Category: Hitler Youth

“Discipline”

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

Savages and half-savages have courage, but only advanced people have discipline. Discipline is the ability to fall in line. Discipline is carrying out an order without knowing the reason, without understanding. Discipline also means enduring injustice for the sake of a good cause.

§ Discipline is iron virtue and silent obedience.

§ Discipline comes from within yourself. You accept it because you follow a higher will. He who does not do this will be forced by steely necessity, which alone can overcome the lack of will and weakness of many, making of them useful members of the people and the state.

§ Discipline is a spiritual attitude. Law and command work through it for the good of all. Any weakening of discipline is the beginning of collapse. Each is called to ensure that he himself and the man next to him behaves in a disciplined way.

Helmut Stellrecht Hitler Youth

“Self Control”

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

One expects that a person who drives a car is in control, and that he causes no accidents. One expects that a person who lives with other people will control himself, so that he does not endanger himself or others.

§ The forces within us can raise or lower us. It depends on the use we make of them, on whether we control them and therefore ourselves.

§ Hunger and thirst exist to be satisfied. But woe to him who eats for the sake of eating or drinks for the sake of drinking. He is lower than an animal that knows when it has had enough. But he to whom understanding has been given does not know it. We hate the gluttons and drunkards with bulging bodies and swollen eyes, people with no character or self control. We eat and drink to live, but we never live in order to eat and drink.

§ The body must be kept under iron discipline so that we are always in charge of it and it is always dependable. We also may never allow the sexual drive to control us. For adults it is not there to be satisfied, but rather a force that should be used to produce future generations healthy in both body and soul. A young person is given strength not to use in bed, but rather in the sun and the wind, on the sports field and countryside, until we have a body in front of us full of strength and speed, a body in which courage and faith are joined in a free soul, a body that is master of its passions, master of itself, the German person of the future. Out of it will grow the strength of a renewed people, the bearer of a future generation of nobility and freedom.

§ If you control yourself, you control life.

§ If you control yourself, you must be able to bear pain without uttering a sound. Men do not complain or cry, and boys who want to become men behave in the same way.

§ You should not give in to every little problem. Be open, be determined, never play the cripple, but control yourself. Be the master of your pain and problems. Force yourself to be cheerfully faithful. Then you will find strength you did not know you had.

§ You must practice self control. How often does duty call, but something distracts you? Command yourself so that you can master yourself.

§ Do something every day that you do not like to do, and avoid doing something every day that you would gladly have done.

§ Do everything you are ordered to do immediately, without thinking about it. You must in order to become a real man.

§ That is the secret of every great personality. It has gained all the strength it directs outwardly from overcoming itself.

§ But you should not be a meek person who gives up everything in order to live in a cave to receive a promised blessing. God does not want that for a person. He should have pleasure in his work. He should use it, but never misuse it, and should be the master of himself.

Hitler Youth

“Will”

Post author By C .T.
Post date May 31, 2013
2 Comments on “Will”

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

Will is the force inside you that commands. You may hesitate from weariness, anxiety,
weakness. Will lifts you over every barrier and orders you to do what your feelings and understanding tell you to do.

§ A man without will is like a machine without power. It is useless. But “where there is a will, there is a way,” and where a will orders, it is obeyed, whether a person follows his own will or men follow the will of a leader.

§ Where there is faith that comes from strength, it is will that gives it the push.

§ Exercise your will so that it is as taut and ready as a drawn bowstring, ready to let loose in the moment it should, neither a second too late nor a second too early. Exercise your will in little things until it is strong enough to bring from you that which Germany expects.

Tags National Socialism

Helmut Stellrecht Hitler Youth Real men

“Hardness”

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

Life demands hardness. One must strive with burning heart toward the ideal of hardness. To be hard for the sake of life, to become a fighter, to win the victory.

§ Our environment is a given. Burning heat in summer, biting cold in winter, long marches in the wet and cold. Working long at the factory, or behind a machine gun. Bearing hunger and thirst, sleeping on the bare earth, not surrendering in battle, never, never, no matter how hopeless everything sees, hurling an empty pistol in the face of the enemy, reaching for his neck without regard for oneself, even if it leads to death. To be a fighter, a fighter with faith in his cause, even if everyone says it is a false cause. That brings victory, the victory that belongs to him who is the harder.

§ You should never give up in battle or work. Even if you fail a thousand times, you must make the thousand and first attempt. In the end it will succeed and you will be the victor, even if almost bled dry, almost faint, but filled with the triumphant knowledge of having overcome. You are victor in your struggle and victor over yourself.

§ Each must prepare for his battle. Each must train as if he will one day fight the decisive battle for Germany. Each must be able to march, suffer hunger and thirst, sleep on bare ground, bear all privations, be a fighter, a soldier from the moment he can understand what is at stake.

§ We need men hard and tough as steel, harder than anything else in the world. Only they will master the great future of Germany. Do you want to be one of them, or stand aside as a weakling?

§ Germany will be the land of the brave and the strong. Either you belong to them, or you will no longer be a German.

Tags Germany, National Socialism

Helmut Stellrecht Hitler Youth

“Courage”

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

Courage is the most beautiful and noble trait a man can have. He who has no courage is not a man.

§ The “storming courage” of an attack is wonderful. The feeling of having risked all in service of a high ideal frees one and lets him charge forward with joy. Courage bears a man as if he had wings, and fills his heart.

§ The attack becomes the high point of life. When everything depends on one card, when one can lose everything, when one can win everything, life is at its best. He who has never charged and attacked, filled with courage, has never fully lived.

§ Alongside “stormy courage” is the “indomitable courage” of those facing hard fate. “Fate is great and powerful, but greater still is the person who bears it unshaken.”

§ Life is often harder than death. A coward holds on to it. No one faces a challenge greater than the strength he has been given to face it. Courage overcomes all. When one has done all in his power, good luck comes to show him a new way and help him along. But it is not really good luck. “Resist all powers, never give in, be strong, calls the army of the gods.”

§ Courage is needed not only by the man, by the soldier, a woman too needs courage. For the man battle, the attack is the greatest challenge. For the woman it comes when she gives a new person life. Men who no longer want to wage war cannot face the mothers who give new life at the risk of their own.

§ Courage is the noblest trait of a man or woman. It determines the battle and gives victory. Hardness Life demands hardness. One must strive with burning heart toward the ideal.

Tags National Socialism

Helmut Stellrecht Hitler Youth

“Fatherland”

Post author By C .T.
Post date April 15, 2013

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

“Oh holy heart of the peoples, O Fatherland!” You were created from the endless forests and wide moors that the glaciers of the ice age left us. It was poor land only made fruitful through sweat and toil, in joy and sorrow, in endless work.

§ One passed you on to the next and laid down in your earth from which new life grew. In you rest the endless ranks of past generations, the seed for new sowing in the wide land. The blood of the noble and brave who defended you fell on you. You were fertilized by the best that you bore.

§ From you, castles and cathedrals rose to the heavens, as if the earth itself wished to rise up to the god it was seeking. From our earth, from the seed of our dead.

§ The land is broad. Under the care of industrious hands it became a garden. They protected it lovingly, like the mountains and valleys protect their villages. Proud cities by the rivers, displaying the splendor of the old Reich. The market fountain has flowed for hundreds of years here. The gates still stand through which once the Kaiser, the knights and the nobility passed.

§ The silver stream of fate winds through. On the other bank is land that was lost. The heart almost stops. How one wishes to stroke the distant forests as one would an old and beloved face. But the heart beats once more on the plains and the coasts that German colonists won. The castle of the knights stands in the east, an eternal testimony of strength and virtue. There are the fields from which Frederick’s eagle rose toward the sun, and there, far from the borders, is the wall of German dead, an eternal memorial of the nation that withstood the world as long as it believed in itself.

§ Everything is founded in and rests in you, Fatherland. Our strength and our greatness, but also our need and our misery. You are the ground that bore us and will bear those distant generations that will work and bleed for you.

§ No one can live without you, but each will gladly give his life back to you who gave it to him.

Tags Germany, National Socialism

Helmut Stellrecht Hitler Youth

“Socialism”

Post author By C .T.
Post date April 13, 2013

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

Socialism means: “The common good before the individual good.” Socialism means: “Think not of yourself, but of the whole, of the people and the state.” Socialism means: “Not the same for everyone, but to each his own.” These sentences make clear what we call “German socialism.” No one is a socialist who does not live according to them.

§ A new order grows from these sentences. The sentence “To each his own” has killed the “mass,” the slogan of Marxism, and replaced it with the “community.” Every community grows around a leader. He is the center of its order, which forms around him. A number of these leaders form a larger community, and stand around their leader as a living order. It all grows from below—the number growing ever smaller—like a pyramid, and finds its epitome in the Führer of the Reich. All are bound by the community. Each community is a living order. The whole, the great living order, is the people’s community. It binds inextricably person to person, leader to leader. It does not give the same to everyone, but to each his own. It creates the socialist people in a socialist state.

§ Each has his task in the community, given to him according to his gifts. Never do all have the same task, but rather each his own. His task gives him a place in the community, If he fulfills it completely, he wins the esteem of the others. He is happy, even if his task is not large in the overall scheme of things.

§ Such communities grow in the field, in assault troops, in artillery battalions, in submarines, in S.A. units. Strong, bound forever together, wordlessly understanding each other, together until the end, sworn to a common goal. Strength grows from such communities, and from them grows the state.

§ We want community in Germany so that we can stand unshaken in the face of whatever may come. The mass is conquered by the community. It gives to each his own, to each his goal and his task, and everyone together one goal: the people’s community in the new state.

Tags National Socialism

Helmut Stellrecht Hitler Youth

“State”

Post author By C .T.
Post date April 12, 2013

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

A people gives itself its form through the state. There is only one natural form for each people, only one state.

§ In the natural process of growth, each people finds its form and its state, and finds them again when it has lost them, if only it wants to.

§ National Socialism has broken foreign compulsion and eliminated the unnatural. Germany once again grows into its own state and is once more itself.

§ The best rules, the Führer, and he carries the responsibility because he is best able to bear it. The parliament has ceased to exist. This form of Western democracy has been abolished. The German states established by the grace of counts or by Napoleon disappear. The Reich becomes one. The new state rises: “The day is coming when a single tent will cover all the German land.”

Tags National Socialism

Helmut Stellrecht Hitler Youth Metaphysics of race / sex

“A People (Volk)”

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

A people grows from god’s will. Woe to him who wishes to destroy the peoples and make people alike. God created the trees, the bushes, the weeds and the grass not so that they could merge into one species, but that each should exist in its own way. Just as a tree, a people grows as a living whole from similar roots, but becoming one, the strongest of its kind.

§ All of the same blood belong to it. A people knows no state boundaries. It is bound by the ties of blood that bind all the sons of a single mother. The German people is a nation of a hundred million. Each German belongs to it, no matter where he may live.

§ A people cannot be destroyed as long as its roots draw on the strength of the earth. Summer and winter may come and go. But it always blooms anew in indestructible life and perfects itself in the strength that rises from its roots towards god’s will.

§ What does it mean when an individual dies? It is as if the wind blows leaves from a tree. New ones grow eternally every spring.

§ The peoples are the greatest and most noble creation of god on this earth. There is no institution in the world, no party and no church, that has the right to make them the same or to rob them of even the tiniest bit of their individuality.

Tags National Socialism

Helmut Stellrecht Hitler Youth Metaphysics of race / sex

“Race”

Post author By C .T.
Post date April 10, 2013

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

Race means to be able to think in a certain way. He who has courage, loyalty and honor, the mark of the German, has the race that should rule in Germany, even if he does not have the physical characteristics of the “Nordic” race. The unity of the noble and a noble body is the goal to which we strive. But we despise those whose noble body carries an ignoble soul.

§ A variety of related European races have merged in Germany. One trunk grew from these roots. Each race gave its best strength. Each contributed to the German soul. We Germans have a fighting spirit, a look to the horizon, the “desire to do a thing forits own sake” of the Nordic race. Another racial soul gave us our cozy old cities and our depth. Yet another racial soul gave us mastery of the magical realm of music. Yet another gave us our ability to organize, and our silent obedience.

§ We can not hold it against anyone if he carries a variety of racial lines, for the German soul does as well, and created out of it the immeasurable riches which it possesses above all other nations. The greatness of our Reich grew out of this soul.

§ But the Nordic race must dominate in Germany and shape the soul of each German. It must win out in the breast of each individual. Today our ideal is not the artist or the citizen, but the hero.

§ Our highest treasure is the soul that we have been given. He who mixes his blood with that of foreign inferior races ruins the blood and soul that have been given to him to pass on in purity to his children. He makes his children impure and miserable, and commits the greatest crime that he as a National Socialist can commit.

§ But he who follows the laws of race fulfills the great commandment that only like should be brought together with like, keeping apart those things like fire and water which do not mix.

Tags Germany, National Socialism