In principle, we must realize that a supposedly first-rate academic education, confirmed by report cards, can never make up for a lack of eagerness to assume responsibility. Knowledge and leadership ability, which also means vigor, are not mutually exclusive. But when doubts arise, knowledge can under no circumstance be considered a replacement for integrity, bravery, courage, and initiative. When it comes to leading a Volk community in the party and the state, these qualities are the more important ones.
If I state this in front of you, my deputies, I am doing it because this one year of German history has taught me, more clearly than all of my previous years, how important and irreplaceable these very virtues are, and how, in critical hours, a single, resolute man always matters more than 1,000 sophisticated weaklings!
As a social manifestation, however, this new selection of leadership must also be liberated from numerous prejudices that I really cannot describe as anything other than a phony and fundamentally nonsensical code of social morality.
There is no attitude that cannot find its final justification in the benefit it brings to the totality. Anything that is clearly unimportant or even harmful to the existence of the totality cannot, in service to a social order, be judged as morality.
And above all: a Volk community is only conceivable with the recognition of laws that are binding for all; that is to say, it makes no sense to expect or demand that one person should adhere to principles that seem nonsensical, harmful, or merely unimportant in the eyes of others.
I have no appreciation for the attempts of dying social groups to cut themselves off from real life by hiding behind a hedge of withered and outdated class laws, in order to maintain themselves artificially in that way. As long as this is done merely to secure a quiet cemetery for one's own demise, there can be no objection. But if one intends to place a barrier in the way of advancing life, then the storm of a forward-surging youth will simply clear away this old brush.
print version
return to list
previous document