Category: Helmut Stellrecht

From Faith and Action (1938) by Helmut Stellrecht for the Hitler Youth:



Courage is the most beautiful and noble trait a man can have. He who has no courage is not a man.

§ The “storming courage” of an attack is wonderful. The feeling of having risked all in service of a high ideal frees one and lets him charge forward with joy. Courage bears a man as if he had wings, and fills his heart.

§ The attack becomes the high point of life. When everything depends on one card, when one can lose everything, when one can win everything, life is at its best. He who has never charged and attacked, filled with courage, has never fully lived.

§ Alongside “stormy courage” is the “indomitable courage” of those facing hard fate. “Fate is great and powerful, but greater still is the person who bears it unshaken.”

§ Life is often harder than death. A coward holds on to it. No one faces a challenge greater than the strength he has been given to face it. Courage overcomes all. When one has done all in his power, good luck comes to show him a new way and help him along. But it is not really good luck. “Resist all powers, never give in, be strong, calls the army of the gods.”

§ Courage is needed not only by the man, by the soldier, a woman too needs courage. For the man battle, the attack is the greatest challenge. For the woman it comes when she gives a new person life. Men who no longer want to wage war cannot face the mothers who give new life at the risk of their own.

§ Courage is the noblest trait of a man or woman. It determines the battle and gives victory. Hardness Life demands hardness. One must strive with burning heart toward the ideal.

From Faith and Action (1938) by Helmut Stellrecht for the Hitler Youth:






Socialism means: “The common good before the individual good.” Socialism means: “Think not of yourself, but of the whole, of the people and the state.” Socialism means: “Not the same for everyone, but to each his own.” These sentences make clear what we call “German socialism.” No one is a socialist who does not live according to them.

§ A new order grows from these sentences. The sentence “To each his own” has killed the “mass,” the slogan of Marxism, and replaced it with the “community.” Every community grows around a leader. He is the center of its order, which forms around him. A number of these leaders form a larger community, and stand around their leader as a living order. It all grows from below—the number growing ever smaller—like a pyramid, and finds its epitome in the Führer of the Reich. All are bound by the community. Each community is a living order. The whole, the great living order, is the people’s community. It binds inextricably person to person, leader to leader. It does not give the same to everyone, but to each his own. It creates the socialist people in a socialist state.

§ Each has his task in the community, given to him according to his gifts. Never do all have the same task, but rather each his own. His task gives him a place in the community, If he fulfills it completely, he wins the esteem of the others. He is happy, even if his task is not large in the overall scheme of things.

§ Such communities grow in the field, in assault troops, in artillery battalions, in submarines, in S.A. units. Strong, bound forever together, wordlessly understanding each other, together until the end, sworn to a common goal. Strength grows from such communities, and from them grows the state.

§ We want community in Germany so that we can stand unshaken in the face of whatever may come. The mass is conquered by the community. It gives to each his own, to each his goal and his task, and everyone together one goal: the people’s community in the new state.

From Faith and Action (1938) by Helmut Stellrecht for the Hitler Youth:




A people gives itself its form through the state. There is only one natural form for each people, only one state.

§ In the natural process of growth, each people finds its form and its state, and finds them again when it has lost them, if only it wants to.

§ National Socialism has broken foreign compulsion and eliminated the unnatural. Germany once again grows into its own state and is once more itself.

§ The best rules, the Führer, and he carries the responsibility because he is best able to bear it. The parliament has ceased to exist. This form of Western democracy has been abolished. The German states established by the grace of counts or by Napoleon disappear. The Reich becomes one. The new state rises: “The day is coming when a single tent will cover all the German land.”