Leaflet 6
Leaflet VI
(written by Professor Kurt Huber)
German Students![1]
Our nation stands shaken before the demise of the heroes[2] of Stalingrad. The brilliant strategy of a Lance Corporal from the World War has senselessly and irresponsibly driven[3] three hundred thirty thousand German men to death and destruction. Führer, we thank you!
Unrest ferments among the German people: Shall we continue to entrust the fate of our armies to a dilettante? Do we wish to sacrifice the remainder of our German youth to the vile instinct for power of a Party clique? On no account!
The day of reckoning has come, the reckoning of our German youth with the most abominable tyranny[4] that our nation has ever endured. In the name of all the German youth, we demand that Adolf Hitler’s government return to us our personal freedom, the most valuable possession a German owns. He has cheated us of it in a most contemptible manner.
We have grown up in a nation where every open expression of opinion is callously bludgeoned. Hitler Youth, the SA and SS have tried to conform, revolutionize, and anesthetize[5] us in the most fruitful years of our educational lives. The despicable methodology was called “ideological education”; it attempted to suffocate budding independent thought and values in a fog of empty phrases. “The Führer’s pick”[6] – something more simultaneously devilish and stupid could not be imagined.
This “Führer’s pick” raises its future Party bosses in Ordensburgen so they will be godless, brazen, and conscienceless users and assassins, blind, stupid disciples of the Führer. We “Workers of the Spirit” would do well if we bludgeoned this new class of men.[7] An intellectual and moral elite of student leaders and Gauleiter hopefuls distracts us systematically from every disciplined, deep course of study. They seek to fritter away our time with roll-calls, Party gatherings, and trade association conferences. Soldiers who have fought on the front lines are reprimanded like schoolboys by these gentlemen. The Gauleiter and student leaders insult the honor of female students with lascivious jokes.
German female students at the college in Munich have given a dignified answer to the besmirching of their honor. German male students have gone into action on behalf of their female comrades and stood firm. This is a beginning in the fight for our free self-determination; without this, intellectual values can never be created. Thank you to all the brave comrades who have led the way with such an illuminating example!
For us now there is but one watchword: Fight against the Party! Get out of the Party organizations in which they wish to keep us politically muzzled! Get out of the lecture halls of the SS-Noncom-or-Major-Generals and the Party sycophants! This has to do with genuine scholarship and true freedom of thought! No threats can dismay us, not even the closing of our colleges.
This is a battle that we all must fight for our future, our freedom and honor in a political system that is conscious of its moral responsibility.
Freedom and honor! For ten long years, Hitler and his associates have abused, stomped, and twisted these two glorious German words till they are loathsome. Only dilettantes are capable of doing this, dilettantes who cast the highest values of a nation before swine. Over the last ten years, they have more than shown us what freedom and honor means to them – they have destroyed all material and intellectual freedom and all moral substance in the German people. The terrible blood bath that they have caused in all of Europe in the name of the freedom and honor of the German people – a blood bath that they cause anew every day – has opened the eyes of even the stupidest German.
The German name will be forever defamed if German youth does not finally arise, avenge, and atone, if he does not shatter his tormentor and raise up a new intellectual Europe. Students! The German nation looks to us! In 1943, they expect from us the breaking of the National Socialist terror through the power of the spirit, just as in 1813 the Napoleonic [terror] was broken. Beresina and Stalingrad are going up in flames in the East, and the dead of Stalingrad beseech us: “Courage, my people! The beacons are burning!” Our nation is awakening against the enslavement of Europe by National Socialism, in a new pious[8] revival of freedom and honor!
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[1] Also in the file as “Fellow Students” (Kommilitonen). This leaflet is typed without the normal line spacing. Cramped together on the page so that it all fit on a single sheet.
[2] In the “German Students” leaflet as “heroes”; in the “Fellow Students” leaflet as “men.”
[3] Hetzen – same word used as in e.g. Judenhetze or Jew-baiting.
[4] Unusual choice of vocabulary. Tyrann (der) is tyrant; Tyrannei (die) is tyranny. Prof. Huber used the word Tyrannis (die).
[5] Lit. “drug” (verb).
[6] Führerauslese – Auslese is the term used in winemaking for the best of the best.
[7] “Men” (Herren) could also be translated “Lords.”
[8] The word used was gläubig, not fromm. Gläubig does not have the negative connotations of the related fromm and would be more likely to be used by persons who took their religion seriously. Yet a “non-believer” could read the same word as “faithful.” Overall, it was a strategically sound word to choose in this context.
Translation (c) 2002-2003 Ruth Hanna Sachs. Please contact us for permission to quote.