The territory of a people

From the Handbook for Schooling the Hitler Youth

Chapter Six: Man and Earth (Handbook online is here)

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The following has been edited for greater brevity -cy

Many peoples who have done great things in the past have already disappeared from the face of the earth because they died out on account of a decline of births. A growing population alone guarantees the future life of a people and its lasting permanence. The racial structure of peoples, however, determines the form their community life takes. Art and science, economy and culture are developed according to their racial character.

On the other hand, territory is not without its influence. A people's geographical situation in the world deeply affects the course of political events. It's soil provides nourishment and possibilities for work. Raw materials and climatic conditions influence the cultural and economic life, either fostering or hampering it. The life of the state develops out of the harmony of man and land. During the course of history the people's consciousness of homeland arose and conferred upon territory positive material values as well as spiritual and idealistic ones.

Real statesmen, in the formation of their policies, proceed from things as they are, racially and territorially. Their greatness and their achievements depend upon their ability to recognise these gifts of nature rightly and to use them.

Attachment to the soil is naturally not equally strong and deep for all peoples. The German people has distinguished itself from earliest times by reason of a special attachment to its territory. Only when racial contamination threatened to suffocate the living and unique forces of the German people could those powers which were striving to uproot the German people gain ground. To this end the spiritual values of the soil were the first to be disturbed. The love of homeland was destroyed and made ridiculous. A world citizenship with a supernational imprint was presented as the goal worthiest to strive for. The agricultural basis of our economic life was attacked. Ideas foreign to our people spread among German economic leaders and took away from our productive working forces a consciousness of the national basis of their work. The German people became more and more dependent economically upon foreign countries. We experienced this in the World War when Germany was cut off from its foreign sources of food by the blockade and our people, though unbeaten militarily, had to stack their weapons and, in consequence, lost their economic freedom, and their political freedom too. By uprooting the German economy the way was paved for unrestricted financial domination by the international Jews. The once flourishing, firmly established German economy was transformed into a heap of ruins. An enormous army of unemployed (just a few pictured below) was the outward indication of the unceasing decline.

National Socialism has now re-established the natural order of things in the economic sphere. It has restored the creative forces of our people and made the resources and products of our own territory the basis of the German economy. Even today, after only a few years, the success of this new economic way of thinking is evident. The army of unemployed has disappeared; the German economy has experience a new upward swing.

The ever-changing relations between man and earth, people and territory are revealed externally in a far reaching transformation of the original character of the land. In century-long trying struggles, steppes, forests, swamps and heaths which at one time covered the whole of Germany, have been remade into the present areas of cultivation. There arose successively the farm, city, and industrial districts - in layout and partitioning closely related to the attitudes of life of our people. The German territory has received, thereby, a typical German imprint which already distinguishes it from the territories of other peoples.

[I think this short chapter is really terrific and reveals the true nature of Adolf Hitler's thinking, and the solidarity of mind of the rest of the National Socialist policy makers. It was always: We Germans are a unique people because of the many centuries of living together on this land and fashioning it in our image. We are Germany, Germany is us; that is our common identity and our common heritage. It is also our greatest treasure and strength, which must be safeguarded at all costs for that reason. Let me know what you think. -cy]