“Blood”

From Faith and Action (1938) by Helmut Stellrecht for the Hitler Youth:


You carry in your blood the holy inheritance of your fathers and forefathers. You do not know those who have vanished in endless ranks into the darkness of the past. But they all live in you and walk in your blood upon the earth that consumed them in battle and toil and in which their bodies have long decayed.

§ Your blood is therefore something holy. In it your parents gave you not only a body, but your nature.

§ To deny your blood is to deny yourself. No one can change it. But each decides to grow the good that one has inherited and suppress the bad. Each is also given will and courage.

§ You do not have only the right, but also the duty to pass your blood on to your children, for you are a member of the chain of generations that reaches from the past into eternity, and this link of the chain that you represent must do its part so that the chain is never broken.

§ But if your blood has traits that will make your children unhappy and burdens to the state, then you have the heroic duty to be the last.

§ The blood is the carrier of life. You carry in it the secret of creation itself. Your blood is holy, for in it God’s will lives.