The Order of Clans
h/t Vidar
SS NOTEBOOK No. 2. 1943.
The word “order” is familiar to us from the monastic orders and orders of chivalry of the Christian Middle Ages. When we think of these orders, we think of the mighty, rebellious feudal castles and the long, windowed facades of monastic buildings. In the past, the former was inhabited by monk-knights wearing the cross of the Order on their doublets and cloaks.
In the latter, we imagine men in sandals and frocks walking silently through the corridors and cells. In both cases, we already have an outward impression of the spirit of the Order.
An order is a community that follows an “ordina”, i.e. a statute, a freely sworn rule of life. The characteristic of an order is that it serves a high ideal. For example, there has never been an “order of merchants”, but at most, associations of merchants.
The spirit of the order plays an exceptional role wherever professions of faith, ideals and the defense of these values are concerned. This is how the most eminent monastic religious orders came into being at a time when extremely pious men wanted to pull the Church out of an ever-increasing “secularization”. The German orders of chivalry came into being when the Christian faith had to be taken to the “holy land” or to the East Slavic countries. The Jesuit Order developed when the Roman Church had to defend itself once again against the popular Nordic Protestant movement.
Regardless of the fact that these Christian orders were based on an alien conception and a mistaken ideology, that they degenerated and partly disappeared, we must nevertheless recognize that in these communities lived men who wanted to dedicate their lives to a high ideal. This ideal, this will, this profession of faith in private life was so heavy with consequence that it could only be the lot of a few, not of all. Moreover, for these idealists it was necessary to build a community of life with the certainty that each one would be ready to demand the maximum of himself in the service of an idea. This certainty gave strength to the individual and the group. So, we see that an order is, within an ideology, that restricted community whose members give absolute precedence in their existence to that ideology and freely commit themselves to following its laws. The stricter these laws are, the stronger the will to respect them, the greater the selflessness required, the more limited the number of members of the order, and the more powerful the order will be in pursuing its objectives.
An order is defined by its objective or programme. This, in turn, is determined by the ideology to which the order is attached.
The Christian monks had as their objective the elevation of the soul to a life in the afterlife. Since this, according to the Christian conception, can only be achieved by withdrawing from this world of sin and mortifying the sinful body, the monk took a vow of complete poverty (removal of all worldly goods), humble obedience (abandonment of all personal wills and rights), and chastity (refusal of all “desires” except for “God’s”, which is the most physically demanding). We call this attitude “asceticism”. Despite justified indignation, we bow with respect to the high degree of idealism of these Germans, these Germans, accepting this personal sacrifice in the name of “God” and an “idea of perfection”. The minority who made such commitments were undoubtedly largely elite in character.
The knight-monks of the orders of chivalry represent a more sympathetic image for us. The profession of Christian faith was combined with the chivalric way of life. In this respect, a more virile, more temporal, more active aspect follows. While the monk believed that he could only achieve his goal by self-destruction, the Teutonic knight had made it his mission to expand the kingdom with his warrior’s body and sword.
The SS Clan Order, on the other hand, is founded within the National Socialist Movement on a completely new basis. The roots of its beliefs are different, and each of its specific laws and values are different. The most striking characteristic of Christian orders in the past, whether “contemplative”, “active” or warrior, was the obligation to renounce women, marriage and children. The essential criterion of our Order is the obligation to get engaged and married! The guiding idea of medieval Christian orders was the elevation of the soul, the “deliverance from the body” to unite the soul with a god in the afterlife. Our credo is that the fulfilment, the “incarnation” and thus the proper destiny of the god of life, is through the evolutionary pathways of species and races; we see mate choice and permanent selection as the means to improve life (body and soul). We no longer need to be ascetics, for we do not want a god in the afterlife. Our god asks us to be “temporal”, because the world, as we know, is his field of action, his “body”. Thus, the SS, as the pagan order of National Socialist ideology in the 20th century, is a temporal order in the highest sense of the word. The time for mistakes has passed. We are now experiencing a powerful advance in our knowledge, and the centuries to come will prove that it will have far-reaching consequences. To recognize the presence of God in nature (as the present state of science knows it) means to note its unity, yes, even its uniqueness with our destiny, subject to the hereditary law that he applies!
The SS began as a troop, but it knew from the start that this troop should not be an end in itself. We do not live to perpetuate a Männerbund, but we are men gathered together with our families, our clans, our people, our blood children, all the children of our people and a living future in mind. For us, “organization” is only a means to serve “the organism”. The organism is the people.
We see today that all the peoples of Europe, including our German people, have undergone a constant racial, and therefore psychic and spiritual, degradation over the last two thousand years, and this as a result of the mixture of blood (the microbes of Judaism and Christianity, its successor.) We know that it is neither famine nor the destructive rage of the people that has caused the tragic wars and disorders of European history, but the corruption of the popular substance, the disregard of the divine will of love and marriage between equals by birth, of selection, of incitement to selection, as well as a vice that accompanies it: the reversal of the relations of authority in the popular bodies. We affirm that each one of us collaborates in the great political and historical human creations if, in the course of our lives, we do not deviate “one inch from the ways of God”, if we are faithful and remain faithful to those who have chosen the same faith.
We men of the SS recognize that the words “people”, “Reich”, “honor” and “freedom” mean nothing if one does not have the will to bring to life the spirit that governs these concepts. The importance attached to this spirit must be placed in the order of the laws of nature. National Socialism is a biological ideology which asserts that the demands of nature are political demands. Nature has defined the rule of life which the races of good men must follow:
- The individual aspiration for marriage between healthy and equal partners by birth.
- On this basis, the development of the family as “the smallest, but most valuable unit within the whole organized structure of the state”.
- Life is built according to natural laws from the fertile branch of the family. The clan is rooted in the family, a living entity, a reality of the Order that a biological as well as political will has dreamed and desired.
It is only in the clan that the individual can develop his or her personality and qualities.
The best order is the one whose laws are none other than the divine laws of nature. From that moment on, the SS began to transform itself from a male association into an association of clans. The SS clans are thus animated by the spirit of the Order and tend to unite. The Order, however, lives through each clan and derives its own value from it.
The fear that anarchic particularism will develop in the clan with regard to the wholeness of the Order and its goal, the Empire, and the opposite fear that the demands of the Order will prejudice the natural freedoms of the clan, are unfounded and without reason as long as the spirit of the Order and the spirit of the clan do not deviate from the natural divine laws of life.
The Order thus places a permanent obligation on all its members. Each member must therefore strive to keep the spirit of the whole intact. The SS member knows that it is a matter of natural law that an individual or another should fail in his duty, but he also knows that this must not take away his faith and loyalty. To maintain this unshakeable firmness is to be a true SS man, to prove the value of his blood.
History teaches us that organizations perish in the course of time through weakening of the spirit, alienation or torpor, when selfish and materialistic intruders take over, pushing aside bold, vivacious, creative personalities who, therefore, no longer feel attracted to the organization. Our Order must therefore avoid allowing its basic spiritual idea to be perverted. We must also prevent it from favoring appearances and material forms to the detriment of its good men. Let us also keep our community free from those who do not give us disinterested faith and pure idealism, but selfishness, lust for power and bourgeois enjoyment. For an Order is judged by impartial History according to the same laws as a people: according to the living qualities of its flesh and blood.
Once a millennium, people have the opportunity to look back on their mistakes and, enriched by painful trials and equipped with new creative forces, to regain awareness of the divine meaning of their lives.
The door to a great future is opening again. We are aware of the responsibility which, in history, always rests on the decisive minority. Thus we, the members of the SS and the SS clan, stand before the divine Creator with the motto which the Führer gave us: “My honor is called loyalty”.
Mayerhofer
-excerpted from “The SS Order – Ethics & Ideology” by Edwige Thibaut