The National Socialist Party is Hitler, and Hitler is the party.  The National Socialists believe in Hitler, who embodies their will.  Therefore our conscience is clearly and exactly defined.  Only what Adolf Hitler, our Fuehrer, commands, allows, or does not allow is our conscience. We have no understanding for him who hides behind an anonymous conscience, behind God, whom everybody conceives according to his own wishes.

These ideas of the Fuehrer’s infallibility and the duty of obedience are so fundamental in fact that they are incorporated as the first two commandments for party members.  These are set forth in the Organisationsbuch der NSDAP (Nazi Party Organization Book) for 1940, page 7 (document 7, post p. 186).  The first commandment is “The Fuehrer is always right!” and the second is “Never go against discipline!”

In view of the importance attached to the Fuehrer principle by the Nazis, it is only natural that youth should be intensively indoctrinated with this idea.  Neesse points out that one of the most important tasks of the party is the formation of a “select group” or elite which will form the leaders of the future: 

A party such as the NSDAP, which is responsible to history for the future of the German Reich, cannot content itself with the hope for future leaders but must create a strain of strong and true personalities which should offer the constantly renewed possibility of replacing leaders whenever it is necessary.[56]

Beck, in his work Education in the Third Reich, also insists that a respect for the Fuehrer principle be inculcated in youth: 

The educational value of the Hitler Youth is to be found in this community spirit which cannot be taught but can only be experienced ...  But this cultivation of the community spirit through the experience of the community must, in order to avoid any conception of individual equality which is inconsistent with the German view of life, be based upon inward and outward recognition of the Fuehrer principle ...  In the Hitler Youth, the young German should learn by experience that there are no theoretical equal rights of the individual but only a natural and unconditional subordination to leadership.[57]

German writers often pretend that the Fuehrer principle does not necessarily result in the establishment of a dictatorship but that it permits the embodiment of the will of the people in its leaders and the realization of the popular will much more efficiently than is possible in democratic states.  Such an argument, for example, is presented by Dr. Paul Ritterbusch in Demokratie und Diktatur (Democracy and Dictatorship), published in 1939.  Professor Ritterbusch claims that Communism leads to a dictatorial system but that the Nazi movement is much closer to the ideals of true democracy.  The real nature of National Socialism, however, cannot be understood