all monuments recalling Germany in Alsace-Lorraine is a matter of indifference to them. It does not excite them that the Poles systematically lay waste to everything that even reminds one of the name of Germany. Indeed, they do not get excited over the fact that this very month in Bromberg [note 13] the Bismarck Tower was officially demolished by the Government —
all this leaves these champions of the national honour of our Folk cold. [note 15] Woe, however, if something like this were the case in the Southern Tyrol. For this has suddenly become a Holy Land for them. But the Fatherland itself, the Homeland, it can go to hell.
Certainly, on the Italian side, more than one unwise action has taken place in the Southern Tyrol, and the attempt to denationalise the German element systematically is just as impolitic as its result is questionable. But those who are in part guilty of all this and who, as a matter of fact, know nothing of a national honour of their Folk, have no right to protest against this. Instead, this right belongs only to those who up to now really fought for German interests and German honour. In Germany this was exclusively the National Socialist Movement.
The whole inner mendacity of the agitation against Italy becomes apparent if the actions of the Italians are compared with the actions that the French, Poles, Belgians, Czechs, Rumanians and Southern Slavs have perpetrated against the German element. That France has expelled more than a quarter million Germans altogether from Alsace-Lorraine, that is, more people than the Southern Tyrol numbers as inhabitants, means not a rap to them. And that the French today are trying to extirpate every trace of German nationality in Alsace-Lorraine does not prevent them from fraternising with France, even when continuous blows on the jaw are the answer from Paris. That the Belgians persecute the German element with a matchless fanaticism; that the Poles have massacred over 17000 Germans, in part under downright bestial attendant circumstances, gives them no cause for excitement; that they, finally, expelled tens of thousands from house and home, with hardly a shirt on their backs, and drove them across the border, are things that cannot make our bourgeois and Fatherland protest swindlers fly into a passion. Indeed, whoever wants to know the real disposition of this pack must only recall the way and manner in which the refugees were welcomed even then. Their hearts, at that time, bled as little as they do now when those tens of thousands of unfortunate expellees again found themselves on the soil of their dear Homeland, in part in veritable concentration camps, and were being shunted from place to place like Gypsies. In my mind’s eye I still see before me the time when the first Ruhr refugees came to Germany, and then were shunted from police administration to police administration as if they were hardened criminals. No, then the hearts of these representatives and defenders of the national element in the Southern Tyrol did not bleed. But if a single German in the Southern Tyrol itself is expelled by the Italians, or some other injustice is inflicted on him, they tremble with righteous resentment and indignation over this unexampled crime against culture and over this greatest barbarism that the world has ever seen. How they say then: Never before and nowhere else before has the German element been so oppressed with such terrible and tyrannical methods as in this country. Indeed, but only with one exception, that is, namely, Germany itself, through your own tyranny.