Mein Kampf
against the world were (with all their heroism and all their “organization”) due solely to superior leadership cannot be denied out of existence. The organization and direction of the German army were the most tremendous things the world had yet seen. Their faults were simply the general bounds of human fallibility.
The fact that this army collapsed was not the cause of our present misfortune, but only the result of other crimes, a result which, it is true, in turn foreshadowed another and this time more visible collapse.
That this is so, we conclude from the following:
Must a military defeat lead to so complete a breakdown of a nation and a state? Since when has this been the result of an unsuccessful war? Are people ever destroyed by lost wars as such?
The answer is short: yes, if in their military defeat these peoples are reaping the reward of their inner rottenness, cowardice, lack of character—in short, of their unworthiness. If this is not the case, the military defeat will be rather the spur to a new and greater advance than the gravestone of a people’s existence.
History offers endless examples to prove the statement.
Unfortunately the military defeat of the German people is not an undeserved catastrophe, but a deserved punishment of eternal retribution. We more than earned that defeat. It is only the great outward symptom of decay among a whole series of inward ones, whose visibility may have been hidden from the eyes of most men, or which people, ostrich-like, would not see.
Consider the ways in which the German people received this defeat. Did not many circles express out-and-out pleasure at the misfortune of the Fatherland? But who does this unless he really deserves such a punishment? Did they not go yet further, and boast that at last they had made the front give way? And it was not the enemy who did this, no, no, this shame Germans put upon their own heads! Was it unjust for the disaster to befall them? And since when, on top of that, has it been customary to blame the war upon oneself? And this although one has better sense and knows differently!
No, and again no. The way in which the German people re-
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