Wolfgang Willrich: For This the German Soldier Fought Part 2
Bearing witness in word and image to the meaning of the Reich and the honor of its soldiers
Title: For This the German Soldier Fought [de: Dafür kämpfte der deutsche Soldat]
Author: Wolfgang Willrich [Wiki LINK] [wolfgang-willrich.de]
“Der Weg” Issue: Year 03, Issue 03 (March 1949) [ToC LINK]
Page(s): 4-16 [Scan LINK]
Für des Volkes Gedeinhen im Schutz des Reiches für Freiheit und Frieden in Haus und Hof
For the People's Prosperity under the protection of the Reich, for Freedom and Peace in House and Home
The flourishing of the people is something different from the prosperity of stock market speculators or the abundance in the standard of living of a few industrial magnates commanding corporations. The flourishing of the people under the protection of the Reich, that our image shows, is indeed something different from the comfortable living of a barren society on the backs of toiling masses. Therein lies the purpose of the legal protection of the Reich, to grant the people a modest but decent livelihood, to rescue them from proletarianization and to warn and save them from the decline of their stock and all dangers threatening the national health in body and mind, thereby creating worthy foundations for their lives.
There would truly be work enough for a thousand years of peace. Yet, the few years before this war sufficed to raise the national health to a height that not even the most optimistic doctor would have deemed achievable so quickly. That now, after the collapse of Germany under the pressure of the material superiority of the enemy, the lowest is again turned to the highest with the support of all riffraff and rabble, and that the war damages are now completed to the total destruction of German national strength, that was all to be expected.
Precisely the men who worked for the national health through discipline and morals in the longed-for thousand-year peace of the Reich, who saw the Reich by no means properly prepared, let alone completed, in a highly imperfect nationalism and socialism, precisely these men are today the target of the rabble’s hatred from all nations. That honors them. They did not let themselves be deterred by the fashionable delusion of the socialist era that everything is equal which shows a human-like demeanor and appearance. As noble spirits, they at least attempted, through selection and education of the still uncorrupted capable ones from the formless mass, to create a people that could and would strive toward a future and its Reich. Precisely our eugenicists give meaning and purpose back to the concept of the national community, so badly proletarianized. In a hard struggle with the born proletarians of all ranks, against all laxity, intellectual laziness, and aimless indifference, against the hatred and malicious resistance of undisciplined depravity, our eugenicists, the advocates of the great health of the German people, at least explored the prerequisites and created the foundations upon which the Reich could be built.
May a better future thank these men that they did everything they could to preserve the tree of life of the German people from the rotting of its roots, from the decay of its trunk and the withering of its branches, leaves and flowers. Precisely our image of a German family speaks for what these men strove for with their desire for freedom and peace in house and home, and what their teaching means for the German people and the value of the Reich. For that, it was worth fighting.
The thought of leading an undisturbed peaceful family life in a simple but healthy dwelling with a capable and content wife, amidst a flock of well-formed lively children, that indeed was a goal that let our soldiers fight with full commitment for the victory of the coming Reich.
Für die Würde des Schaffens und die Güte des Handwerks
For the Dignity of Creative Work and the Virtue of Craftsmanship
For the dignity of creation and the virtue of craftsmanship, this is the third goal of struggle and peace. It reveals the German conception of the spirit and meaning of creation, of the essence and value of the creative personality, of love in work, and of the excellence of the work itself. It presents the conception of creation as a cultural achievement in the spirit of the Reich, and not only as a soulless production within the framework of a short-lived, advertising-inflated economic cycle.
The robot slavery of impersonal drudgery, bound to the conveyor belt of running machinery in the Taylor or Stakhanov system, does not correspond to our German conception of the dignity of creation. The catchphrase "time is money" will not fulfill a genuinely creative spirit. For to a person who creates out of inner calling, time is more than money, namely work. And work means also more than just the output of a production, whose pace is determined by greed for profit and machine efficiency. It means intellectual and manual craftsmanship, created with personal involvement in loving dedication to the task.
Creating and toiling are two very different things. He who creates is a master, he who toils, a slave. To the one who creates, the machine serves, the toiler it drives. It is more important to escape the soul-killing rat race in the service of Mammon, the poison-filled air of class antagonisms, and the shackles of trustification and bureaucratization. We must return to humane working conditions, to creative peace in the work itself and in cooperation, rather than endure boundless, measureless, soulless drudgery for profits. Creative peace in work is a goal, which alone would have made the victory of the Reich worthwhile and also today, despite the collapse, justifies all sacrificial courage.
Our depiction shows the harmony of the planning mind and the experienced hand. It shows the loving dedication to a work, the immersion in a task, worthy of an old substantial culture, whose heritage we not only want to enjoy and manage, but in which we want with joy to continue to participate. Through the window of the quiet workshop we see down upon venerable structures of earlier centuries, whose masters knew the spirit and the love of creation. They knew that the greatness and significance of a work cannot be measured solely in meters, feet, or utility, that kilograms or tons say nothing about its spiritual weight, and that a good thing takes time.
The warfare of our enemies has placed the focus of their will to destroy upon our cultural sites. From Cologne to Dresden, from Hamburg to Munich, and beyond, the bomb-laden purveyors of Christian phosphorus have systematically reduced to rubble and ashes the treasures of German cultural creation that centuries of peaceful diligence and masterful skill had given to the world of the spirit and the dignity of humanity. That was no fight against the armament power of a warring might, for the great armament works lay notoriously elsewhere. It was also not merely a ghastly mass murder for intimidation and paralysis, corresponding to the Boer War methods of England, which had introduced the age of total war. But under the prayer carpet woven of phosphorus and explosives of the "Soldiers of Christ," the scientific "strategy" of "civilization" planned both the German cultural life of the past, the "museum junk," to destroy, as well as, together with the culture-creating spirits dwelling in the city centers, above all the independent craftsmen, the cultural future of the Reich once and for all to burn. One can establish today that hardly another hate-goal so almost completely was reached.
That one destroyed our industry and now still dismantles it, including the soap-powder and comb factories, therein we see the fear before the still apprehended German competition and a secret recognition of the superior goodness of many German products for the use of the world. In the robbery of our patents, in the more or less compulsory abduction or deportation of specialists, we see where and how much it apparently still lacks in spirit and skill with our conquerors. But in the treatment of our cultural cities and creative forces, we see the primary aim of the will to destroy: to erase the German tradition under ruins, to strangle the cultural creation of independent spirits, and to extinguish us as a cultural nation. To this goal serve also the reawakening and perpetuation of barren class-hatred and party-strife, the attrition of the workforce and the joy of creation under the knout of a bureaucracy authorized with bayonet and atom-bomb. To this goal serves also the reinstatement, namely "liberation," of that sort of intellectuals, whose spirituality, driven from evil juices, brings forth concoctions, which to all honorable German tradition speak scorn, as testimonies of folkish impotence and human degradation, the rest of German self-respect and German reputation in the Reich of reason altogether in question put.
And nonetheless, whether we now hope for a better future, or whether we despair of it: A people, which so much good has performed and created, as the German, has not only the right, but also the duty, as a culture-people to live, as long as it at all lives. For it was, is, and remains, to all spite and all attempts it into the pariah-state down to press, in defiance, a master-people. It will this claim, which with world-domination plans and militarism not the slightest to do has, everywhere in the world enforce, where truly created, not only toiled, becomes. Where a creative disposition, elevated above mere greed for power and profit, lifts the creator in dedication to his work above the slavery of the machine age—a slavery to which even the victorious peoples succumb—there we are and remain free. There we carry the Reich within us. As long as other nations with all their inexhaustible ground-treasures, raw-material sources, and their civilization us herein not ahead are, as long as they no better forceUO and creative civility prove in their relation to the work, is the sense of the Reich still the best guiding-star for our creation and our fighting.
Für unser täglich Brot aus eigener Deutscher Scholle
For our Daily Bread from our own German Soil
Closely tied to the pursuit of freedom, peace, and national prosperity is the timeless imperative, fulfilled by all free peoples, of securing food from their own soil and producing vital raw and manufactured materials within their own sovereign territory.
In 1918, the German people were deprived by the overwhelming power of their enemies not only of their colonies but also of extensive and significant core areas crucial for their supply of necessary raw materials, especially grain for bread. Securing these disputed territories definitively for the Reich, to which they had previously belonged, was a real and fundamental war aim. There could be no discussion of its legitimacy with nations whose population density and economic intensity did not remotely match Germany’s, yet who had nonetheless used their victory to intolerably constrain the German people and thereby proletarianize them.
Indeed, the German people had already learned from the murderous hunger blockade of World War I—an English innovation as civilized humanity slid toward total war—that only a people able to defend and feed itself from its own soil is truly free. Thus, the freedom of the Reich demanded the preservation of existing agricultural enterprises and their expansion through new settlements. This corresponds to the next goal: For our daily bread from our own German soil.
Our harvest scene once again illustrates the German way of viewing things: What matters is freedom and joy in work that is vital to the nation. Here, it is not a kolkhoz worker toiling in an impersonal, collectivized grain factory on endless grain steppes, but an independent, middle-sized farmer harvesting his seed, his grain, not only by the sweat of his brow but with satisfied pride in his heart. Here is the so-called “master race” man, vilified by enemy propaganda, who is in truth a gentleman farmer at work. And behold: He is not thinking of world conquest and oppression but simply mowing his grain according to his own free decision and insight, with no one daring to interfere. Behind him, the maid binds the sheaf; she is of the same good human stock as her farmer. Such mowing of the field signifies a festive, almost pious work. A rational cooperation of honorable people, far removed from any desires for exploitation or class struggle, promises success, and the prosperity of the economy is hinted at in the background by the new building with the topping-out wreath.
Moreover, the face of this farmer is not only that of an honorable man, a gentleman who fulfills his duties and upholds his well-earned rights, but also that of a moderate, insightful, and rational person. In his decency, he would curtly dismiss the suggestion of any propaganda chatterbox that he should conquer the world with the question: “Are you really saying something, or is your mouth just running?” Shielding the borders of the Reich, especially in the endangered East, with as many such farmers as possible, settled on inalienable hereditary farms, against the surging Slavic and Asiatic peoples, was a goal of both national and European significance. With full justification, the German soldier was entitled to fight for this.
Für die Achtung der Arbeit und den Segen des Fleißes
For the Respect of Labor and the Blessing of Diligence
Our last image, dedicated to the evening of a hard-working life, bears the inscription: "For the Respect of Labor and the Blessing of Diligence." This was also a battle goal for the soldier, whose preservation only the victory of the Reich could guarantee.
Nowhere else in the world did the working man so acquire the undeniable entitlement to a dignified old-age provision. As long as the Reich existed, the soldier, like everyone else, knew that neither his parents, nor he himself, nor his wife and children would one day, in their old age, tired from honest life’s work, be thrown onto the street without rights by treacherous exploitation. As long as the Reich prospered, no honest citizen would need to spend the night under some bridge arch or languish in a wretched hovel.
The loyalty principle of One for All, All for One had already been removed from personal arbitrariness and legally solidified since Bismarck’s times through social legislation like no other state has ever had. If victory was achieved, and only then, the soldier knew, and everyone knows, that a war invalid and his family would not be dependent on charity, but the law would ensure his and his family’s rightful claims, for a decent livelihood. Not to forfeit all the rights that ability, diligence, and loyalty inscribe in a morally ordered state was reason enough to fight for the victory of the emerging Reich.
A defeat of Germany, as experience taught, would once again helplessly expose honestly working, dutiful people to misery, unemployment with inadequate provision, and the wildly rampant corruption in a powerless state.
to be continued.