For this reason our Storm Detachments were not allowed to have anything to do with military organiza¬ tion. They were purely an instrument for protecting and educating the National Socialist movement, and their tasks lay in quite another direction from that of any so-called defence association.
Neither did they represent a secret organization. The aims of secret organizations can only be unlawful ones.
What we needed then, and need now, was and is not a hundred or twro wrong-headed conspirators, but a hundred thousand, and again a hundred thousand, fanatical fighters for our world-theory. The work must be done, not in secret conventicles, but by power¬ ful massed strokes ; the road cannot be cleared for the movement by dagger or poison or pistol, but by con¬ quering the man in the street. We have to destroy Marxism, so that future control of the street may be in the hands of National Socialism—now, just as it will be in the future.
There is another danger from secret organizations, in that their members often fail completely to under¬ stand the greatness of the task, and are apt to imagine that the success of the national cause can be assured all at once by means of a single murder. Such an idea may find historical justification in cases where a nation has been suffering under the tyranny of some gifted oppressor.
During 1919 and 1920 there was a danger that members of secret organizations, inspired by great examples in history and carried away by the magnitude of the nation’s misfortune, might attempt to take vengeance on the corrupters of their country, under the belief that thus they would put an end to the misery of their nation. All such attempts were purely folly, because the Marxist victory was not due to the superior genius of some outstanding individual leader, but to the measureless incompetence and cowardice of the bourgeois world.