Adolf Hitler's Zweites Buch

Chapter 4: National Socialist Foreign Policy

I am a German nationalist. This means that I proclaim my nationality. My whole thought and action belongs to it. I am a socialist. I see no class and no social estate before me, but that community of the Voelk, made up of people who are linked by blood, united by a language, and subject to a same general fate. I love this Folk and hate only its majority of the moment, because I view the latter to be just as little representative of the greatness of my Voelk as it is of its happiness.

The National Socialist Movement which I lead today views its goal as the liberation of our Voelk within and without. It aims to give our Voelk domestically those forms of life which seem to be suitable to its nature and to be a benefit to it as the expression of this nature. It aims thereby to preserve the character of this Voelk and to further cultivate it through the systematic fostering of its best men and best virtues. It fights for the external freedom of this Voelk, because only under freedom can this life find that form which is serviceable to its Voelk. It fights for the daily bread of this Voelk because it champions [in hunger] this Voelk's right to life. It fights for the required space, because it represents this Voelk's right to life.

By the concept domestic policy the National Socialist Movement therefore understands the promotion, strengthening and consolidation of the existence of our Voelk through the introduction of forms and laws of life which correspond to the nature of our Voelk, and which can bring its fundamental powers to full effectiveness.

By the concept foreign policy it understands the safeguarding of this development through the preservation of freedom and the creation of the most necessary prerequisites for life.

Thus, in terms of foreign policy, the National Socialist Movement is distinguished from previous bourgeois parties by, for example, the following: The foreign policy of the national bourgeois world has in truth always been only a border policy; as against that, the policy of the National Socialist Movement will always be a territorial one. In its boldest plans, for example, the German bourgeoisie will aspire to the unification of the German nation, but in reality it will finish with a botched up regulation of the borders.

The National Socialist Movement, on the contrary, will always let its foreign policy be determined by the necessity to secure the space necessary to the life of our Folk. It knows no Germanizing or Teutonizing, as in the case of the national bourgeoisie, but only the spread of its own Folk. It will never see in the subjugated, so-called Germanized, Czechs or Poles a national--let alone Voelkish--strengthening, but only the racial weakening of our Folk. For its national conception is not determined by earlier patriotic ideas of government, but rather by Voelkish, racial insights. Thus the point of departure of its thinking is wholly different from that of the bourgeois world. Hence much of what seems to the national bourgeoisie like the political success of the past and present, is for us either a failure or the cause of a later misfortune. And much that we regard as self-evident seems incomprehensible or even monstrous to the German bourgeoisie. Nevertheless a part of German youth, especially from bourgeois circles, will be able to understand me. Neither I nor the National Socialist Movement figure to find any support whatsoever in the circles of the political national bourgeoisie, active at present, but we certainly know that at least a part of the youth will find its way into our ranks.

For them.

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