Der Fuehrer - Hitler's Rise to Power (1944) - Heiden

352 DER FUEHRERsupport the children and had no authority over them. From such familiesthe youth could get no view of life, no traditional class conceptions. Thebest that this youth could derive from its situation was a radical will toget ahead, which in many turned into criminality, in most into a demandfor new group loyalties, often into both. In a song that became verypopular after 1930, this generation boasted of being 'shameless to thetesticles,' and 'even if the shopkeepers and cynics laugh at us, our sundoes not go down'; this song, it goes without saying, was taken over bythe S.A.These young people of 1930 contributed a great mass inclined to fusewith the human type we have encountered since 1919 in the murderers'army. It would be absolutely false to say that they brought with them thebulk of German youth, but surely an appreciable proportion. At allevents, it is here, in the cynicism of this youth, and not in the rage of the'dispossessed petty bourgeois,' that we must seek the origin of thehuman type which later buried their fellow men alive in stone coffins,struck out their eyes, shot them down by the score. Material miserydoubtless helped to release this barbarism; but since such barbarism isfrequent in history, though comparatively rare in the last hundred years,it can scarcely be derived from the social structure of the last century;and no one will seriously try to explain the philosophy and behavior ofan S.S. man by the fact that the S.S. man is a baker or stationer. Thewhole popular concept of class is an intellectual left-over from a periodwhen men were confined to distinct occupations or groups all their livesand often for generations on end.The type which came to the fore in 1930 was rapidly departing fromthe old class concepts. He was led by the declassed of all classes, thearmed bohemians. The worn-out occupational and class concepts hadconcealed the decisive phenomenon, a new human type, which nowrevealed himself in a brown or a black shirt, with pistol, club, andtorture chamber: the armed intellectual. This total disregard of humanityis born not from bloodthirstiness, but from cold calculation — for thevilest horrors of this age have been perpetrated out of cold intellectualcalculation and not out of bestial cruelty.In this era of general failure, in which the state became all-power-