There are probably few sights more offensive to those of us who knew the clean, clear-eyed, disciplined youth of Third Reich Germany than a horde of today's American white teenagers strolling through malls - with their pants hanging past their butts' cleavage, with hair that has not seen shampoo for weeks, with earrings dangling from their ears and sometimes even from their noses, pushing and justling each other while leering at girls with lilac or green hair, equally freakishly adorned, dropping candy wrappers anywhere, munching on junk food.
When I see specimens of cultural degeneration like that - now the children and sometimes even the grandchildren of the Hippies' and Flower Generation - I confess I come close to despair. They are the victims, the outcome of the violence to spirit. I know that tomorrow we'll see many of them sullenly lining up in the welfare offices without a work ethic or training and skills, or standing unwashed and unkempt at the entrance to America's superhighways, holding up a sign that says "Will work for food".
All I can ask is this: Contrast and compare!
In "The Speeches of Adolf Hitler", Howard Fertig edition, we read:
"The addresses of Hitler to German Youth are naturally but variations of two or three simple themes: Hitler draws the picture of the divided past, separated by barriers of profession, rank, and class; the Germans no longer knew their fellow countrymen; they did not even wish to know each other."
* In his speech at a Gymnastic Display at Stuttgart on 30 July 1933 Hitler said:
"The so-called Age of Reason, stamped with its characteristic liberal outlook, with its half-knowledge and half-culture, was in a fair way to breed a thoroughly unfit generation. The overvaluation of knowledge led not merely to a disregard of the bodily form and of bodily strength, but in the end to a lack of bodily work. It is (not by) chance that this age, propagated and protected by sick persons, necessarily led to a general sickness - not only to sickness of the body but also to sickness of the mind. For he who despises bodily strength and health has already become the victim of a malformation of the intellect. (...)
"The new Reich is not dedicated to theories, but to the maintenance of our people, and I would have you take away with you the conviction that it is not only knowledge which counts in the Third Reich but also strength. For us the highest idea is the human type of the future whose radiant spirit has for its home a glorious body so that men, turning from money and property, may once more find their way to ideal riches."
* Hitler said in a speech delivered at the Parteitag in Nuremberg in September 1933:
"(W)e have to learn our lesson: One will must dominate us; we must form a single unity; one discipline must weld us together, one obedience, one subordination, must fill us all, for above us stands the nation. (...)
"You are the living Germany of the future, not an empty idea, no mere formula: you are blood of our blood, flesh of our flesh, spirit of our spirit, you are our people's future. . . Never again for all time shall the German people tear itself asunder, never again shall its unity be broken up: it shall be in truth a people of brothers which no distress and no danger shall henceforth divide."
* In his May Day speech to German youth in 1935 Hitler said:
"Only after this great work of inner regeneration can the prestige of the Reich abroad be restored. All this that we are experiencing today is not a matter of chance, it is not a gift from heaven but the result of immense efforts, continual work, and the heaviest sacrifices. And this restoration of our German people is, and must be . . . your greatest experience. Generations have been set no task of such a magnitude as this generation could not perform such a task. It has been granted to the German people of today to accomplish a task which might well have taken many centuries, but which has been compressed into the space of a few years. (...)
"Every German youth, every German girl must be (imbued) through and through with the sacred consciousness of your duty to become the representatives of our people. You must be (imbued) with the feeling that you have to embody in yourselves everything which can enable Germany to be justly proud of her people. (...)
"Great things are happening at this present time, but all will be in vain if you do not guarantee a lasting German future. You are a link in the chain of German destiny. See to it then that the link is strong, lest this chain break with you and thus bring an end to our people's life.
"We are facing stern times. The wind today flutters our banners, but in the next few years perhaps it will bring up over Germany many a cloud and many a storm. But nothing in this world must make us afraid. You, my German youth, must be guarantors for the security of the existence and thus of the future of our German people.
"The ideal of manhood has not always been the same even in our own people. There were times which now seem to us to be very distant and are for us almost incomprehensible when the ideal of the young man was the lad who could hold his beer and was good for a drink. And now his day is past and we like to see the young man who can stand all weathers, the strong, young man. It does not matter how many glasses of beer he can drink, but how many blows he can stand; not how many nights he can spend on the spree, but how many kilometers he can march. We no longer see in the loutish beer-drinker the ideal of the German people: that is to be found in men and girls who are sound to the core, who are sturdy.
"What we wish from our German youth is different from what past generations asked. In our eyes the German youth of the future must be slim and slender, swift as the greyhound, tough as leather, and hard as Krupp steel. We must educate a new type of manhood so that our people does not go to ruins among all the degeneracy of our day.
"We shall not in the future neglect ten or fifteen years in our German education and then later be forced to make good what unfortunately has previously become bad. It is our intention and our will - and that will none shall break - that to the hearts of youth we will bring that spirit which we would like to regard and are determined to regard in Great Germany as the only possible spirit, the spirit which shall sustain the future.
"Germany is not a hen-roost where everything is in confusion and everyone cackles and crows, but we are a people which from its infancy learns how to be disciplined.
"If the others fail to understand us, that need not trouble us. It has never yet been the worst things in the world which most people have failed to understand. The opposite is true. . . We are no bullies. If the rest of the world misconceives us in our discipline, we cannot help it. From this discipline of ours there will come fewer brawls for the world than from the parliamentary democratic chaos of today. We go our own way; we do not wish to cross the way of another. Would that the others would let us pursue our way in peace! That is the only reservation which we must make when we express our love for peace: To do no one wrong, and to suffer from none!"
* In his May-Day Address to Youth, given at Berlin on 1 May 1936, Hitler said:
"What we ask of you now, my Youth, is this: we wish you to be first and foremost an idealistic youth. This, which perhaps many, especially in the past, have not understood, is for us a sacred need and a profession of faith which springs from the depths of our hearts. There were in the past many who used to say: We wish the Germans to think sensibly - and by 'sensibly' they meant that they should consider only their own life, and in their own life only the material side of this life: prudence and wisdom were their names for what was mainly egoism and self-seeking. (...)
"If each one thinks only of himself, and each one keeps only his own interests before his eyes, then no community of the people can come into being . . . We ask of you therefore that you should learn, while you are still young, that life for you must mean sacrifice: sacrifice of your personal freedom, sacrifice of your free time, sacrifice of many of the small pleasures of life; sacrifices when you take on yourself charges not for the individual, not for yourself alone, German boys and German girls, but for your small, and yet so great, community.
"And secondly we ask of you, German youth, that you should be strong in character! That you should learn to be decent in your thought, that you should shun what is and always will be harmful. (...)
"And in the third place, further, we ask of you to be hard, German youth, and to make yourselves hard! We cannot use a generation of 'mother's boys', of spoiled children. What we need is boys and girls who can one day become brave men and women. We must ask for a hard youth, when life comes upon youth in all its hardness, it may not in face of this hardness surrender and grow weak (...)
"But most of all we ask of you, German youth, that you fashion the German people of the future, and in yourselves be for it a model."
* In his address to German youth at the Parteitag in Nuremberg on 11 September 1937 Hitler said:
"Over and over again it is the same petition that we would make to Providence - we have only one prayer: that our people may be sound and true; we would that Providence should teach our people the meaning of true freedom; that Providence should keep alive in it its love of honour.
"We would not ask that we should receive freedom as a gift: we would ask only that we may be permitted to play our part in an honourable struggle. (...)
"Never in the history of Germany has there been so deep an inner unity of spirit, in the constraint of a single will and in leadership. Many generations that have gone before us have dreamed of such a unity; we are the happy witnesses in the fulfillment of their dream."
Tomorrow: The Outlook for the Future: The Tasks of the Movement
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Thought for the Day:
"We are at present working discreetly with all our might to wrest this mysterious force called sovereignty out of the clutches of the local nation states of the world. All the time we are denying with our lips what we are doing with our hands."
(Arnold Toynbee in a 1931 speech to the Institute for the Study of International Affairs at Copenhagen)