The Volk

Ernst Rudolf Huber, in his basic work Verfassungsrecht des grossdeutschen Reiches (Constitutional Law of the Greater German Reich) (document 1, post p. 155), published in 1939, states: 

The new constitution of the German Reich ... is not a constitution in the formal sense such as was typical of the nineteenth century.  The new Reich has no written constitutional declaration, but its constitution exists in the unwritten basic political order of the Reich.  One recognizes it in the spiritual powers which fill our people, in the real authority in which our political life is grounded, and in the basic laws regarding the structure of the state which have been proclaimed so far.  The advantage of such an unwritten constitution over the formal constitution is that the basic principles do not become rigid but remain in a constant, living movement.  Not dead institutions but living principles determine the nature of the new constitutional order.[8]

In developing his thesis Huber points out that the National Socialist state rests on three basic concepts, the Volk or people, the Fuehrer, and the movement or party.  With reference to the first element, the Volk, he argues that the democracies develop their concept of the people from the wrong approach:  They start with the concept of the state and its functions and consider the people as being made up of all the elements which fall within the borders or under the jurisdiction of the state.  National Socialism, on the other hand, starts with the concept of the people, which forms a political unity, and builds the state upon this foundation.

There is no people without an objective unity, but there is also none without a common consciousness of unity.  A people is determined by a number of different factors:  by racial derivation and by the character of its land, by language and other forms of life, by religion and history, but also by the common consciousness of its solidarity and by its common will to unity.  For the concrete concept of a people, as represented by the various peoples of the earth, it is of decisive significance which of these various factors they regard as determinants for the nature of the people.  The new German Reich proceeds from the concept of the political people, determined by the natural characteristics and by the historical idea of a closed community.  The political people is formed through the uniformity of its natural characteristics.  Race is the natural basis of the people ...  As a political people the natural community becomes conscious of its solidarity and strives to form itself, to develop itself, to defend itself, to realize itself.  “Nationalism” is essentially this striving of a people which has become conscious of itself toward self-direction and self-realization, toward a deepening and renewing of its natural qualities.