National Socialism ends in the absorption of the personality of the citizen into that of the state and in the denial of any intrinsic value of the human person.
We are brought back, as can be seen, to the most primitive ideas of the savage tribe. All the values of civilization accumulated in the course of centuries are rejected, all traditional ideas of morality, justice, and law give way to the primacy of race, its instincts, its needs and interests. The individual, his liberty, his rights and aspirations, no longer have any real existence of their own.
In this conception of race it is easy to realize the gulf that separates members of the German community from other men. The diversity of the races becomes irreducible, and irreducible, too, the hierarchy which sets apart the superior and the inferior races. The Hitler regime has created a veritable chasm between the German nation, the sole keeper of the racial treasure, and other nations.
Between the Germanic community and the degenerate population of an inferior variety of men there is no longer any common measure. Human brotherhood is rejected, even more than all the other traditional moral values.
How can one explain how Germany, fertilized through the centuries by classic antiquity and Christianity, by the ideals of liberty, equality, and social justice, by the common heritage of western humanism to which she had brought such noble and precious contributions, could have come to this astonishing return to primitive barbarism?
In order to understand it and to try to eradicate forever from the Germany of tomorrow the evil by which our entire civilization came so near to perishing, it must be recalled that National Socialism has deep and remote origins.
The mysticism of racial community was born of the spiritual and moral crises which Germany underwent in the 19th century and which abruptly broke out again in its economic and social structure through a particularly rapid industrialization. National Socialism is in reality one of the peaks of the moral and spiritual crisis of modern humanity, convulsed by industrialization and technical progress. Germany experienced this metamorphosis of economic and social life not only with an extraordinary brutality but at a time when she did not yet possess the political equilibrium and the cultural unity which the other countries of western Europe had achieved.
While the inner and spiritual life was weakening, a cruel uncertainty dominated human minds, an uncertainty admirably defined by the term “Ratlosigkeit,” which cannot be translated into French but which corresponds to our popular expression, “One no longer knows in what saint to believe.” This is the spiritual cruelty of the 19th century which so many Germans have described with a tragic evocative power. A gaping void opens before the human soul, disoriented by the search for new values.
The natural sciences and the sciences of the mind give birth to absolute relativism; to a deep scepticism regarding the lasting quality of values on which Western humanism has been nurtured for centuries. A vulgar Darwinism prevails, bewilders, and befuddles the brain. The Germans cease to see in human groups and races anything but isolated nuclei in perpetual struggle with one another.
It is in the name of decadence that the German spirit condemns humanism. It sees in the value of humanism and in the elements that derive from it only “maladies,” which it attributes to an excess of intellectualism and abstraction of everything that restrains men’s passions by subjecting them to common norms. From this point on, classic antiquity is no longer considered in its aspects of ordered reason or of radiant beauty. In it one sees only civilizations violently enamored of struggles and rivalries, linked especially to Germany through their so-called Germanic origin.