The 25 Points of Hitler's Nazi Party A precuser of evil

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http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/riseofhitler/25points.htm

I can see he evil intrenched in the NAZI Party as early as 1920

[CENTER]The 25 Points of Hitler's Nazi Party[/CENTER]

1. We demand the union of all Germans in a Great Germany on the basis of the principle of self-determination of all peoples.

2. We demand that the German people have rights equal to those of other nations; and that the Peace Treaties of Versailles and St. Germain shall be abrogated.

3. We demand land and territory (colonies) for the maintenance of our people and the settlement of our surplus population.

4. Only those who are our fellow countrymen can become citizens. Only those who have German blood, regardless of creed, can be our countrymen. Hence no Jew can be a countryman.

5. Those who are not citizens must live in Germany as foreigners and must be subject to the law of aliens.

6. The right to choose the government and determine the laws of the State shall belong only to citizens. We therefore demand that no public office, of whatever nature, whether in the central government, the province, or the municipality, shall be held by anyone who is not a citizen.

We wage war against the corrupt parliamentary administration whereby men are appointed to posts by favor of the party without regard to character and fitness.

7. We demand that the State shall above all undertake to ensure that every citizen shall have the possibility of living decently and earning a livelihood. If it should not be possible to feed the whole population, then aliens (non-citizens) must be expelled from the Reich.

8. Any further immigration of non-Germans must be prevented. We demand that all non-Germans who have entered Germany since August 2, 1914, shall be compelled to leave the Reich immediately.

9. All citizens must possess equal rights and duties.

10. The first duty of every citizen must be to work mentally or physically. No individual shall do any work that offends against the interest of the community to the benefit of all.
Therefore we demand:

11. That all unearned income, and all income that does not arise from work, be abolished.

12. Since every war imposes on the people fearful sacrifices in blood and treasure, all personal profit arising from the war must be regarded as treason to the people. We therefore demand the total confiscation of all war profits.

13. We demand the nationalization of all trusts.

14. We demand profit-sharing in large industries.

15. We demand a generous increase in old-age pensions.

16. We demand the creation and maintenance of a sound middle-class, the immediate communalization of large stores which will be rented cheaply to small tradespeople, and the strongest consideration must be given to ensure that small traders shall deliver the supplies needed by the State, the provinces and municipalities.

17. We demand an agrarian reform in accordance with our national requirements, and the enactment of a law to expropriate the owners without compensation of any land needed for the common purpose. The abolition of ground rents, and the prohibition of all speculation in land.

18. We demand that ruthless war be waged against those who work to the injury of the common welfare. Traitors, usurers, profiteers, etc., are to be punished with death, regardless of creed or race.

19. We demand that Roman law, which serves a materialist ordering of the world, be replaced by German common law.

20. In order to make it possible for every capable and industrious German to obtain higher education, and thus the opportunity to reach into positions of leadership, the State must assume the responsibility of organizing thoroughly the entire cultural system of the people. The curricula of all educational establishments shall be adapted to practical life.

The conception of the State Idea (science of citizenship) must be taught in the schools from the very beginning. We demand that specially talented children of poor parents, whatever their station or occupation, be educated at the expense of the State.

21. The State has the duty to help raise the standard of national health by providing maternity welfare centers, by prohibiting juvenile labor, by increasing physical fitness through the introduction of compulsory games and gymnastics, and by the greatest possible encouragement of associations concerned with the physical education of the young.

22. We demand the abolition of the regular army and the creation of a national (folk) army.

23. We demand that there be a legal campaign against those who propagate deliberatepolitical lies and disseminate them through the press. In order to make possible the creation of a German press, we demand:
(a) All editors and their assistants on newspapers published in the German language shall be German citizens.
(b) Non-German newspapers shall only be published with the express permission of the State. They must not be published in the German language.
(c) All financial interests in or in any way affecting German newspapers shall be forbidden to non-Germans by law, and we demand that the punishment for transgressing this law be the immediate suppression of the newspaper and the expulsion of the non-Germans from the Reich.

Newspapers transgressing against the common welfare shall be suppressed. We demand legal action against those tendencies in art and literature that have a disruptive influence upon the life of our folk, and that any organizations that offend against the foregoing demands shall be dissolved.

24. We demand freedom for all religious faiths in the state, insofar as they do not endanger its existence or offend the moral and ethical sense of the Germanic race.
The party as such represents the point of view of a positive Christianity without binding itself to any one particular confession. It fights against the Jewish materialist spirit within and without, and is convinced that a lasting recovery of our folk can only come about from within on the pinciple:

[CENTER]COMMON GOOD BEFORE INDIVIDUAL GOOD [/CENTER]

25. In order to carry out this program we demand: the creation of a strong central authority in the State, the unconditional authority by the political central parliament of the whole State and all its organizations.

The formation of professional committees and of committees representing the several estates of the realm, to ensure that the laws promulgated by the central authority shall be carried out by the federal states.
The leaders of the party undertake to promote the execution of the foregoing points at all costs, if necessary at the sacrifice of their own lives.

What does the forum have to say about these demand by the NZI Party in 1920??

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@Alan McDougall,

But cant you see how it was so attractive to down trodden and repressed German nation. If you could select certain parts from it, it would sound very encouraging.

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@Alan McDougall,

Xris is right. If you were to list some of the points without citing the source, no one would take offense. Historically, again, the Versailles Treaty, with its war guilt clause, demand for extreme reparations that crippled Germany economically (Keynes warned about its consequences --- French greed was a disaster for Haiti, too), and limits on German military strength, was disliked by a vast majority of Germans. Some of 25 points skillfully played on this nationalism, and others appealed to a large segment of the population vaguely leaning towards socialist ideas. Then, too, we must remember that antisemitism "thinking" was a current in Europe (and not only THERE) that was not inconsequential. A partly platform such as this, and carefully worded, attracted all sorts of adherents.

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@Alan McDougall,

Hitler was a fairly extreme antisemite by that point, which is obvious in Mein Kampf which he compiled shortly afterwards. The necessary ingredients for belligerence and slaughter were there, but the SS actions taken after the invasions of Poland and esp the USSR could not have been directly predicted back then.

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@Aedes,

Aedes;121241 wrote:

Hitler was a fairly extreme antisemite by that point, which is obvious in Mein Kampf which he compiled shortly afterwards. The necessary ingredients for belligerence and slaughter were there, but the SS actions taken after the invasions of Poland and esp the USSR could not have been directly predicted back then.

Desperate men seek desperate measures. I spoke to a young German girl in the sixties and she remarked how she could not understand why her families where so taken by his rambling rhetoric speeches. She said they sounded ridiculous and manic. I think he stood for a certain renewal of pride that they yearned for. The truth of his evil was ignored. It does remind me of the actions of Israel in Jerusalem and their attitude towards the palestinians.

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@Alan McDougall,

Leni Reifenstahl's propaganda film about the '34 Party Congress at Nuremburg (ah, the associations with THAT city), Triumph of the Will, shows best how the Nazi party sought to bring even 'normal' Germans into its fold though its echos of national solidarity, of economic well-being, the glorification of its past, and of a nation with a GOAL and not in complete disarray and anarchy,and lots of happy faces.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcFuHGHfYwE

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@xris,

xris;121262 wrote:

I spoke to a young German girl in the sixties and she remarked how she could not understand why her families where so taken by his rambling rhetoric speeches. She said they sounded ridiculous and manic.

We probably associate such species with mania and ridiculousness because of the sort of people who made them.

Before Hitler and Stalin and the like made impassioned speeches impassioned speeches were probably much more fashionable.

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@xris,

xris;121173 wrote:

But cant you see how it was so attractive to down trodden and repressed German nation. If you could select certain parts from it, it would sound very encouraging.

It was the manifesto of the German Workers Party just before it changed it name to the German NAZI Party. If you read the twenty five points you will see it was all about demands and threats, no promises just threats

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@Alan McDougall,

Alan McDougall;121292 wrote:

It was the manifesto of the German Workers Party just before it changed it name to the German NAZI Party. If you read the twenty five points you will see it was all about demands and threats, no promises just threats

This was a somewhat generalizable feature of fasciism, including that of Spain and Italy, i.e. xenophobia and militarism.

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@Aedes,

Aedes;121293 wrote:

This was a somewhat generalizable feature of fasciism, including that of Spain and Italy, i.e. xenophobia and militarism.

Evil to be Xenophobic about your own fellow German citizens , namely the innocent Jews effected by the unimaginable depravity of the Nazi regime

I simple cant rap my mind around this unspeakable evil, murdering innocent people by the million, it becomes surreal to me. I have difficult dealing with this base evil, how could a civilized people allow millions of men, woman and children to be burned in the gas ovens. Most animal slaughterhouses are more humane.

I get very very angry when people try to find excuses for the utter bestiality of the NAZI regime

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@Alan McDougall,

Alan McDougall;121472 wrote:

I get very very angry when people try to find excuses for the utter bestiality of the NAZI regime

How long have you lived in South Africa?

1 Reply

@Dave Allen,

Dave Allen;121481 wrote:

How long have you lived in South Africa?

All my life, why?

1 Reply

@Alan McDougall,

Alan McDougall;121683 wrote:

All my life, why?

Because South Africa had a pretty bestial regime of its own. While the Holocaust is unique in many respects, there are plenty of other examples of sophisticated modern nations exacting barbarisms on millions of innocents, whether or not a gas chamber was involved.

When you get to this sort of superlative degree of cruelty, you need to stop picking "worsts" versus "not so bads". The whole issue is that populations have been the victims of many modern crimes.

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@Aedes,

Aedes;121698 wrote:

Because South Africa had a pretty bestial regime of its own. While the Holocaust is unique in many respects, there are plenty of other examples of sophisticated modern nations exacting barbarisms on millions of innocents, whether or not a gas chamber was involved.

When you get to this sort of superlative degree of cruelty, you need to stop picking "worsts" versus "not so bads". The whole issue is that populations have been the victims of many modern crimes.

Yes the apartheid system of the Afrikaner regime took away the dignity of millions of dark skinned people and made them third class citizens in their own country and can was a crime against humanity but it cant be compared to the unspeakable evil of the NAZI regime of Hitler

Many people died in "The Struggle" to free themselves from the yoke of Apartheid but more like hundreds and certainly not millions as was th case with the Nazis, I am not making excuse for the awful philosophy of Apartheid just stating facts

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@Alan McDougall,

Alan McDougall;121723 wrote:

Yes the apartheid system of the Afrikaner regime took away the dignity of millions of dark skinned people and made them third class citizens in their own country and can was a crime against humanity but it cant be compared to the unspeakable evil of the NAZI regime of Hitler.

Well, I think it can, and I'm not sure I agree totally with Aedes here, because I don't think it was 'so bad'.

I don't think the institutionalised prejudices of Northern Ireland, where I currently live, were so bad either - but they were there.

I do think actions of the country of my birth - England - have been worse - but fortunately for British PR history seems to have forgotten the Tasmanians.

What I think it does demonstrate is that evil and bestial are not the same thing, and that circumstances can conspire to place a lot of otherwise reasonable and even apparently "kind" people within a framework that is responsible for great suffering and injustice - great in terms of the crimes of the Nazis or the Tasmanian genocide, less so (but still significantly so) in terms of the crimes of aparthied, and less so (but still significantly so) in terms of the crimes of a protestant state for protestant people.

But they are still prejudiced dehumanising systems.

Have you ever heard of the Milgram Experiments?

Milgram experiment - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Their disturbing upshot is that when asked to endanger someone's life by an authority figure a majority of humans will do so.

So the 'unspeakable evil' and 'utter bestiality' of those who staffed Belsen and Dachau - or who supported the regime allowing for those crimes - seems to stem from a rather common human quality.

That's not to say it isn't worth railing against or educating people about in the hope of changing it - but I find your condemnatory tone a bit rich.

For example - I think point 2 of the list of demands is a highly reasonable one - those treaties were too much of a punishment and were wrecking the lives of people who had been no more belligerent in the first world world war than their neighbours.

In fact it is the harsh lesson of the effects of those reperations that led to the Marshal Plan at the end of WWII. A plan that arguably set northern and western Europe into an unprecedented era of peace.

So yes, it was a demand - a good one which might have alleviated matters had it been promptly met.

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@Alan McDougall,

Things can be "so bad" in lots of different ways. The Nazi program was executed over a much smaller period of time than the Apartheid program, and the acuity of the Nazi horror stands in a rare league with other true genocides. The Nazis were far more brutal and violent.

But the similarity is that the Nazi vision for the ethnic hierarchy of eastern Europe was not all that different than that of the Apartheid regime for South Africa, whether or not they expressed it so brazenly. Remember that the Nazi program was not simply Treblinka and Auschwitz (which in themselves were part of different programs within the Holocaust). The Nazis wanted to turn the Slavic people into an uneducated race of manual laborers. Is that all that grossly different than the institutionalized constraints that the Apartheid regime placed on the black populace of their country?

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@Aedes,

Aedes;121761 wrote:

Things can be "so bad" in lots of different ways. The Nazi program was executed over a much smaller period of time than the Apartheid program, and the acuity of the Nazi horror stands in a rare league with other true genocides. The Nazis were far more brutal and violent.

But the similarity is that the Nazi vision for the ethnic hierarchy of eastern Europe was not all that different than that of the Apartheid regime for South Africa, whether or not they expressed it so brazenly. Remember that the Nazi program was not simply Treblinka and Auschwitz (which in themselves were part of different programs within the Holocaust). The Nazis wanted to turn the Slavic people into an uneducated race of manual laborers. Is that all that grossly different than the institutionalized constraints that the Apartheid regime placed on the black populace of their country?

No, I broadly agree with all your points.

And I think there's a lot of - largely supressed - debate over the status of the death camp projects in terms of who ordered them and for what reasons and with the complicity of which people.

A debate that gets associated with holocaust denial - unfairly in most cases, I think.

It's not like every Nazi was a camp guard - and it's not like every camp guard was Ilsa Koch.

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@Dave Allen,

Dave I would like to say how we are all capable of horrors we would never ever believe. As a counter insurgent trained soldier the army would put you into a position where you had power and be tempted to use it. When a friend playing the part of an insurgent spits in your face and lashes out at you with a knife, its so easy to over react and use your power over him. I think it should be part of our moral education to make us aware of these human weaknesses.

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@Dave Allen,

Dave Allen;121766 wrote:

And I think there's a lot of - largely supressed - debate over the status of the death camp projects in terms of who ordered them and for what reasons and with the complicity of which people.

A debate that gets associated with holocaust denial - unfairly in most cases, I think.

It doesn't even need to be a debate, there are historical aspects of this that are much more useful to learn about than to just call it evil. And believe me, my heart would love to do so, I mean we just celebrated my grandfather's 87th birthday and he's still talking about it almost every time I see him.

In my mind, the "extermination" aspect of the Holocaust is not exemplified so much by Auschwitz as it was by a) the Einsatzgruppen who killed a million Jews before the Wannsee Conference even happened, and b) the Operation Reinhard camps (Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor, Majdanek, and Chelmno) that were in existence solely for gassing and not for work selection (like Auschwitz-Birkenau).

The methods, priorities, and 'urgency' of the Nazis' program changed as the war went on. In 1942-1943 when Reinhard got going, the Nazis had a thousand miles of occupied territory to do with what they like. By 1943-1944 when Auschwitz was in full swing as an extermination center and the Reinhard camps had closed, the Wermacht was in retreat, the state was in a total war economy, and slave labor became a priority over liquidation.

1 Reply

@Aedes,

Aedes;121789 wrote:

It doesn't even need to be a debate, there are historical aspects of this that are much more useful to learn about than to just call it evil.

I don't think it has to be a debate, though my perception of it is that it only occurs with a certain degree of contention.

My worry in this regard is that if those who wish to question the extent and motives of the holocaust are coralled with deniers - it makes the deniers look like they have a point.

Austria's arrest and imprisonment of David Irving - a very contrary and obtuse individual who flirts with a lot of very disturbing ideas alonside some interesting ones - clearly has less to do with protecting people than it does the reputaton of Austria.

And I suspect you recognise this - I'm just clarifying.

Have you ever read Maus?

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The 25 Points of Hitler's Nazi Party A precuser of evil

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