I have issued the command, and I'll have anybody who utters but one word of criticism executed by a firing squad, that our war aim does not consist in reaching certain lines, but in the physical destruction of the enemy. Accordingly, I have placed my death's-head formation in readiness, for the present only in the East, with orders to them to send to death mercilessly and without compassion, men, women, and children of Polish derivation and language. Only thus shall we gain the living space which we need. Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?
I am a German nationalist, that means I am openly committed to my Volkstrum. All of my thoughts and actions belong to it. I am a socialist. I see before me no class or rank, but rather a community of people who are connected by blood, united by language, and subject to the same collective fate.
As soon as by one's own propaganda even a glimpse of right on the other side is admitted, the cause for doubting one's own right is laid.
You, my Brown Guard, will regard it as a matter of course that this German people should go only by the way which Providence ordained for it when it gave to Germans the common language. So we go forward with the profoundest faith in God into the future. Would that which we have achieved have been possible if Providence had not helped us?
When I recall my teachers at school, I realise that half of them were abnormal. . . . We pupils of old Austria were brought up to respect old people and women. But on our professors we had no mercy; they were our natural enemies. The majority of them were somewhat mentally deranged, and quite a few ended their days as honest-to-God lunatics! . . . I was in particular bad odor with the teachers. I showed not the slightest aptitude for foreign languages - though I might have, had not the teacher been a congenital idiot. I could not bear the sight of him.
Only a handful of Germans in the Reich had the slightest conception of the eternal and merciless struggle for the German language, German schools, and a German way of life. Only today, when the same deplorable misery is forced on many millions of Germans from the Reich, who under foreign rule dream of their common fatherland and strive, amid their longing, at least to preserve their holy right to their mother tongue, do wider circles understand what it means to be forced to fight for one's nationality.
Our German language has a word which in a magnificent way denotes conduct based on this spirit: doing one's duty [Pflichterfüllung]-which means serving the community instead of contenting oneself. We have a word for the basic disposition which underlies conduct of this kind in contrast to egoism and selfishness-idealism. By 'idealism' we mean only the ability of the individual to sacrifice himself for the whole, for his fellow men.
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