Extracts from Mein Kampf, on the need for living space for Germans, a fighting spirit, and the goal to "secure . . . the territory due to the German people"

MEIN KAMPF > By Adolf Hitler
39th Edition, 1933
Publisher Franz Eher, Muenchen, Pages 563-618.
On 4 November 1921, between six and seven in the evening, " I received the first positive news that the meeting would definitely be broken up, and that for this purpose they intended to send in great masses of workers, especially from a few red factories.
It must be laid to an unfortunate accident that we did not get this information earlier. On the same day we had given up our venerable old business office in the Sterneckerstrasse in Munich and had moved to a new one because work was still going on inside. Since the telephone had already been taken out of the old one and not yet installed in the new one, a number of attempts to inform us by telephone of the intended breaking up of the meeting had been in vain.
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The consequence of this was that the meeting itself was protected only by extremely weak monitor groups. Only a numerically weak company [Hundertschaft], comprising about forty-six heads,; was present and the alarm apparatus was not yet sufficiently developed to bring ample reinforcement in the space of an hour in the evening. Added to this was the fact that such alarmist rumors had come to our ears innumerable times without anything special happening. The old saying that announced revolutions usually fail to take place had up to this time always proved correct in our experience.
And so, for this reason, too, perhaps not everything was done which could have been done that day, to counter any attempt to break up the meeting with the most brutal determination.
Finally, we regarded the Festsaal of the Munich Hofbraeuhaus as most unsuited for an attempt to break up a meeting. We had been more afraid for the largest halls, especially the Circus. In this connection this day gave us a valuable lesson. Later we studied all these questions with a method which I should call truly scientific and came to results which in part were as incredible as they were interesting and in the ensuing period were of basic importance for the organizational and tactical leadership of our storm troops.
When I entered the vestibule of the Hofbraeuhaus at a quarter of eight, there could indeed be no doubt with regard to the existing intention. The room was overcrowded and had therefore been closed by the police. Our enemies who had appeared very early were for the most part in the hall, and our supporters for the most part outside. The small S.A. awaited me in the vestibule. I had the doors to the large hall closed and then ordered the forty-five or forty-six men to line up. I made it clear to the lads that today probably for the first time they would have to show themselves loyal to the movement through thick and thin, and that not a man of us must leave the hall unless we were carried out dead; I myself would remain in the hall, and I did not believe that a single one of them would desert me; but if I should see anyone playing the coward, I myself would personally tear off his "arm-band and take away his insignia. Then I called upon them to advance immediately at the slightest attempt to break up the meeting, and to bear in mind that the best defense lies in your own offensive.
The answer was a threefold Heil that sounded rougher and hoarser than usual.
Then I went into the hall and surveyed the situation with my own eyes. They were sitting in there, tight-packed, and tried to
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stab me with their very eyes. Innumerable faces were turned toward me with sullen hatred, while again others, with mocking grimaces, let out cries capable of no two interpretations. Today they would make an end of us, we should look out for our guts, they would stop our mouths for good, and all the rest of these lovely phrases. They were conscious of their superior power and felt accordingly. .
Nevertheless, the meeting could be opened and I began to speak. In the Festsaal of the Hofbraeuhaus I always stood on one of the long sides of the hall and my platform was a beer table. And so I was actually in the midst of the people. Perhaps this circumstance contributed to creating in this hall a mood such as I have never found anywhere else.
In front of me, especially to the left of me, only enemies were sitting and standing. They were all robust men and young fellows, in large part from the Maffei factory, from Kustermann's, from the Isaria Meter Works, etc. Along the left wall they had pushed ahead close to -my table and were beginning to collect beer mugs; that is, they kept, ordering beer and putting the empty mugs under the table. In this way, whole batteries grew up and it would have surprised me if all had ended well this time.
After about an hour and a half—I was able to talk that long despite interruptions—it seemed almost as if I was going to be master of the situation. The leaders of the invading troops seemed to feel this themselves; for they were becoming more and more restless, they often went out, came in again, and talked to their men with visible nervousness.
A small psychological mistake I committed in warding off an interruption, and which I myself realized no sooner had I let the word out of my mouth, gave the signal for them to start in.
A few angry shouts and a man suddenly jumped on a chair and roared into the hall: "Freedom!" [Freiheit]. At which signal-the fighters for freedom began their work.
In a few seconds the whole hall was filled with a roaring, screaming crowd, over which, like howitzer shells, flew innumerable beer mugs, and in between the crackling of chair legs,, the crashing of the mugs, bawling, howling, and screaming.
It was a mad spectacle.
I remained standing in my place and was able to observe how thoroughly my boys fulfilled their duty.
I should have liked to see a bourgeois meeting under such circumstances.
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The dance had not yet begun when my storm troopers—for so they were called from this day on—attacked. Like wolves they flung themselves in packs of eight or ten again and again on their enemies, and little by little actually began to thrash them out of the hall. After only five minutes I saw hardly a one of them who was not covered with blood. How many of them I came really to know only that day; at the head my good Maurice, my present private secretary Hess, and many others, who, even though gravely injured themselves, attacked again and again as long as their legs would hold them. For twenty minutes the hellish tumult lasted, but then our enemies, who must have numbered seven or eight hundred men, had for the most part been beaten out of the hall and chased down the stairs by my men numbering not even fifty. Only in the left rear corner of the hall a big group stood its ground and offered embittered resistance. Then suddenly two shots were fired from the hall entrance toward the platform, and wild shooting started. Your heart almost rejoiced at such a revival of old war experiences.
Who was shooting could not be distinguished, from that point on; only one thing could be definitely established, that from this point on the fury of my bleeding boys exceeded all bounds and finally the last disturbers were overcome and driven out of the hall.
About twenty-five minutes had passed; the hall looked almost as if a shell had struck it. Many of my supporters were being bandaged; others had to be taken away, but we had remained masters of the situation. Hermann Esser, who had assumed the chair this evening, declared: "The meeting goes on. The speaker has the floor." And then I spoke again.
After we ourselves had closed the meeting, an excited police lieutenant came dashing in, and, wildly swinging his arms, he cackled into the hall: "The meeting is dismissed."
Involuntarily I had to laugh at this late-eomer; real police pompousness. The smaller they are, the bigger they have to try to look at least.
That night we had really learned a good deal and our enemies fists of the proletariat up to the autumn of 1923.
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The sole organization which at this time would have had the courage and strength to oppose the Marxists and their incited masses, were for the present the free corps, later the self-defense organizations, citizens' guards, etc., and finally the tradition leagues.
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But why their existence brought about no sort of shift that was in any way discernible Was due to the following:
Just as the so-called national parties could exert no sort of influence for lack of any threatening power on the streets, likewise the so-called defense organizations in turn could exert no sort of influence for lack of any political idea, and above all of any real political goal.
What had given Marxism its success was its complete combination of political will and activistic brutality. What excluded national Germany from any practical activity in shaping the German development was the lack of a unified collaboration of brutal force with brilliant political will.
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With the founding of the NSDAP, for the first time a movement had appeared whose goal did not, like that of the bourgeois parties consist in a mechanical restoration of the past but in the effort to erect an organic folkish state in place of. the present senseless state mechanism.
The young movement from the first day espoused the standpoint that its idea must be put forward spiritually but that the defense of this platform must if necessary be secured by strong-arm means. Faithful to its belief in the enormous significance of the new doctrine it seems obvious to the movement that for the attainment of its goal no sacrifice can be too great.
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As already mentioned, the German combat organizations had no definite political idea. They were really nothing but self-defense leagues of more or less competent training and organization, with the result that they actually represented an illegal complement to the state's momentary legal instruments of power. Their character of free corps was based only on the way in which they were formed and on the condition of the state at that time, but they were by no means deserving of such a title as free formations of the struggle for a free conviction of their own. This, despite the opposition of individual leaders and whole leagues toward the Republic, they did not possess. For being convinced of the inferiority of an existing condition does not suffice to entitle one to speak of a conviction in the higher sense; no; the latter is rooted only in the knowledge of a new condition and in the inner vision of a condition the achievement of which one feels as a necessity, and to stand up for whose realization one regards as one's highest life task.
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What distinguishes the monitor troops of the national socialist organization of that time essentially from all combat leagues is that it was not and did not want to be in any way a servant of the conditions created by the revolutions, but that it fought exclusively for a new Germany.
In the beginning, it is true, this monitor troop possessed only the character of a meeting-hall guard. Its first task was a limited one: it consisted in making it possible to hold meetings which without it would simply have been prevented by the enemy. Even then, it had been trained to carry out an attack blindly, but not, as stupid German-folkish circles nonsensically claimed, because it honored the blackjack as the highest spirit, but because it understood that the greatest spirit can be eliminated when its bearer is struck down with a blackjack, as in actual fact the most significant heads in history have not seldom ended beneath the blows of the pettiest helots. They did not want to set up violence as a goal, but to protect the prophets of the spiritual goal from being shoved aside by violence. And in this they understood that they were not obligated to undertake the protection of a state which offers the nation no. protection, but that, on the contrary, they had to assume the protection of a nation against those who . threatened to destroy the people and the state.
. After the meeting-hall battle in the Munich Hofbraeuhaus the monitor troop, once and for all, in eternal memory of the heroic storm attacks of the small number they were then, received the name of Sturm Abteilung. As this very designation indicates, it presents only a section of the movement. It is a component in it, just as propaganda, the press, the scientific institutes and so
forth, constitute mere components in the party. *
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As the directing idea for the inner training-of this Sturm Abteilung the intention was always dominant, aside from all physical education, to teach it to be an unshakable, convinced defender of the national socialist idea, and finally to strengthen its discipline of bourgeois conception, but likewise nothing in common with a secret organization.
The reason why, even at that time, I sharply opposed having the SA of the NSDAP organized as a so-called combat league, was based on the following consideration: From the purely practical point of view, the military training of a people cannot be carried out by private leagues, except with the help of the most enormous state means. Any other belief is based on great overestimation of their own ability. And so it is out of the question that organiza-
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tions possessing military value can be built up beyond certain limits with so-called voluntary discipline. The most important support of the power in the fall, or even better in the spring of 1919, to set up so-called free corps, but not only did most of them possess front-line fighters who had gone through the school of the old army, but the type of obligations which they laid upon the individuals subjected them, for a limited time at least, just as unconditionally to military obedience.
This is totally lacking in a voluntary combat organization of today. The larger the league, the weaker its discipline will be, the smaller the demands made on the individual men, and the more the whole will take on the character of the old non-political soldiers and veterans clubs. .
It will never be possible to carry out a voluntary training for army service among the great 'masses without guaranteed unconditional power of command. Never will more than a few be'willing to submit of their own accord to such forced obedience as was considered self-evident and natural in the army.
Furthermore, real training cannot be given in consequence of the absurdly small means at the disposal of a so-called combat league for such a purpose. But the best, most reliable training should be precisely the main task of such an institution. Since the war, eight years have gone by, and since that time not a single age class among our. German youth has been systematically trained. But it cannot be the function of a combat league to include the old classes? that have already been trained, since otherwise it can at once be reckoned mathematically when the last members will leave this corporation. Even the youngest soldier of 1918 will in twenty years be incapable of fighting, and we are approaching this moment with a disquieting speed. Thus every so-called combat league must necessarily assume more and more the character of an old soldiers' association. This, however, cannot be the purpose of an organization that designates itself not as an old soldiers' league but as a combat league [Wehrverein], and which by its very name endeavors to express the fact that it sees its mission, not only in the preservation of the tradition and common bond of former soldiers, but in the development of the military idea, and in the practical advocacy of this idea, that is in the creation of a military body.
This task, however, absolutely demands the training of elements which had previously received no military drill, and this in practice is actually impossible. With one or two hours training a week, you really cannot make a soldier. With the present-
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day enormously increased demands that warfare makes on the individual, a two year period service is pei/haps just adequate to transform an untrained young man into fin expert soldier. All of us have seen in the field the terrible consequences that resulted for young soldiers not thoroughly trained in their trade. Volunteer formations, which for fifteen or twenty weeks had been drilled with iron determination and boundless devotion, nevertheless represented nothing but cannon fodder at the front. Only distributed among the ranks of experienced old soldiers could younger recruits, trained for from four to six months, furnish useful members of a regiment; even then they were directed by the "old men" and thus gradually grew into their functions.
How thoughtless in contrast seems an attempt to try to create troops with a so-called training period of one or two hours a week, without clear power of command and without extensive means. It might be possible to freshen up old soldiers in this way, but never to turn young men into soldiers.
How indifferent and totally worthless such a procedure would be in its results can be demonstrated especially by the fact that, while a so-called volunteer league with puffing and blowing, with trouble and grief, trains of tries to train a few thousand essentially well-intentioned men (it does not get to any others) in the military idea, the state itself, by the pacifistic-democratic nature of its education, consistently robs millions and millions of young people of their natural- instincts, poisons their logical patriotic thinking, and thus gradually transforms them into a herd of sheep, patiently accepting every arbitrary tyranny. '
How absurd in comparison with this are all the exertions of the combat leagues to transmit their ideas to the German youth.
Assuming that despite the above-mentioned difficulties a league nevertheless succeeded in training a definite number of Germans year after year into arms-bearing men—equally with respect to their convictions as with respect to their physical fitness and schooling in the use of arms—the result would nevertheless be practically nil in a state which, by its whole tendency, absolutely does not desire such military education, in fact positively hates it, since it stands in complete contradiction to the aim of its leaders—the destroyers of this state.
In any case such a result would be worthless under governments which have not only demonstrated by deed that they care nothing about the military strength of the nation, but which
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above all would never be willing to issue an appeal to this strength, except at best for the support of their own ruinous existence.
And today this is the case. Or is it not absurd for a government to try to train some tens of thousands of men in the dim-light of dawn and evening, when the state a few years previously disgracefully sacrificed eight and a half millions of the best-trained soldiers, not only ceasing to use them, but as thanks for their sacrifices actually exposing them to general villification ? And so they wapt to train soldiers for a state regime which befouled and spat upon 1;he most glorious soldiers of former days, tore their decorations from their chest, took away their cockades, trampled their banners and degraded their achievements? Or has this present state regime ever undertaken a single step to restore the honor of the old army, to call to account those who have corrupted and reviled it? Not in the slightest. On the contrary: we can see these creatures enthroned in the highest state posts.—Remember the words spoken at Leipzig: "Right goes with power." But since today in our Republic the power lies in the hands of the same men who engineered the revolution, and this revolution represents the vilest high treason, nay, the most wretched piece of villainy in all German history, really no reason can be found for enhancing the power of these very characters by the formation of a new young army. In any event, all the arguments of reason speak against it.
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For this reason alone, the SA of the NDSAP could have nothing in common with a military organization. It was an instrument for defense and education in the national socialist movement, and its tasks lay in an entirely different province from that of the so-called combat leagues.
But it could also constitute no secret organization. The aim of secret organizations can only be illegal. In this way the scope of such an organization is automatically limited. It is not possible, especially in view of the talkativeness of the German people, to build up an organization of any size and at the same time to keep it outwardly secret or even to veil its aims. Any such intention will be thwarted a thousand times. Not only that our police authorities today have a staff of pimps and similar rabble at their disposal who will betray anything they can find for the Judas payment of thirty pieces of silver, and even invent things to betray, but the supporters themselves can never be brought to the silence that is necessary in such a case. Only very small
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groups, by years of sifting, can assume the character of real secret organizations. But the very smallness of such organizations would remove their value for the national socialist movement. What we needed and still need were and are not a hundred or two hundred reckless conspirators, but hundreds of thousands of fighters for our philosophy of life. We should not work in secret conventicles, but in mighty mass demonstrations, and it is not by dagger and poison or pistol that the road can be cleared for the movement, but by the conquest of the streets. We must teach the Marxists that the future master of the streets is national socialism, just as it will some day be the master of the state. "
These views, which directed me in 1920 and 1921 and which I gradually endeavored to inject into the young organization, had the result that, as early as midsummer, 1922, we disposed of an imposing number of companies, which in late autumn, 1922, little by little received their: special distinguishing uniforms. Three events were of infinite importance for the further shaping of the SA.
1. The great general demonstration of all patriotic leagues against the law for the protection of the Republic in late summer on the Koenigsplatz in Munich.
The patriotic leagues of Munich had issued an appeal summoning a gigantic demonstration as a protest against the introduction of the law for the protection of the Republic. The national socialist movement was also expected to participate in it. The solid procession of the party was headed by six Munich companies, followed by the sections of the political party. In the column itself marched two brass bands, and about fifteen flags were carried along. The arrival of the national socialists in the half-filled square, which was otherwise void of flags, aroused immeasurable enthusiasm. I myself had the honor of being privileged to address the crowd, now numbering sixty thousand heads, as one of the orators.
The success of the rally was overpowering, particularly because, in defiance of all Red threats, it was proved for the first time that national Munich, too, could march in the streets. Red republican defense corps (Schutzbund), who attempted to proceed with terror against the approaching columns, were within a few minutes scattered by SA detachments. The national socialist movement then for the first time showed its determination to claim for itself the right to the streets in the future, thus
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wresting this monopoly from the hands of the international traitors of the people and enemies of the fatherland.
The result of this day was an incontestable proof of the psychological and also organizational soundness of our conceptions with regard to the structure of the SA.
On the foundation which had been so successfully proven, it was energetically broadened, so that only a few weeks later double the number of companies had been set up.
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At first the importance of this day could not be fully evaluated by its consequences. Not only that the victorious SA had been enormously enhanced in its self-confidence and its faith in the soundness of its leadership, but the outside world also began to follow our doings more closely, and many for the first time recognized in the national socialist movement the institution which in all probability would some day be called upon to put a suitable end to the Marxist madness.
Only the democrats groaned that anyone could dare not peacefully let his skull be bashed in, and that under a democratic republic we had had the audacity to oppose a brutal attack with fists and cudgels instead of pacifistic songs.
On the whole, the bourgeois press, as usual, was partly pitiful and partly contemptible, and only a few honest newspapers greeted the fact that in one place at least someone had dared to call a halt to the activity of the Marxist highwaymen.
In Coburg itself, at least a part of the Marxist working class, which incidentally could be regarded only as misled, had learned a lesson from the fists of national socialist labor and been taught to realize that these workers also fight for ideals, since, as experience shows, men fight only for something that they believe in and love.
The greatest benefit, however, was derived by the SA itself. It now grew with great rapidity, and at the Party Day held on January 27, 1923, approximately six thousand men could take part in the dedication of the flag, and the first companies were fully equipped with their new uniforms.
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