All of these men and movements contributed the notes, the chords, or the screeches that fused into the Horst Wessel song. And they are merely some of the obvious voices in Germany from a chorus sustained across hundreds of years and gradually rising in volume. If the brutes finally rose from the gutters and stamped a swastika across the doctrines of the centuries; if, plucking the naked essence of those doctrines from the atmosphere, they began to preach the worship of the all-powerful, collectivist, militarist state, ruled by a master Fuhrer in the name of a master race; and if, finding an avid following, they proceeded to drench the world in blood--one need not ask what made it possible.