atic sense of a
community to which the individual may voluntarily adhere.

The central field of force of the National Socialist
consciousness is rather the folk, and this folk is in no
case mere individual aggregation, i.e., collectivity as sum
of the individuals, but as a unity with a peculiar
two-sidedness, at the same time "essential totality" (M.H.
Boehm). The folk is both a living creature and a spiritual
configuration, in which the individuals are included through
common racial conditioning, in blood and spirit. It is that
force which works on the individual directly "from within or
from the side like a common degree of temperature" (Kjellen)
and which collects into the folk whatever according to
blood and spirit belongs to it. This folk, point of
departure and goal at the same time, is, in the National
Socialist world-view, not only the field of force for
political order, but as well the central factor of the
entire world-picture. Neither individuals, as the epoch of
enlightenment envisaged, nor states, as in the system of the
dynastic and national state absolutism, nor classes, as
conceived by Marxism, are the ultimate realities of the
political order, but the peoples, who stand over against one
another with the unqualifiable right to a separate existence
as natural entities, each with its own essential nature and
form. [24]

Dr. Scurla claims that National Socialism and Fascism are the
strivings of the German and Italian people for final national
unification along essentially different national lines natural to each
of them. "What took place in Germany," he asserts, "was a political
revolution of a total nature."[25] "Under revolution," he states, "we
understand rather the penetration of the collective folk-mind
[_gesamtvoelkischen Bewusstseins_] into all regions of German
life."[26] And, he concludes:

National Socialism is no invented system of rules for the
political game, but the world-view of the German people,
which experiences itself as a national and social community,
and concedes neither to the state nor the class nor the
individual any privileges which endanger the security of the
community's right to live.[27]

Some of the most striking expressions of the race concept are found in
_Die Erziehung im dritten Reich_ (_Education in the Third Reich_), by