National Socialist Ethics

-Newsletter 115: 1 April 1939

In the Schwarze Korps, official weekly of the Black Guards, for 9 March, there appears an outline of National Socialist ethics which is in startling contradistinction from Christian ethics. We quote the following excerpts: ‘it is characteristic of the inferior races—when contesting vital space with superior races—to find it imperatively necessary to devise ethical rules which will render them capable of competing. In this manner, the Jewish people, owing to its Ten Commandments, has acquired the reputation of being a particularly favored people. However, the Jewish people had to create its own community organization by telling itself: Thou must not steal, commit adultery, bear false witness, and so on.

‘But an essentially different sense of justice is developed by saying to a member of the community: thou shalt not be robbed, thou shall not be killed or cheated. Such a point of view considers fundamentally the violator of right as being outside the community, as an intruder and alien. The free Germanic race assumes responsibility upon its own honor; the human being of Near Eastern origin, as well as the mongrel, expiates congenital error. 

‘If today, from the viewpoint of our own world-philosophy, we begin to build the foundation of our communal existence for an invincible future, we must clearly realize that not only the racial-communal substance of Germany been in part badly damaged, but also the whole people and, in fact, the whole Occident—the world of the Aryan peoples—has been inculcated for over a thousand years with a doctrine which basically accepted evil as the impulse to action in man, and has given a metaphysical foundation to this acceptance…

‘The consciousness of accomplishment, which has driven the Aryan peoples to powerful methods of expression in all spheres, has been compensated by the consciousness of inferiority… Against the Near Eastern racial consciousness of original sin, of original guilt and hereditary inferiority, we set the belief in the worth of German men. Because we have once again realized our origin and also that, in the course of centuries, innumerable values of our blood have been destroyed, and because they have gainsaid the blood’s effectiveness, we have once again raised up this belief. The belief in Germany—and therewith the belief in the German people—has in our time become a powerful filter which permits the entry only of that selection of leadership in which the biological values of a people’s ethics have become an integral part of their conduct…

‘The greatness of the creator, the image of God, can only in this belief first attain its full splendor, because this belief alone recognizes the justness of creation and thus, in the view of the All, excludes the ridiculous nonsense peddled about an apple, a serpent and two human beings. He who looks upon our earth as a grain of dust in infinity will not allow two human beings to correct his point of view. Belief in German men—if it must be expressed theologically—is the vindication of God and his creation…

‘While a completely abstract religiosity, based solely on the transcendental, produced a species of spiritual slavery, its present-day antithesis, the materialistic conception of the world and of economics—which for the last century has kept the world in continual crisis—produced a sort of labor slavery. Both conceptions agreed on the ethical inferiority of mankind and his slave nature.’