THE NSDAP'S CONCEPTION OF THE STATE
Translated by Hadding Scott
The chapter titled Staat in the 16th (1940) edition of Politische Fibel is much longer than the corresponding chapter in the 1934 edition, mainly because the shape of National-Socialist rule had become more specific during seven years of wielding power. Important progress had been made in the unification and empowerment of the German nation. The 1934 edition contained a general discussion about forms of state which was totally omitted by 1940. Theory and generalization were replaced with concrete reality.
One of the most important points about the National-Socialist view of the state is that it is not the same as the Neo-Hegelian, Fascist view of the state. For National-Socialism, contrary to a widespread false opinion, the state is not an end in itself.
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See inter alia: Adolf Hitler: Mein Kampf, especially Vol. I, chapters 5 and 10, and Volume II, chapters 2, 3, 4, and 10.
Adolf Hitler: "The state is a means to an end. Its purpose is the preservation and advancement of a community of physically and spiritually homogeneous life-essences."
Lesson 3. State
(From the 16th (1940) edition of Hansjoerg Maennel's Politische Fibel.)
The state is an organization whose purpose is the preservation of the folk. (Organization is the binding together of human beings for a specified purpose.) The state is always a means to an end, never an end in itself. We do not serve the state for the state's sake, but for the sake of the German folk.
This principle has not been observed in the last thousand years of German history. The mediaeval Roman idea of the state saw as its task the erection of a supranational Christian World Empire. Absolutism saw it as service to the prince. Liberalism and Marxism shifted the individual and his economic interests into the foreground. Some advocated the unimportance or even the abolition of the state (anarchy); others advocated the state as an end in itself.
National-Socialism combats all these false views and shifts the state into its proper perspective: it is a form, which has to embrace and protect its content, the folk, just as a vessel carries liquid. The state is thus important, but the ultimate and highest value is the nation. Adolf Hitler gives the state an exalted task: the maintenance of the type. The preservation and advancement of the best racial forces of its ethnicity is the highest duty of the National-Socialist state.
The state possesses the right of political sovereignty. .... If it loses this right of sovereignty, it becomes a colony. Adolf Hitler has turned Germany from an international colony back into a nation-state, into a true Reich. The National-Socialist state protects the folk community internally and externally. The aim is: socialist justice and cohesion internally, nationalist freedom and power externally. Every German folk-comrade and citizen has the duty to support the National-Socialist state leadership in the accomplishment of this aim.
A citizen of the state [Staatsbürger] is a folk-comrade with political rights.
Hitherto the following conception prevailed: everyone could become a citizen of the state. One could buy for oneself the right of citizenship (Ostjuden and other racial aliens). This principle must inevitably lead to the ruin of the folk and along with that, the state. (Example: Rome). The National-Socialist conception opposes that: only a German folk-comrade can be a citizen of the German State; all people of alien race are foreigners. Through birth only, as a matter of principle, can nationality [Staatsangehörigkeit] be obtained. The national who has fulfilled his duty to the folk (labor-service and military obligations) can become a citizen of the Reich [Reichsbürger]. First comes duty, then, only as a consequence of that, comes the right. Jews and racial aliens may hold no public office (cf. Program, Points 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 23; Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, Vol.II, chapter 3).
Point 4 of the Program: "A citizen can only be someone who is a folk comrade (Volksgenosse). A folk-comrade can only be someone of German blood, without regard to religious denomination. Hence no Jew can be a folk comrade."
Through the Reich Citizenship Law of September 15, 1935 these principles have already been actualized. This law distinguishes foreigners, nationals, and citizens of the Reich. Only the national of German or kindred blood who shows that he is willing and qualified to serve the German folk and Reich becomes a citizen of the Reich. The Reichsbürger alone is the bearer of public political rights. With that the National-Socialist racial idea has triumphantly prevailed in the German state. Germany is a folkish state.
The relation between Party and State is important. Here we must distinguish between the state in the broad sense, i.e. the entire organization of the people, and the state in the narrower sense, i.e. the state authorities, the administrative bureaucracy of the state, and the bearer of supreme power in the state. The Party is the most important pillar of the National-Socialist state (in the broad sense). The NSDAP is bearer of the German state idea (Law for the Guarantee of the Unity of Party and State).
For the relation between party and state authorities (state in the narrower sense) this principle applies: the Party commands the State. This does not mean that every party comrade can issue commands to every public official. This means rather that the higher leaders of the National-Socialist movement, above all the Leader, simultaneously are higher state officials […] and give to officials the binding guidelines of National-Socialist rule. The Party has rescued the state and shapes it for all time according to its principles.
Adolf Hitler: "We are one folk and we want to live in one Reich!"
The National-Socialist state is "total" in the sense that there is only one single will in it, that of National-Socialism, which is embodied in our Leader. Instead of clashes of interest between classes, regions, and religious denominations, a single interest now prevails: that of the entire German people.
National-Socialism does not, however, strive for the "total state" in the sense of an absolutist guardian that would supervise every aspect of private life. The state is rather a servant of the National-Socialist Idea and therewith of the German people. We do not represent the totality of the state, rather the totality of the National-Socialist worldview in the state.
National-Socialism brings to all spheres of public life unity instead of division. The eternal longing of the best Germans for a united Reich is finally actualized through Adolf Hitler. There is now only a single state, the German Reich; the tribal districts [die Gaue] are important building-blocks of the Reich. The reorganization of the Reich is one of the German People's mightiest tasks, which the National-Socialist state-leadership is discharging purposefully and masterfully. The unity of the Reich is personified above all through the one Leader, and concurrently through the one worldview which the German People determines and welds together for all future.
Adolf Hitler has not only raised up our fatherland out of a slavish existence to national self-sufficiency (Selbstständigkeit); he has formed it furthermore into a true Reich. The "Reich" is far more than a "state." The Reich is for us Germans the powerful expression of our type, the highest expression of the German essence. Consequently even the German word "Reich"cannot be rendered into other languages; it means something completely different from the English or French "Empire."
The German-English War is really nothing other than a struggle between the Idea of Empire and the Idea of the Reich. And concurrently between ownership (Besitz) and achievementt (Leistung), between gold and blood. We National-Socialists are no imperialists; i.e., we do not intend to oppress and to exploit alien peoples who inhabit remote regions and have done us no harm. Rather the Reich has the great task of being the leading and guiding power of all small peoples within the German sphere of life and culture [innerhalb des deutschen Lebens- und Kulturraumes].
Filled with this lofty mission, Adolf Hitler is implementing a true and just new order of Europe. The basis of all European policy in the future will be only one force: the Germanic Reich of the German Nation!
Hadding Scott
31 December 2009
http://national-socialist-worldview.blogspot.com/2009/12/nsdaps-conception-of-state.html