The cover: Deutsche
Kriegsweihnacht.
Published by the Main Culture Department of the
NSDAP.
Hitler looking at a Christmas tree. The facing page
has these words from Goebbels’s 1941 Christmas Eve speech: “On this evening we
will think of the Führer, who is also everywhere present this evening wherever
Germans gather, and place ourselves in the service of the fatherland. At the
end of the war, it shall be greater, lovelier, and more impressive. It should
be the proud and free homeland for us all. We promise the Führer that in this
hour he can rely on his people at the front, at home, and in the world. He
leads us. We follow him. Without the shadow of a doubt, we follow him, bearing
the flag and the Reich. The flag and the Reich shall remain pure and unscathed
when the great hour of victory comes.”
This picture faces a poem by Walter Flex that
translates:
“Lonely watch / Ice-cold night! / The frost creaks / The storm
rages / The peace I extol / I see in them. / The bright flame blazes! / Murder,
hatred, death / They fill the earth / With grim threatenings. / Never will
there be peace, they say, / Swearing an oath with bloody hands. / What care I
about cold and pain! / In me burns an oath / Blazing as a flame / With sword
and heart and hand. / Come what may / Germany, I am ready!
This picture shows a mother holding her child next to
a Christmas tree, while three soldiers trudge through the snow of the east. It
faces a poem by Herybert Menzel titled “Soldiers’ Christmas.”
This drawing follows an essay
by Walter Henkels, titled “My Thoughts are with You. A Christmas Letter from
the Front to Women and Children.” It begins: “I have traveled to you today
without a leave, without a ticket — with only the baggage my dreams and
thoughts — to be with you when the candles on the Christmas tree are lit. I
have come only in my thoughts. That’s the way it is. It is wonderful to travel
with one’s thoughts. I sense how my steps lighten as I heave the railway
station, as I turn the corner, as my boots squeak in the snow. There is our
home, protected by the rose bushes. I ring quickly three times, just as before:
three times, it’s me. Your heart leaps a little, for no one but me would ring
three times. (continued here).
Here, soldiers gather around a small Christmas tree in
their dugout. It accompanies a letter from a soldier’s wife for Christmas 1943.
It ends: “And so, like millions of women today, the light of my heart shines
forth with joy and love, illuminating the front, brightening the year’s longest
night, in which you stand watch and fight for us. That light is within us, and
will give us all the strength to find our way to a fresh spring. That is my
firm, unshakable faith.”
This pictures faces a poem by Herybert Menzel:
“Women
quietly serve a strong people, / They are the homeland, and they shape the
home. / When men take risks, they trust. / What men build, they make beautiful.
/ They are the happy mothers of proud sons, / Sons are their greatest fame, /
They carry through the years all that is beautiful, / They build a better
humanity. / Such a people needs great strength, / For what glows must suffer
greatly, / And when hard times come, / The woman must stand alongside the man.
In this picture, a sentry enters a dugout. It
accompanies a story about Christmas 1941 in Russia that begins: “I will tell a
story about a Christmas Eve that some who hear will think could not possibly
have been worse....” A unit, after hard battle, is resting in a forlorn
village, hoping for Christmas packages. They find a small tree, and put some
Christmas candles on it. Suddenly, an order comes to return to the front. The
enemy is attacking. As they leave, one soldier runs back to get the Christmas
tree. After a day’s march through a bitter-cold snow storm, they set up the tree
again, exhausted, weary. The flicking candles warm their hearts. The story
ends: “Perhaps the soldiers did not realize what they had done for the world
this evening — during the longest and bitterest night of their lives, in which,
despite everything, they had stubbornly rescued their little tree. On earth, on
the dead, cold, dark earth, they lit the light that alone has the strength to
renew life eternally, even in the darkest night.”
This picture faces an excerpt
from Goebbels’s 1942 Christmas Eve talk: “A soldier speaks tonight of his
fallen comrade as he recalls the hard battles of this war, and at home today, a
mother, a father, a wife and a group of children remember each dead hero in
proud sorrow. Our dead are the only ones with the right to make a demand today,
and indeed to us all, at the front or at home. They are the eternal monuments,
the voices of our national conscience, which constantly drive us on to do our
duty. The mothers who mourn their lost sons may be at peace. They did not in
vain bear their children in pain and rear them. They lived the proudest and
bravest life that a son of the fatherland can live, crowning with the most
heroic end possible: they sacrificed themselves so that we could stand in the
light. It is up to us alone whether their great devotion has its deepest
meaning.... The coming century shines to us, as the poet says, from a royal
distance. It demands of us battle and sacrifice. But one day, we will be there.
For us, it is only a matter of time and patience, of courage and work, of faith
and confidence in the strength of our souls and the bravery of our hearts.
All nature is a
gigantic struggle between strength and weakness, an eternal victory of the
strong over the weak.
—Adolf
Hitler
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