Hans-Ulrich Rudel: We Soldiers Build the New World [Der Weg 1950-06]
An original translation of "Wir Soldaten bauen die neue Welt"
Source Documents: German Scan
Note(s): This article appears in “Der Weg”, a German-language magazine founded in Buenos Aires, Argentina in the years immediately following the destruction of the Third Reich. See the links above for more information on the magazine and its contents.
This appears to be the first article written in Der Weg by Hans-Ulrich Rudel.
Selectively quoting Wikipedia:
Hans-Ulrich Rudel was a German ground-attack pilot during World War II and a post-war neo-Nazi activist.
The most decorated German pilot of the war and the only recipient of the Knight's Cross with Golden Oak Leaves, Swords, and Diamonds, Rudel was credited with the destruction of 519 tanks, one battleship, one cruiser, 70 landing craft and 150 artillery emplacements. He claimed nine aerial victories and the destruction of more than 800 vehicles. He flew 2,530 ground-attack missions exclusively on the Eastern Front, usually flying the Junkers Ju 87 "Stuka" dive bomber.
Rudel surrendered to US forces in 1945 and immigrated to Argentina. An unrepentant Nazi, he helped fugitives escape to Latin America and the Middle East. He worked as an arms dealer to several right-wing regimes in South America, for which he was placed under observation by the US Central Intelligence Agency.
Title: We Soldiers Build the New World [de: Wir Soldaten bauen die neue Welt]
Author(s): Hans-Ulrich Rudel
“Der Weg” Issue: Year 4, Issue 6 (June 1950)
Page(s): 516-519
Referenced Documents: None.
We Soldiers Build the New World
Hans-Ulrich Rudel
The question of whether Germans should take part in Europe’s defense with their own soldiers yet wield foreign weapons stands at the heart of heated debates. The German people have declared their stance on this matter with unmistakable clarity. Yet, because some have sought to recast this issue as a test of "European consciousness," I find it essential, as a soldier, to speak out and take a stand.
It begins with piercing through the haze that has been deliberately draped over these ideas, to lay bare the terms in their stark truth. We Germans have been charged with an "inherited evil," one said to have plunged not only us but generations before us into ruin. This so-called "evil" is none other than our "soldierly nature." For this, they forbade us from crafting lead soldiers for our children; they even outlawed gliding for our youth; they reduced us to a defenseless nation, powerless to stop Russians, Poles, Czechs, Negroes, and others from assailing German women. Literature extolling our people’s heroes and great soldiers has been banned; we are barred from raising monuments to honor our fallen comrades; war graves have been razed. The battle-scarred steel helmet crossed the ocean as a "souvenir," whole army units stand accused of "murder," and German officers have been hanged while their wives and children, branded as "kin of war criminals," are denied all aid. Men beyond reproach—men any nation would hail as paragons of manhood, be it Dönitz or Kesselring, Sepp Dietrich or von Manstein—languish still in disgraceful captivity. Even now, countless hundreds of thousands of soldiers remain unjustly held as prisoners of war or slave laborers in the victor nations, while German women, men, and children yearn in vain, year after year, for their husbands, fathers, or brothers. Comrades who fended off the treacherous ambushes of partisans and francs-tireurs are condemned as criminals, yet in the victor states, these same partisans—long excluded from the military code—are feted as heroes and saviors of their nations. Our history books are falsified, and a concerted effort seeks to strip an entire people of honor with the charge that they were "soldierly."
It posed no challenge for them to cloak this assault by the victors—against soldierly honor, against chivalry, against the laws of war—in the garb of "humanity." Yet today, with equal audacity, they dare to prod this "pariah class," this lowest caste to which they sought to degrade us soldiers, invoking their "European mission" and priming them as cannon fodder for foreign ends.
I will not dwell here on every shameful, crushing, and embittering act inflicted upon us, past and present, for to do so would only thicken the walls of division rising between nations. We Germans still hold that it is not the Americans, the British, the Russians, or the French who act thus, but a relatively small clique that has seized power in those lands and now marches relentlessly toward a fixed aim. Thus, we believe it futile to parley from politician to politician, but not fruitless to speak from people to people, from soul to soul, from soldier to soldier.
Soldierly nature runs deep in the veins of our people, and we bear it with pride—pride equal to that we take in the grand works of our artists, poets, and scientists. It is as impossible to rip this from us as any of those other threads woven into our being. Soldierly nature is not merely a uniform; it is a way of life. There are those who never served, never donned a uniform, never faced war, yet embody the soldier’s spirit. Amid the deliberate muddling of terms in our age, "soldierly nature" is conflated with "militarism," "chauvinism," "lust for expansion," "slavery," "violence," and the like. Thus, soldiers and soldierly souls the world over must raise their voices against this tide. Just as men in Germany today are judged for their soldierly bearing, so might it befall another land tomorrow. And if, the day after, with the same excuse—"We reject it because we are not so!"—all musicians were condemned because some power despises music, or all athletes, scholars, or industrialists, such a verdict would be as "just" as that against the soldiers. If anyone held the right to judge the bearers of German soldierly nature, it would be Germans alone—German soldiers, vested by the whole people with the authority to speak in their name. Yet the cry of our time has been, "Hang them swiftly; we’ll judge them somehow later." With so many already strung up, it becomes inevitable—despite all assurances to the contrary, despite professions of friendship and talk of a "united Europe," despite their courting of German soldiers’ hearts and fists—that new "war criminal trials" must be conjured week after week, month after month, unearthing fresh "atrocities" and "crimes" of German soldiers and officers. The dead, in their silence, "confess" their guilt! Ask the peoples, and a roar of outrage would rise!—but the dead hold their peace.
Once a man cried out to us,
„Ihr müßt ein Volk von Soldaten werden!“
"You must become a nation of soldiers!"
and we swelled with pride at his words—not dreaming that infants might be born in uniform, but because it promised to weave the soldier’s virtues into a broader fellowship. The soldier’s task should become the people’s: to preserve and defend national, ethnic, and personal freedom and dignity; to stand as guardians of human, social, and civic order. This charge forged a distinct and unmistakable figure, one who honed the very virtues needed to safeguard the highest human values. These traits split into the bedrock laws of a masculine brotherhood and the special codes meant to ensure triumph in battle. Conscription, practiced in loose or strict form across nearly all civilized states, aimed not merely to train as many men as possible for war, but to serve as the high school of manhood itself, embracing the widest circle of citizens. Soldierly nature is the pinnacle of the sporting spirit; here as there, readiness and chivalry are its cornerstones. Thus, all these virtues that define the soldier’s mold—not solely the uniformed man’s, but the worker’s and the thinker’s alike—unite under the banner of "soldierly nature."
It is said that the German people have honed these virtues to their finest edge—a necessity born of nature itself. Just as the Jewish people in diaspora raised their knack for trade to unmatched heights, just as England’s unique place and character forged it into the world’s premier seafaring nation, just as every people’s inner and outer growth bends to the sway of geography, climate, and geopolitics, so too did the German people, poised as the "folk of the center" amid constant peril, cultivate these soldierly virtues most keenly. That Germany, among Europe’s great powers, has waged the fewest wars of aggression proves soldierly nature shares no kinship with militarism. Yet the fact that scarce any nation has fallen so often and so low as ours, only to climb again to proud heights, testifies to the blessings of this "soldierly" quality. This holds true for us today! Recent events have laid bare what we Germans must yet learn. But they have shown, with equal clarity, that not one of our soldierly virtues must we forsake. "Re-education" will alter none of this. The victor powers themselves have made it plain enough: only a man without character can be "re-educated." Insight and understanding differ wholly from "re-education." Years of hardship have guided us to the former and taught us to scorn the latter.
All nations revere the "unknown soldier." The "heroes of the fatherland" were, more often than not, its mightiest soldiers. The monuments of every land hoist more soldiers atop their plinths than politicians or scholars. We Germans took a further step—a step now mirrored worldwide in the sports and martial training of the young. We sought to spread soldierly virtues to as vast a throng as possible, forging the strongest bulwark against vice, corruption, and decay. This is known, a quintessentially German endeavor, whose rightness or wrongness Germans alone may judge. Who dares be so bold as to brand this warlust, saber-rattling, or the din of arms? That so many soldiers, in despair, have taken their own lives, that others have fled abroad, that still others have enlisted in the Foreign Legion—these speak not against them but as a damning verdict on the occupiers’ policies and their German collaborators. Can one not grasp why those who crave sincerity and freedom as they do breath itself would abandon a land where all that lends their lives deepest meaning is trampled? And does not this trampling birth a duty to cherish these virtues as the holiest of treasures? One truth stands firm: every woe—be it dismantling, the displaced’s plight, unemployment, or slave labor in mines not ours—can be mended the moment we seize our fate anew, can be healed if we all become soldiers once more. The future looms dark only if we forsake our spiritual legacy, the sole key to a fate worthy of us.
The question stirring such dust today—"Should Germany have a Wehrmacht or not?"—strays far from these core truths, posed instead from the political-tactical calculations of ruling powers. At best, it serves as a bargaining chip in the West German government’s deft maneuvers. Any clear-eyed thinker knows a robust defense of Europe hinges on German aid. From this springs the puzzle: how to weave Germany into the western front without the wrongs done it growing too glaring or, perish the thought, being righted. When the whole German people, under German command, fought to the last against the eastern menace unto self-sacrifice, we did so from conviction, sensing what awaited us and Europe should we, as sentinels in the East, lose the war and loose Bolshevism’s reins. Hence our unyielding will and unshaken faith in victory. We could not bear the guilt of flinging wide Europe’s gate to Bolshevism without a fight. Must we now return to that same front, armed with foreign steel, ranked in foreign contingents, led by foreign hands, for foreign aims? For what? For a Europe that’s but a mirage, a homeland stolen from us, a life shadowed by surveillance and spiritual chains even hereafter? Are we to shield only the "victor states" and their dominion, without reclaiming our freedom, our independence, our right to shape our course within and without? We are no mercenaries. And one horror more: the most ghastly deed we’d face today would be to war against our own brothers in the occupied East. Soldiers—not just we who once were, but the vast host of our people—hear, see, and live reality, not propaganda. What we’ve been freed from and for what, let each reckon in the quiet of their heart; but so long as the wretched policy now wielded against us Germans goes unrooted and unrighted, so we may craft anew from our own strength for our own good, we’ll not be swayed that joining a European defense front serves Europe or us. Without that conviction, not one German soldier will don the garb.
Today looms the peril that we’re to sacrifice ourselves to shield others—letting them slip away in time. No sleight of persuasion, no propaganda ruse, no tossed "crumbs of mercy" should blind us to this! Dreadful would be our people’s fate then: annihilation, consumed to the last shred. Our old foes’ deeds should give us pause! Are these "sweeter tones" of late not merely the echo of discord with their erstwhile eastern ally, a quiver of fear at his might—a might we once faced with full resolve, a might he gained only through western foes’ aid? We did all humanly possible to stave off Bolshevik chaos; now our task is to guard our living essence. We cannot afford to march to war for strangers. We’ll not again be "punished" by any side for our stand. Greater, truer trials await us at home: the displaced’s fate, the bereaved’s care, work for the idle, the opening of our trade, the freeing of our coin, the raising of our youth, and more besides. Did they not once say, "If wicked Germany is undone, peace and calm will reign"? We seek naught but this—our peace. So, kindly leave us be!
Thus, this whole tangle of questions touches our soldierly nature not at all. It dwells in the hearts of millions of upright Germans. To keep it alive is their silent, steadfast service. Beneath its banner, Germany and Europe will one day rise anew. It alone warrants mutual understanding, mutual honor, and shared triumph. It is the bedrock of all decent life in Europe. Not every man decked in medals and braid bears this soldierly nature, but where true soldiers meet, there forms a vital core, the firm ground of Europe’s tomorrow.