Preface
“world concept which aims, while denying the idea of democratic mass rule, to give this earth to the best of its peoples, to the highest of the human race …” This insistence on Germanic—not Aryan—supremacy appears again at the end of the book when Hitler sums up his political dogma in the sentence: “Just so Germany must inevitably win the position on this earth that it can justly claim as its own, if it is led and organized in accordance with these principles. That state which, in this age of race poisoning, devotes itself to the cultivation of its best racial elements, must one day become the ruler of the earth …”
Is it necessary to enlarge on this absurd grandiloquence for an American public? Undoubtedly, it is! Ten years ago one would have been mad to believe that the German people would accept such postulates as that “Parliamentarism is the instrument of that race whose innermost aims make it fear the sun, today and forever”; that “Marxism is the product and the instruments of Jews”; that Freemasonry is an “excellent instrument for the defense and realization of Jewish aims.” Today we wonder. Who knows what America will believe tomorrow?
It is natural, I suppose, that one should think of Nazi anti-Semitism first when one discusses Hitler. It is also unfortunate. In its preoccupation with the tragic problem of the German Jew the world at large overlooked much of the significance of the Third Reich’s more far-reaching activities. Hitler withdrew from the League of Nations; Hitler marched into the Rhineland; Hitler repudiated German disarmament; Hitler won the Saar and established a National Socialist government in Danzig; Hitler joined Mussolini in Spain and marched into Austria; Hitler forced Chamberlain to accept the treacherous Munich pact.
Each time the world found what comfort it could in the thought that this would be the last of Nazi aggressions. Yet a simple perusal of Mein Kampf should have shown it the truth. As long as Hitler rules Germany there can be no peace. “Peaceful competition among nations,” he says, “has never existed. There is only the peaceful possibility of mutually acknowledged brigandage …” “Even as a boy I was never a pacifist,” he as-
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