Nothing had saddened me so much in the turbulent years of my youth as the thought of having been born in an era that seemed to erect its temples of glory exclusively for merchants and officials. The fluctuations of universal history seemed to have reached such a degree of appeasement that one could well believe that the future truly belonged only to the “peaceful competition of peoples” or, what amounts to the same thing, to a quiet, mutual plundering with the exclusion of violent methods of defense. The different states were increasingly assuming the role of corporations that undermined each other and also reciprocally snatched customers and orders from each other, trying to outdo each other by every possible means, and all this amid great and harmless fuss. Such a development not only seemed likely to persist, but by universal recommendation should also in the future transform the world into a single gigantic bazaar in whose halls, as signs of immortality, the effigies of the most refined speculators and the most lazy administrative officials would be placed. The English could serve as sellers, the Germans as administrators, and none other than the Jews as owners.
Why wasn’t I born a hundred years earlier, for example, in the era of the wars of freedom, when a man was really worth something, even without having a “business”?
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When the news of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand spread in Munich (I was at home and only heard vaguely what had happened), I was immediately overcome with fear that perhaps the murderous bullet had come from the pistol of some German student who, irritated by the constant work of Slavicization encouraged by the heir to the throne,
Austrian, would have tried to save the German people from that internal enemy. It wasn’t difficult to imagine what the consequences of this might have been: a new era of persecutions that would have been “justified” and “well-founded” for the entire world. But when, shortly afterward, I learned the names of the alleged perpetrators of the attack and learned, moreover, that they were Serbians, I was overwhelmed with horror at the reality of this revenge of unfathomable fate.
The greatest friend of the Slavs fell under the leadership of a Slavic fanatic.
Anyone who had had the opportunity to carefully study the state of relations between Austria and Serbia in the years prior to the attack could not doubt for a moment that the stone had begun to roll and that it was now impossible to stop it.
It is unfair to criticize the Viennese government of the time today regarding the form and content of its ultimatum to Serbia. No power in the world could have acted otherwise, all else being equal. Austria had an irreconcilable enemy on its southeastern border who systematically provoked the Habsburg Monarchy and would never have relented until the precise moment for the long-awaited destruction of the Austro-Hungarian Empire was found. There was every reason to suppose that this would happen at the latest with the death of the aging Emperor Franz Joseph.
It is obviously unfair to attribute to official circles in Vienna the urging of war, thinking that it might still have been avoided. This was no longer possible; at most, it could have been postponed for a year or two. But this was precisely the curse that weighed on German and also Austrian diplomacy, which always tended to delay inevitable solutions only to be forced into decisive actions at the least opportune moment. One can be sure that a new attempt to save peace would only have led to precipitating war, surely at an even more unfavorable time.
For decades, Social Democracy had been engaged in the most infamous warlike agitation against Russia, and the Catholic party had made the Austrian state the central point of reference in German politics for religious reasons. The time had finally come to bear the consequences of such an absurd orientation. What happened, must have happened fatally. The mistake of the German government, wanting to maintain the
peace at all costs, was that of having always let the opportune moment to take the initiative pass, clinging as he was to his policy of alliance with which he believed he was serving universal peace and which ultimately led him only to become the victim of a global coalition that, to its desire to preserve peace, opposed an unwavering decision to go to war.
A gigantic struggle for freedom erupted, gigantic like no other in history. Hardly had the fate of the event begun when the conviction spread among the great masses of the people that this time it would not be a question of the isolated fate of Serbia or Austria, but of the existence of the German nation.
Two thoughts crossed my mind when the news of the Sarajevo attack spread through Munich: first, that war would ultimately be inevitable, and second, that the Habsburg state had no choice but to maintain the alliance pact with Germany. What I had always feared most was the possibility that one day Germany itself would be involved in a conflict, perhaps precisely because of this pact, but without Austria being the direct cause, so that the Austrian state, for reasons of internal politics, would lack the energy to take the decision to support its ally. The Slavic majority of the Austro-Hungarian Empire would have immediately begun to sabotage such a plan and would have preferred, in any case, to precipitate the ruin of the state rather than lend its ally the support it was obligated to. On that unfortunate occasion, such a danger was eliminated. Old Austria had to take action, whether it wanted to or not.
My personal view of the conflict was clear and simple: For me, Austria was not striving for satisfaction from Serbia, but by dragging the German nation along with it, it was forcing it to fight for its existence, its autonomy, and its future. Bismarck’s work had to be put to the test: what our forefathers had achieved in the battles of Weissenburg, Sedan, and Paris at the cost of the heroic sacrifice of their blood, the young German Reich would now have to achieve again. Once the struggle was victorious, our nation would have once again placed itself, by virtue of its external strength, in the circle of great powers. Only then could Germany constitute itself as a powerful bastion of peace, without having to deprive its children of their daily bread for the sake of universal peace.
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On August 3, 1914, I submitted a direct request to His Majesty King Ludwig III of Bavaria, asking for the grace of being inducted into a Bavarian regiment. The Cabinet Chancellery certainly had a lot to do in those days, so my joy was even greater when I received news of my induction the following morning.
Thus, for me, as indeed for every German, the most sublime and unforgettable period of my life was about to begin. Now, in the face of the events of the gigantic struggle, everything that had happened before was to sink into nothingness.
And the day came when we left Munich for the front to fulfill our duty.
Thus I saw the Rhine for the first time, when along its peaceful current we headed west to defend the river of German rivers from the ambition of the age-old enemy.
Then in Flanders, marching silently through a cold, damp night, just as the first mists of morning were beginning to dissipate, we suddenly received a baptism of fire; the shells, whistling over our heads, fell in the midst of our ranks, lashing the wet ground. But before the deadly blast had passed, a hurrah from two hundred voices rose to meet those first harbingers of death.
It is quite possible that the volunteers of the List Regiment had not yet learned to fight, but they had learned to die and they died like old soldiers.
This was the beginning. And so it continued year after year; the romance of war was replaced by the horror of battle. Little by little, enthusiasm waned, and the terror of death drowned the exalted joy of the early days. The time had come when each person struggled between the instinct for self-preservation and the imperative of duty. I, too, should not have been exempt from this inner struggle. Whenever death threatened, an indefinable something struggled to rebel within the individual, presenting itself to human weakness as the voice of reason, but in truth, being nothing more than the temptation of cowardice, thus disguised, trying to subdue man. But the more this impulse persisted, advising one to avoid danger, and the more insistently it tried to seduce, the more vigorous was the individual’s reaction, in whom, after a long inner struggle, the conscience of duty finally prevailed. By the winter of 1915—
By 1916, I had intimately defined the problem: Fortitude had conquered everything, and just as in the early days I had been able to rush into the assault jubilantly and laughingly, now my mood was serene and resolute. This was precisely what endured. Fate could now subject us to the most severe trials without our nerves failing us or our reasoning failing us. The young volunteer had become a veteran!
The same evolution had taken place throughout the German army, experienced and toughened by the endless struggle. Now, after two and three years of constant fighting, emerging from one battle to enter another, always fighting against an adversary superior in numbers and armament, suffering hunger and enduring privations of every kind, the time had come to test the effectiveness of that unique army.
Millennia will pass, and it will never be possible to sing of heroism without ceasing to remember the German army of the Great War. Lifting the veil of the past, the vision of the iron front of the gray steel helmets will always emerge—an unbreakable, firm front—a monument of immortality. And as long as there are Germans, they will never forget that those heroes were sons of the German homeland.
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I was a soldier at the time, and I didn’t want to get involved in politics, as the time wasn’t really right for it. However, I couldn’t help but form an opinion regarding certain events that affected the entire nation and that should be of particular interest to us soldiers.
It was an unspeakable error in the first days of August 1914 to have tried to identify the German worker with Marxism. At that time, the German worker was already freed from the clutches of that poison. However, there was the naiveté to assert that Marxism had become “national.” Marxism, whose supreme objective is and always will be the destruction of every non-Jewish national state, must have seen with horror that in July of that year the German proletariat, which it had caught in its net, awoke to place itself hour by hour, with increasing speed, at the service of the fatherland. In a few days, all appearance of this infamous deception of the people vanished, and from one moment to the next, the band of Jewish leaders found themselves alone and abandoned, as if there were no trace of the
The absurdity and madness they had infiltrated into the psychology of the masses for 60 years. It was a dark moment for the defrauders of the German working class; but as soon as these leaders realized the danger they were facing, they covered themselves up to their noses in the cloak of lies and pretended to participate in the national civic exaltation.
The time had come to attack the entire fraudulent community of these Jewish poisoners of the people. The duty of a government zealous for its mission would have been—seeing that the German worker felt reintegrated into the nationality—to ruthlessly eliminate the agitators who were undermining the stability of the nation.
Since the best members of the nation were giving their lives on the front lines, the least that could be done in the rearguard was to exterminate the poisonous vermin.
But instead, it was Emperor Wilhelm II himself who reached out to the same old criminals and gave these perfidious members of the nation a chance to reconsider and unite.
Every ideological conception, whether religious or political—it is sometimes difficult to establish limits in this regard—fights less in a negative sense to destroy the adversary’s world of ideas than in a positive sense to impose its own. Its struggle under these conditions is more of an attack than a defense. It certainly already has an advantage simply by defining its objective, which represents the triumph of its own idea. In the opposite case, it can only be determined with great difficulty when the negative aim of destroying an opposing doctrine is considered a given and certainty.
Any attempt to combat an ideological tendency through violence is doomed to failure, unless the struggle has assumed the character of an aggression for a new spiritual conception. Only when two ideologies are in open conflict can the use of brute force, employed persistently and without compromise, achieve a decision in favor of the party it serves.
This is why the struggle against Marxism always failed. This was also the reason why Bismarck’s anti-socialist legislation failed, and ultimately had to fail. The platform for a new ideological conception, whose success could have been achieved, was lacking.
Well, the fact that the farce of a so-called “State authority” or the motto “tranquility and order” constituted the appropriate basis for promoting
Ideologically a life-or-death struggle, it could not fit into the proverbial “wisdom” of high-ranking ministerial officials.
In 1914, effective action against social democracy would have been feasible, but the complete lack of a practical substitute cast doubt on how long the struggle could have been sustained.
In this order the existing void was enormous.
I held this opinion long before the war, and that’s why I couldn’t bring myself to join any of the militant political parties. During the course of the war, my opinion was reinforced by the proven impossibility of resolutely engaging in the struggle against Social Democracy, a struggle for which a movement of opinion that was something more than a simple “parliamentary” party would have been necessary.
I clearly expressed my thoughts on this matter to my close friends. For the first time, the thought then arose in my mind that I might one day be involved in politics. And this was precisely the reason why I reiterated to my small circle of friends my intention that, after the war, I would act as a political orator, without prejudice to my professional work.
