HOW GERMANY TRAINS LEADERS
By WILLIAM TEELING
FOR 'five years the Nazi Party has been in control in Germany ; the policy of the Party has been carried Out inside the country according to plan and with only slight variations, due often to new experiences after the Party had actually obtained Office. The first thing to do was to absorb in work no fewer than six million unemployed; within two years, by 1935, the unemployment figures were down to a little over a million ; since then they have fluctuated around that figure and the Nazis say that will always be a necessary surplus.
• To obtain this result Labour Camps were started, women were urged to return to the home, pay was cut and more men were, as a result, employed. The numerous new kinds of uniform gave work to cloth factories ; new roads were started and a general confidence inspired the starting up of many new works.
The next part of the programme seems to have consisted ef re-armament, of two years' conscription and -the re-occupa- tion of the Rhine. This was followed by the Four Years' Plan, and it is not surprising that last September, at the Nuremberg Rally, people were talking about a possible cutting of the period of two years for conscription to one year, in order to set free more young men for work- The Govern, ment, however, does not seem to have felt justified in doing ;his., and instead a large number of Italian workers are being drafted into Germany for temporary work during the coming months..
All these .enterprises, as the Nazi party realised from the start, needed, leaders, and, until those leaders were more or less ready, few of the new plans have been started up. Labour Camps seemed the first necessity, and during the first years- of the Nazi regime these werc yoluntary organ- isations and did not number much more thaii a hundred. It was openly Said that, as soon as money could be provided and leaders be found, Labour Camps would become com- pulsory for the nation, and they have become so. In 1933, I visited the Training Camp for future Labour Camp leaders ; ihese men did a course lasting several months and were trained in three different kinds of leadership ; one group learnt to be sports leaders, another to be leaders for technical subjects such as land-drainage and the third group was to lead in intellectual subjects such as the teaching of German history, with a new slant. The men studying in these camps were aged up to forty, and were destined to make a life-profession of such leadership. As soon as they were ready, Labour Camps became compulsory, and today you have a regular system for picking out such future suitable leaders, who are then sent to special Labour Camp Schools and take this work up as their life profession.
The need for officers in the Army and the shortage of•their is well known ; it will take at 'least another three or four years before the country has 'enough of these, but Hitler is today even more concerned about the type of future leader 'in the Party, the people who will come after him and his own immediate followers.
In every Gau or Province of Germany, he has had for the last two or three years three special schools placed in a beautiful- country setting,..Where men- from every- industry and every Government office, chosen for their powers of leadership, have gone for three weeks to study the teachings of Rosenberg and the ",German World Outlook." They in turn- have given their' own opinions about conditions, und an educational compromise has this resulted, which is becoming todaY more or less the official teaching of 'what h good German must believe. These men are currying On 'as _leaders in their own jobs, but obviously a three weeks' course cannot make them very knowledgeable leaders and they are in a sense, make-shifts.
Better trained than these men, are the two hundred and fifty thousand young men in the S.S., Hinunler's Black Guards. These men are gradually being placed in key positions throughout the country. What they are learning is in itself a key to much of the future policy of Germany.
They are not taught anything officially about religion, but unofficially, the following can be said to be a rough outline of the creed of an S.S. man.
Christianity was forced on Germany from the Orient, coming through Rome ; the real German believes in a fine and noble paganism which a little over a thousand years cannot eradicate, and the German will now naturally drift back to his Nordic ideas. The German must become a complete worshipper of this world, or as the S.S. term it a "Yes man of the World." By this is meant that we must not try to excuse suffering and inequality in this world by suggesting that the sufferers will have a better time in the next ; every effort must be made that in this life a good time shall be enjoyed by all. This means that sickly beings Must not be allowed to ex'st and therefore if possible must not be born. It means that if you have lost a limb in an accident you must not resign yourself to the loss, but every- thing must be done to find you fresh employment and to develop your other limbs and senses so that the loss can be ignored. Lastly, a definite standard of living and con- tentment must be found for the nation, and, until every living being has reached that level, no wealthier people must be allowed to exist. Obviously this cannot be put into practice in a day, but it is a Socialistic object for which the S.SJ, are working. ,‘ Physical fitness is almost madly encouraged, and-aursign of lack of manliness isrto be eradicated from the people.
One of the chief signs of lack of manliness, the S.S. tell us, is Christianity, and bending the knee or confessing to a priest dressed in many ways like a woman is to be anathema, The Ten Commandments are disapproved of because they are so obviously Jewish ; they are Jewish because they suggest that if you keep them you will receive a hundred per cent, reward. Christ is admitted to have been a great Man, but, as I have been frequently told, there was no stenographer present whenever He spoke ; and what He said has merely been written down by a number of Jewish writers. There is much that -is good in the Ten Commandments, but a Nordic Pagan will do such things naturally and without any desire for reward. Moreover, the Nordic must refuse to recognise the Virgin Birth, for that would mean an insult to the purity of every German mother, since it would imply something wrong in sleeping with one's husband. German children are to look on their parents, and their parents' ancestors, with something like the awe of ancestor-worship in Japan. The S.S. man is also taught that it has never been his destiny to populate countries South of the Alps, and for that reason he must never look on Colonies as anything but sources from which to draw the raw materials for use inside a Nordic State. If the Germans must spread, they must move to the East, and to my mind everything in the teaching points to an eventual friendship and even alliance With Russia. For face-saving purposes it would have to be an altered Russia, but not So much altered as many people imagine. , Even these two hundred and fifty thousand men are not to be the absolute First Line leaders of the New Germany ; these are to come- from the four Fiihrer schools, one in each part of Germany. Here a new Nordic Order, on the lines of the old Knights Templar, is gradually being evolved. Each year, one thousand new knights are sent out at the agt of twenty-eight, to carry on what they have learnt in four years of training. Until last year, they went by the name of Junkers, which means literally "Young Gentlemen " ; from now on they are to be known as "Future Leaders."
For the time being such teaching has sufficed, but for the future Hitler requires for his country's leaders children trained from the age often. For three years, he has had an experimental school wbrking in Potsdam ; modelled on this there are now to be started fifteen special schools throughout the Reich, and thirty-two what might be termed " semi-special " schools, one in each province of Germany. From these, starting in the sixth year in the Nazi regime, at the age of ten, will grow up the future perfect Nordics, who will only become leaders eighteen years hence, at the age of twenty-eight. As an elderly German Nazi put it to me, "We can never have the complete Nazi World Outlook, for we have been contaminated With foreigners, with Socialists and with Democrats. These -boys will grow up unpolluted and should one day be the finest Specimens of manhood in the world."
Given a long enough continuance of the Nazi regime in Germany, these boys, with their new training, will one day come to power, and what the Nazi PartY has decided to launch as its effort for the sixth year of the righne may both directly and indirectly have a more fat-reaching effect On the world as a whole than .anYthing that Hitler has yet done. In his search for new leaders, Hitler is developing something the world has not known amongst civilised Whites for over a thousand years ; and these new leaders will differ from their thousand-year predecessors, in that they will have power over modern inventions, both con- structive and destructive.
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