Mein Kampf
The products of this seduction of mankind can be described only as victims. For if in some pictures I have striven to draw the character of these “lowest” strata from the life, it would not be complete without my assurance that in these depths, again, I found light in the shape of often extraordinary self-sacrifice, faithful comradeship, contentment in adversity, and thoroughgoing modesty, especially among what were then the older workmen. Even though these virtues were disappearing more and more in the younger generation through the very influence of the metropolis, there were still many whose good, healthy blood mastered the low vilenesses of life. If in politics these kind, honest people nevertheless joined and helped to fill the ranks of our people’s deadly enemies, it was because they neither could nor did understand the vileness of the new doctrine; because nobody else troubled to pay them any attention; and finally because social conditions were stronger than any will to the contrary. The privation whose victims they were bound sooner or later to be would yet drive them into the Social Democrats’ camp.
Countless times the bourgeoisie in a manner as clumsy as it was immoral, had formed a united front even against demands justified in ordinary humanity, and had done this without so much as profiting or having any expectation of profit by their attitude. Hence even the most decent of workmen was driven from the trade-union organizations into political activity.
Millions of workers were surely inwardly hostile to the Social Democratic Party at first, but their resistance was overcome by the manner, often quite insane, in which the bourgeois parties opposed any demand of a social nature. The simply hidebound obstruction of all attempts to improve working conditions, of safety devices on machines, of prevention of child labor and of protection for women at least during the months when she carries the future comrade of the people beneath her heart—all this helped to drive the masses into the nets of Social Democracy, which gratefully seized upon every case of similar contemptible sentiments. Our political citizenry, our bourgeoisie, can never make good such past sins. For by resisting all attempts to cure
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