Mein Kampf
the Second Infantry Regiment. This was my first more or less purely political activity.
Within a few weeks I received orders to attend a “course” which was being held for members of the defense forces. Here a soldier was supposed to acquire a definite foundation for his thinking as a citizen. The value of the whole performance to me was that I had a chance to make the acquaintance of a few like-minded comrades with whom I could thoroughly discuss the situation of the moment. We were all more or less firmly convinced that Germany could no longer be saved from the coming catastrophe by the parties of the November crime, i.e. the Center and the Social Democrats, but that even with the best will in the world the so-called “bourgeois-nationalist” organizations could never make good what had been done, either. A whole series of essentials was lacking here without which such a task could not succeed. Time has since proved that our view was correct.
In our little circle, therefore, we discussed the formation of a new party. The basic ideas we had in mind were the same that were later realized in the “German Workers’ Party.” The name of the movement which was to be founded must give us a chance from the very beginning to get at the broad masses; for without this possibility the whole task seemed senseless and unnecessary. We hit upon the name “Social Revolutionary Party,” because the social views of the new organization actually constituted a revolution.
But the deeper reason lay in the following:
Attentive as I had always been to economic problems, still it had been more or less confined to the limits resulting from the consideration of social questions as such. Not until later were the bounds extended as a result of my examination of the German alliance policy. This was, after all, very largely the result of a mistaken valuation of the economic system, as well as of vagueness about the possible basis on which the German people could be sustained in the future. But all these ideas rested on the opinion that capital was never anything but the product of labor, and,
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