The Racial Awakening of the German People by Dr. Rudolf Frercks, parts 9-10

This article is reposted from National-Socialist-Worldview.

This booklet by Dr. Frercks, the vice-director of the NSDAP's Office of Racial Policy, was originally published in 1935. The edition on which this translation was based is dated 1942. Translation by Hadding Scott, 2014.

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Part 9 - Miscegenation

Our leader has coined the saying, "What is not race on this Earth, is chaff."* With that he conveyed that the value of a people lies in its race, its blood. A people that ceases to be loyal to its image, to its kind, and to its mission in history, has lost its right to life and is on its way to its demise. This has already played out many times in history. The descendants of the ancient Greeks and Romans no longer have anything physically and mentally in common with their ancestors who created those high cultures of antiquity. The men that live there today are different from those whose artworks we still admire today, whose philosophy and writings we still study today.

We ask, why do we find different men today than back then? -- and we find the same causes back then as play out in our own time before our own eyes. First, counter-selection: in other words, the most competent and capable, the culture-bearing classes, renounced procreation and gradually died out, while the congenitally not so competent classes increased in number. Second, the feeling for purity of the blood was lost, so that through the peaceful infiltration of racially alien persons the face of these peoples changed. 

Racial Conceit? 

All these peoples have sinned against the missions assigned to them by God, namely to maintain themselves in their kind and to create from their essence. Among us too this sense has already in many ways been lost, and many found the Aryan legislation harsh. It was said that the Jews, Negroes, and Mongols in any case were humans too; one no longer sensed, in the megalopolitan civilization that gradually dulls every natural sense, what it was about these races that was so foreign to our essence. We have been accused of racial conceit and haughtiness: no, this is not it; we do not want to humiliate the alien races; we also do not even say that they are inferior, but of a different kind. And in this difference of kind -- in this foreignness compared to our kind, our essence, our thought, and our feeling -- is the basis for our response. We also do not want therefore to speculate and ask why there are now various races of man on this Earth; rather we want to concentrate on ourselves and again follow the laws of nature that have separated blood from blood. Everyone is familiar with the faces of mixed-race persons from the harbor-districts of the big cities, who look so ugly because they are internally unhappy and divided, and  vacillate this way and that when making a decision. But we remember in contrast the men about whom one knows exactly how they will conduct themselves in particular situations of life -- cowardly or brave, loyal or honorless. 

"Infinitely many virtues of the character, infinitely great harmony of the spirit and of the body, and with that an immense quantity of human happiness, has been our loss due to mixture with alien blood. And whoever experiences our days with open eyes sees shocking examples every day of the frightening consequences that accompany such disloyalty toward one's own blood. For, out of it arise men that wander anchorless and spiritually homeless between the peoples, that belong neither to the one nor to the other, and in psychic despair and often material distress must stand aloof from the great events of their age." (Dr. Walter Gross.) 

But woe unto a people if it is so strongly infused with foreign blood  that it no longer thinks as a unit in difficult hours of its existence, if it vacillates at the moment when it has to decide for honor and freedom or for slavery. 

Bastards on the Rhine 

Where mixture with highly dissimilar races can lead has been shown to us by the occupation of the Rhineland with colored troops, which left behind about 600 Negro-bastards for us. The danger exists that their Negro blood might seep further into the German population and attach itself to countless lines of blood and heredity, the purity and character of which then would be forever clouded. The thought and feeling of these humans would be different, and would set up no resistance to the intrusion of foreign blood over the French border. 

France today already has in Paris and in the southern provinces a considerable mix of bastards, and the decline in births has come to a halt only because of the higher number of births among racial aliens. France today has, after America, the greatest number of immigrants, of which Italians, Spaniards, and Negroes form a considerable part. Through this assimilation of immigrants the capacity for culture in particular regions has already sunk significantly. With the continuation of this development France in just a few decades will represent an outpost of Africa on European soil. For France itself this means racial suicide; most importantly the racial aliens in France are not tolerated guests that one would in the best case deport back to their homelands; rather they can even count on full equal rights among the French. Herein lie dangers also for us, since boundary-posts are never strong enough to prevent a racial infiltration. 

The Question of the Jews 

In Germany the November Revolution laid the intellectual groundwork for an unlimited, racially alien immigration consisting preponderantly of Jewish elements from the east. 

It is the secret of the Jewish people, whereby it alone has accomplished its survival through all the tumults of history, that it constantly acknowledges the laws of blood for itself and has even anchored them in its religion of law. The religious Jews' consciousness of blood and the sense of family are the roots of the Jewish people and have proven themselves stronger than other forces of history, and thus we have the unique example of a people without space and without language that otherwise represents and contains the essential characteristics of a people, and outlasts many peoples, but without ever abandoning its racial character. Everywhere they are regarded as foreigners, and also sense this themselves. This was most clearly expressed by Walter Rathenau as early as 1897: "Strange apparition! In the midst of German life a segregated foreign tribe of men, splendidly and conspicuously attired and of hot-blooded behavior. On Marxist sand, an Asiatic horde." Einstein expressed himself similarly in the year 1931: "Whenever I hear the expression "German citizen of Jewish faith," I have to laugh. These citizens in the first place want to have nothing to do with my poor Jewish brothers from the east; in the second place, not to be sons of my [Jewish] people, but only members of the Jewish cultural community? Is that honest? Can a non-Jew respect persons that dissimulate so? I am no German citizen. I am a Jew and happy to belong to the Jewish people." 

The demand for equal rights supplied the basis throughout the world  for establishing Jewish preeminence and rule among all peoples. With the dwindling of racial consciousness only the religious difference was still noticed, and to the feeling of that time it seemed unjust to give a special legal status to particular persons only because of their religion, which is indeed every man's personal affair. When the new purpose was called humanity and mankind, nothing stood in the way of mixing. Where objections were raised, it was silently hoped that assimilation also would denote the intention of Jewry. Jewry however only all too gladly made use of the opportunity for equal religious status: with that the path to all important offices and even to political leadership of the people stood open to him. Thus the certificate of baptism became "the admission-ticket to European culture" (H. Heine). This process of gaining racial acceptance was advancing at a greatly accelerated pace in the 14 years prior to the seizure of power by National-Socialism. 

It has often been said that National-Socialism, in the question of race, is purely negative and destructively oriented, and that its essential content is gutter anti-Semitism. This accusation misses the essential point, and entirely fails to consider the result and the purpose of the work of racial education. In the Jewish Question, which was most palpable among us, an entire generation that had learned to see only the human in the human recognized the importance of the racial question, for its own people as well as for the rest of the world. The entire handling of the Jewish Problem in the years prior to the seizure of power should be viewed essentially in terms of the political education of the German people, whose racial instincts had been to a dangerous degree lost. 

In this question, which showed its true face precisely in Germany, the eyes of many folk-comrades were opened, and, with the simultaneous call to all heroic and manly virtues of German humanity, there occurred the racial selection of political warrior-natures, which the leadership of the new state represents. The earlier status of the Jewish Question, as expressed in the absolute equalization of civil rights and in the unimpeded influx of Jews from the east, is the best demonstration of the extent to which the sense and consciousness of race had been lost. The emphasis in our position on this question is not on the negative, nor on mere rejection, but rather on the positive valuing of our own people. At the same time however it must also be taken into account that Jewry stood against Germany, principally through its role as leader of Marxist class-struggle and through its involvement in international finance, and supported all anti-nationalist efforts of a cultural as well as political kind. 

So that the people may not fragment at its core, we strive for purity of the blood. We want a separation between people and people, between blood and blood. Out of these considerations the law about civil servants was created and German racial legislation came into being. We have been accused of blind hatred of Jews, but it was not hatred against the Jews, rather love for our own people, that motivated these measures. 

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* "Was nicht Rasse ist auf dieser Erde, ist Spreu," are the words that Frercks attributes to Hitler, but it is a slight misquote. The statement that appears as a one-sentence paragraph on page 324 in the 1936 edition of Mein Kampf is: "Was nicht gute Rasse ist auf dieser Welt, ist Spreu." -- "What is not good race in this world is chaff."

Part 10 - Our Mission in Racial Policy

"National-Socialism is applied racial doctrine."

National-Socialism has recognized that the destiny of all peoples is not bound to external accidents -- to lost wars, to an undermined  economy, or to a natural disaster -- but that a nation's will to live solely and exclusively determines whether the race and the type, and therewith all the achievements of political, cultural, and economic life produced by it, are preserved through the centuries of history. We know therefore that all external measures in the end would be futile, that all exertions and casualties of the struggle, all commitment for building anew would be in vain, if in a few hundred years persons with different faces would then inhabit German lands, who, although they might still speak our language, would think and feel differently, because they would be of alien blood. 

Whenever the question of healthy and valuable progeny in a people is no longer regulated by natural instinct, and "ethnic status" has been overcome, it is the duty of a state recognizing the biological laws of racial and populational policy as the foundation of its existence to intervene. To liberal thinking such measures may seem harsh, but they are nonetheless salubrious for the people as a whole. Therefore the new state had to undertake first,  through the Law for the Prevention of Congenitally Ill Progeny, to cause the unhealthy hereditary lines of our people to run dry and to exclude them from propagation; and beyond that to prevent mixture with racial aliens. Even more important than these measures for protection against the congenitally incompetent and different, are the positive measures that add up to a promotion of families that are congenitally healthy and rich in children. The state seeks to facilitate the founding of families through marriage-loans, tax-breaks, and compensation-funds.

That these practical measures, necessary and desirable in themselves, will gradually yield what is required for keeping a people alive, is a fact that we must keep in mind. That is because the new state's challenges in populational policy require the voluntary commitment of the will of every individual. 

Education about Racial Policy 

Our racial world of beholding and experiencing is so basic and instinctual that we consider it fundamentally mistaken only to use promulgation of heredity-laws and many isolated scientific facts to move Germans to a changed attitude toward the child and toward the biological occurrence of the folk. For 2000 years the German people has taken the path of self-preservation and growth of its substance as a people, without having known anything about laws of heredity. And we are convinced that also in the future it will not consider this necessary for its racial health, if it succeeds in clearing away from the soul of the German person all the rubbish and refuse of a merely calculating and mechanically oriented epoch. 

Our mission, deriving from biological facts, must be again to lead the nation as a whole into rediscovering the path to itself and heeding the voice of its own blood, and furthermore rejecting all values adopted from outside as alien to its essence. With this inner orientation the life of the people also will be secured in regard to its racial character.

"What was shackled for a thousand years is being liberated for the salvation and for the health of our people and for others. The nobility of the human body has become free of its defilement and decay. A new world of beauty proclaims itself." (Adolf Hitler.)

The German Woman as Protectress of the Type 

And here it has been shown to the German woman where she can assist in the mission of racial rebuilding; her cooperation is perhaps the most important, since whether we shall continue on the path of biological decay, or whether respect and reverence for the eternal process of life will rise again in the next generation, depends ultimately on her relationship to the child and to the family. The youth must again with a sense of destiny [ahnungsvoll] learn to understand that it is only a link in the chain of the eternal sequences of generations of a people, and it must eventually in turn be the beginning of new chains of generations, if the people of the Germans wants to live and ought not to shrink in number in the next decades. 

The education should not consist in conveying knowledge; rather we have a much broader concept of education in racial policy, and we mean by that the retuning [Umstimmung] of the person in the depth of his soul, in his character. The point is to overcome the person's wrong inner attitude, which is not to be accomplished with the aid of calculation, clever words, or imparting of knowledge, but only and exclusively through an inner transformation of the person himself.[1] Thus will the upbringing of the youth into a natural life that affirms life allow a healthy new generation to mature, for which the body is not bad in itself[2] and must be chastened for the salvation of the soul. We wish moreover, in accord with the words of our Leader at the Stuttgart Gymnastic Festival, a youth "with a radiant spirit and magnificent bodies." If it is rumored from groups of emigrants that we have turned to barbarism, they might call it that -- if we again understand it to mean life in its original condition, bound to Nature and close to the Earth. The meaning and the purpose however ought to be -- and only then will the work have succeeded -- to make all work of enlightenment and education in racial policy superfluous, when the life of the nation will again cut its path vigorously and instinctively into the future. 

The Racial Idea Structures the German Future

Today the epoch of raceless thinking is dissolved by the thought and the idea of human polymorphism, the value of which stems exclusively from rootedness in ancestry and soil, the historic mission of which consists in the representation of its own incontrovertible and eternal value. This breakthrough of new racial thinking must find its natural adversaries among all those who are anxious to produce the unity of the culture and of the social order and organization of mankind through calculation, or even dogmatically through a religion. 

"When we speak of race, we mean the whole to which body and physicality is necessary, which however also extends into that great sphere of the life of the mind and the soul. If we deliberately conduct a racial policy, we are not thereby cultivating men as if they were cattle; rather we are taking care that healthy men grow, from whose healthy blood the great law of their kind speaks and which now for the first time in this world can structure what the German people has sought and longed for and striven after on an endlessly long, bitter path through centuries of its history: the Dominion of the Germans, about which we believe that it is not only a state but a dominion of the soul." (Dr. Walter Gross)

END

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1. Houston Stewart Chamberlain had talked about such a deep inner transformation of the Germans in his book Aryan Worldview (which I recently translated for Wermod and Wermod). Chamberlain foresaw it as a result of the influence of ancient Indian thought in Germany, although that is not specified here by Frercks. Indian thought, Chamberlain believed, was superior to Ancient Greek thought for the purpose of helping the Germans to find their way out of Semitic influence and back to their own true selves.

2. Some of the language and ideas in this sentence, and to some degree in the rest of the chapter, are conspicuously Nietzschean. The noun Lebensbejahung (saying yes to life) is an important term in Nietzsche's thought. The adjective lebensbejahend (life-affirming), which Frercks uses here, had been used by some authors influenced by Nietzsche in the early 20th century. The proposition that cultivation of the body should not be neglected (as had been the tendency in Germany prior to the First World War) is an emphatic point with Nietzsche.