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Mein Kampf

as worthy of life, and thus retaining them alone to propagate their species; man, on the other hand, restricts breeding, but takes frantic care that every creature once born shall survive at any price. This correction of divine purpose seems to him as wise as it is humane, and he is delighted once more to have outwitted Nature, nay to have proved her inadequacy. But the Heavenly Father’s pet ape hates to see or behold the fact that while the number may indeed be restricted, the value of the individual is correspondingly reduced.

The moment propagation as such is restricted, and the number of births reduced, we have instead of the natural struggle for existence, which allows only the strongest and healthiest to live, a craving to “save” as a matter of course and at any price even what is weakest and most sickly—thus sowing the seeds of new generations which are bound to become more and more pitiful the longer this mockery of Nature and her will goes on.

But the end of it all can only be that some fine day such a people is deprived of its mundane existence; for man may indeed defy the eternal laws of the will to survive, but sooner or later there is retribution. A stronger race will drive out the weak ones: the urge for life in its final form will always break the ridiculous shackles of so-called humaneness of individuals, putting in its place the humaneness of Nature, which annihilates weakness, and puts strength in its stead.

Anyone who would assure the German people’s existence by way of a self-limitation of increase is simply robbing it of its future.

2. A second way might be the one we are again hearing constantly proposed and advocated today: internal colonization. This proposal is well-meant by many, and by fully as many is ill understood, causing the greatest imaginable harm.

No doubt the yield of a given soil can be increased within certain limits. But only within certain limits, and not indefinitely. For a certain length of time, that is, the increase of the German people can be balanced by increased productivity of our soil without danger of starvation. But against this we have the fact

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