CHAPTERÂ ELEVEN Propaganda and Organization
Immediately after joining the German Workers’ Party, I took charge of the propaganda department. I considered this branch to be the most important at the time. Propaganda had to precede organization and win over the latter’s human resources for its activities. I have always been an enemy of hasty and pedantic organizational methods, because the result is generally nothing more than a dead mechanism.
For this reason, it is more appropriate to first disseminate an idea through propaganda directed from a central office for a certain period of time and then gradually examine the human material recruited, studying it carefully in order to select the most capable leaders. It will not be unusual to observe, in this way, that some of the seemingly insignificant elements deserve to be considered men who meet the conditions of Führer.
It would be completely wrong to try to find in the accumulation of theoretical knowledge the characteristic tests of aptitude and competence inherent to the status of Führer.
The opposite often occurs.
Great theorists are only very rarely also great organizers, and this is because the merit of the theorist and the programmatic person lies, first and foremost, in the knowledge and definition of exact laws of an abstract nature, while the organizer must be, above all, a psychologist.
Even rarer is the case of a great theorist being at the same time a great Führer.
The agitator has more capacity for this—and it is understandable—although this truth is heard with displeasure by many of those who devote themselves exclusively to scientific speculation. An agitator, capable of spreading an idea among the masses, will always be a psychologist, even if he were merely a demagogue. In any case, the agitator may be
A better Führer than a theorist who is oblivious to the world and alien to humanity. Because leading means knowing how to move crowds.
The gift of forming ideas has nothing in common with the Führer’s own ability. It would be obvious to argue about what is more important: conceiving ideals and proposing human goals, or achieving them? As often happens in life, in this case too, it’s both. The most beautiful theoretical conception will be aimless and without any practical value if there is no Führer to move the masses in that direction. And conversely, what would be the point of the Führer’s genius and all his drive if the ingenious theorist did not define in advance the ends of human struggle? But the rarest thing on this planet is to find the theorist, the organizer, and the Führer embodied in the same person. This conjunction is what reveals the great man.
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As I said, during the first period of my activity in the movement, I devoted myself entirely to propaganda. Thanks to it, a small nucleus of men imbued with the new doctrine gradually formed, thus forming the material that would later provide the first basic elements of an organization.
The purpose of propaganda is to recruit followers, while that of the organization is to gain members.
An adherent of a cause is someone who clearly agrees with its aims; a member is someone who fights for it.
Adherence lies in the mere knowledge of the idea, while membership implies the courage to personally represent the truth recognized as such and to propagate it.
Passive knowledge corresponds to the mentality of the human majority, which is negligent and cowardly; membership compels action and is unique to the minority.
According to this, propaganda will have to work tirelessly to gain followers. And the organization will have to rigorously select only the most qualified from among its followers to grant them membership.
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Propaganda orients public opinion in the direction of a particular idea and prepares it for the hour of triumph, while the organization strives for that triumph through the active, constant, and systematic cohesion of those coreligionists who demonstrate the dispositions and aptitudes to carry the struggle to a victorious end.
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The triumph of an idea will be possible all the sooner the more widely the action of propaganda has affected public opinion and the greater the exclusivity, rigidity, and firmness of the organization that practically sustains the struggle.
It follows from this that the number of adherents can never be too large; the number of members, on the other hand, is more likely to be too large than too small.
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The decisive success of an ideological revolution must always be achieved when the new ideology is inculcated in everyone and then imposed by force, if necessary. Furthermore, the organization of the idea, that is, the movement itself, must encompass only the number of men indispensable for managing the central bodies within the mechanism of the respective state.
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The supreme duty of the organization is to ensure that possible disagreements arising within the members of the movement do not lead to a division and thus to a weakening of the work of the organization.
set. It must also ensure that the spirit of action does not disappear, but rather is constantly renewed and consolidated.
Organizations, that is, groups of members that exceed a certain limit, gradually lose their fighting strength and are no longer capable of promoting an idea with interest and dynamism, much less of knowing how to use it appropriately.
Therefore, it is essential that the moment success has been placed on the movement’s side, it—acting out of a simple instinct for self-preservation—automatically suspend the admission of new members and expand its organization in the future only on the basis of extreme care and thorough examination of its respective elements. Only in this way will the movement be able to maintain its core intact and healthy. It will then ensure that under such circumstances, it is this core alone that guides and directs the movement, that is, that it determines the propaganda aimed at achieving universal recognition and that—as the wielder of power—it adopts the procedures necessary for the practical implementation of its ideas.
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All great movements, whether religious or political, owed their success to the knowledge and application of these principles; above all, lasting success is inconceivable without observance of these laws.
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As leader of the party’s propaganda, I strove not only to prepare the ground for the subsequent great development of our movement, but, thanks to a radical approach to this work, I also strove to ensure that the organization always received the best elements; for the more extreme and fulminating my propaganda, the more the weak and timid became frightened, thus preventing them from entering the central core of our organization.
And indeed, it was so!
Until mid-1921, this purely propaganda activity was sufficient for the movement’s initiation. In the summer of the same year, special events made it necessary to adapt the organization to the increasingly evident success of propaganda.
In 1919 and 1920, the movement’s leadership was overseen by a committee elected by the members’ assemblies, which in turn were mandated by the party statutes. This committee embodied, paradoxically, precisely what the movement aimed to combat with all its rigor: parliamentarism.
The committee sessions, for which protocols were kept and where resolutions were adopted by majority, truly represented a mini-parliament.
Such nonsense did not agree with me and I soon stopped attending the meetings.
I was fulfilling my duty of propaganda and that was all; for the rest, I did not allow any ignorant person to try to interfere in my field, just as I did not try to interfere in the attributions of others.
That absurdity must have come to an end when, after the new statutes were approved and I was called to take over the presidency of the party, I had sufficient authority.
The president is responsible for the running of the entire movement. He is responsible for distributing tasks among the committee members, who report to him, and among any necessary collaborators. Each member, in turn, is solely responsible for the task entrusted to them and is directly subordinate to the president, who must ensure the cooperation of all, whether by selecting members or issuing general directives.
This law of responsibility, as a matter of principle, gradually became embedded within the movement.
A movement that, in an era where majority rule reigns in everything, abides by the principle of the Führer’s authority and the responsibility inherent in this principle, will one day with mathematical certainty overcome the existing state and will be the victor.
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In December 1920, the “Völkischer Beobachter” was acquired. This newspaper, which, as its name suggests, generally defended national-racist interests, was now to become the official organ of the party. Initially, it appeared twice a week; in 1923, it was published daily; and finally, in August, it adopted its current format.
It was thought-provoking that, in the face of the power of the Jewish press, there was almost no nationalist newspaper of any real importance. This was largely attributable—as I later had the opportunity to personally verify in countless practical cases—to the unskillful commercial structure of national-racist enterprises in general. They were too absorbed by the belief that conviction should prevail over productive effort; a completely erroneous point of view, considering that it is precisely productive effort that represents the most beautiful expression of a way of thinking, which should have nothing external or superficial about it.
Even if the content of the “Völkischer Beobachter” was honest, the company’s management was commercially impossible. Here, too, the mistaken belief was that nationalist newspapers should be supported by voluntary contributions from nationalist circles, rather than reflecting that, after all, a newspaper must make its way in competition with others and that it is undignified to try to cover up negligence or errors on the part of the company’s management with donations from well-intentioned patriots.
For my part, I strove to innovate in that state of affairs, the seriousness of which I had become aware of, and chance favored my purpose, allowing me to meet the man who, since then, has rendered worthy services to the Nationalist cause, not only as manager of the company, but also as a party administrator. In 1914, that is, at the front, I had met (at that time I was his subordinate) our current manager, Max Amann. During the four years of the war, I had the opportunity to observe almost constantly the extraordinary qualities of ability, diligence, and conscientiousness that characterized the man who later became my collaborator.
When in the summer of 1921, our movement was going through a difficult crisis and I was dissatisfied with the work of some employees,
Especially about one of them, whose memory was very bad, I appealed to my old regiment comrade, asking him to take charge of the party administration. Amann held a respectable position at the time, and only after much reflection did he decide to accept my invitation, although on the express condition that he recognized the authority of a single person and never put himself at the mercy of a committee of wise men.
It is to the enduring merit of our first manager, a man of broad commercial training, that he introduced correctness and order into the party’s administrative machinery, these characteristics remaining exemplary ever since. The work was carried out like a private enterprise: the staff had to distinguish themselves through their own efforts, and there was no point in trying to claim the status of coreligionist. It is natural that a movement that so bitterly condemns the political corruption prevailing in the administration of the Marxist state should keep its own administrative apparatus free of vices.
The year 1921 was also significant in that, in my capacity as party chairman, I gradually managed to eliminate the influence of countless committee members in our various departments. There were people dominated by the itch to criticize and who lived in a kind of permanent pregnancy of excellent plans, ideas, projects, methods, etc. Their highest and greatest aspiration was generally to establish a supervisory committee whose sole purpose was to spy on the honest work of others.
The most effective way to neutralize such useless committees, which did nothing but hatch practically unworkable resolutions, was to assign them some kind of effective task. How laughable it was to see this whole group of individuals imperceptibly vanish! This made me think of the Reichstag. How quickly all the honorable members of parliament would disappear from there if, instead of their loquacity, they were given a positive task, that is, work that had to be carried out under the personal responsibility of each of these sycophants!
Over the course of two years, I managed to spread my way of thinking more and more, and today the National Socialist movement is fully in tune with it.
The material success of my method of organization was revealed on November 9, 1923. When I joined the movement four years earlier, not even a simple stamp was available: four years later – when the party was dissolved and its assets confiscated – our
The economic assets, including valuables and the newspaper, amounted to 170,000 gold marks.
