Adolf Hitler – proclamation read by Gauleiter Adolf Wagner
Nuremberg, September 11, 1935
l. Jewish Marxism and
parliamentary democracy related to it;
2. the politically and morally
corrupting Center;
3. certain elements in a
stubborn, dumb-reactionary bourgeoisie.
I would like to point out in
this context that the battle against the inner enemies of the nation will never
be frustrated by formal bureaucracy or its incompetence; where the formal
bureaucracy of the State should prove ill-suited to solve a certain problem,
the German nation will activate its more dynamic organization as an aid to
asserting its vital necessities. For it is a grave error to suppose that the
nation would exist only because of some formal phenomenon and that, moreover,
when such a phenomenon is not capable of accomplishing the tasks assigned to
it, the nation would capitulate in the face of these tasks.
On the contrary: what can be
accomplished through the State will be accomplished through the State. But
whatever the State is incapable of accomplishing, due to its very essence, will
be accomplished by the Movement.
For the State as well is only
one of the forms of organization in volkisch life, driven and controlled
by the direct expression of the Volk’s will to live, by the Party, by the
National Socialist Movement.
Under no circumstances will
the National Socialist State tolerate that the politicization of the
confessions be prolonged or even begun anew by any type of detour. And let no
one delude himself as to the determination of the Movement and the State! We
have already fought a battle against the political clergy and ousted it from
the parliaments, and that after a long struggle in which we had no state
authority and the other side had it all. Today we have this authority and will
more easily be able to win the struggle for these principles. But we will never
wage this battle as a battle against Christianity or even against one of the
two confessions. But we will wage it in order to keep our public life pure and
free of those priests who have mistaken their calling, those who should have
become politicians and not clergymen.
After an incredible struggle
for enlightenment, after endless sacrifices, we have succeeded in converting
nine tenths of our Volk to subordinate themselves to one opinion and to one
will. The last tenth comprises the remainder of thirtyseven parties, the
confessions, the former associations-in short, that very chaos which thrust
Germany into one disaster after another for centuries. And thus, when we calmly
take in the perspective of what success recent years have given to our German
Reich, in the end we must always recognize the most uplifting fact of all,
namely: The most valuable thing is and remains the Movement, which has joined
the nation to form a whole and which allows its desires to manifest themselves
in one single will. What security, and what tranquillity reign in our Germany
today! Wherever we look, we see everywhere around us the ferments of
decomposition, the elements of dissolution.
Endless strikes, lockouts,
street-fighting, destruction, hatred and civil war; rootless
Jewish-international wandering scholars are infiltrating the nations, agitating
against all healthy common sense and whipping up hostility among the people.
Under the guise of representing the interests of the classes, they are putting
a civil war in motion which will lead only to the utmost satisfaction of their
own interests. And we are witnessing the consequences. In a world which should
actually live in affluence, need reigns. Countries with a population of
scarcely fifteen persons per square kilometer suffer from hunger, states which
are blessed with every conceivable natural resource are simply incapable of
reducing their armies of unemployed.
It is a triumph of the
effectiveness of the National Socialist regime that it has succeeded-in a
country in which 137 persons live in one square kilometer, in a country which has
no colonies, which lacks most natural resources, which was drained to its very
blood for fifteen years, which lost its entire foreign capital, paid more than
fifty billion in reparation dues, which was confronted with the total ruin of
its economy-that even given the worst problems, it succeeded in preserving a
means of existence, in reducing the number of unemployed, so that today we are
better off than many of the world’s richer countries.
Today we can admit it openly:
the year 1934 was unfortunately a bad harvest year. We are still suffering from
the aftereffects. But it was nevertheless possible to secure the German Volk’s
supply of vitally important foodstuffs.
The fact that this was
possible, in spite of the many restrictions, is an achievement of which the
broad masses of our Volk have perhaps not been sufficiently aware. The
difficulties connected with this harvest led many a time to a temporary
shortage of this or that foodstuff. We were nonetheless determined that under
no circumstances would we capitulate as a certain international press was
ardently hoping. And we overcame the crisis. We were forced, in this context,
to repeatedly halt with every means available attempts to compensate for the
bad harvest by partly understandable but also partly unjustified price
increases.
In this year we were-and will
likewise be in future-motivated by the unshakeable desire to prevent the German
Volk from stumbling unawares into a new inflation. But this would still be the
unavoidable result of any increase in salaries or any increase in prices at
present. So if today, too, irresponsible egoists or unthinking fools fancy that
any kind of shortage-which can always arise- gives them the right to increase
prices, this behavior would, if the Government were to let it, set the
well-known vicious circle of 1921 to 1923 in motion, leaving the German Volk
with an inflation on its hands for the second time around. For this reason we
will attack such elements from now on with brutal ruthlessness and-if good
intentions fail-will not shrink from using concentration camps to make them
conform with and adapt to the national interest as a whole.
Speech at NSDAP congress hall in Nuremberg
September 11, 1935
National Socialists! Party Comrades!
Sixteen years ago the spiritual cornerstone was
laid for one of the greatest and most significant manifestations of German
life. The resolution of but a few men at that time to extricate Germany from
the fetters of its internal corrupters and to liberate it from the yoke of
external bondage constituted one of the boldest decisions in world history.
Now, after sixteen years of hard struggle, this scheme has evolved to become a
decisive historic achievement. A world of internal adversaries and obstacles
was overcome, and a new world is at the verge of being born. On this day, we
hereby lay for this new world of the German Volk the cornerstone of its first
great monument. A hall shall rise which is to serve the purpose of annually
housing within its walls a gathering of the elite of the National Socialist
Reich for centuries to come. Should the Movement ever be silent, even after
millenniums, this witness shall speak.
In the midst of a hallowed
grove of ancient oak trees will the people then marvel in reverent awe at this
first colossus among the buildings of the German Reich. With this premonition I
hereby lay the cornerstone of the Congress Hall of the Reich Party Congresses
in Nuremberg in the year 1935, the year of the freedom of the German nation
hard won by the National Socialist Movement.
But if such a so-called
“artist” feels himself called upon to portray human life under all
circumstances from the viewpoint and perspective of what is inferior and
diseased, then he should do so in an age in which there is a widespread
appreciation for just this type of viewpoint. Today this age is over, and hence
it is also over for this type of “would-be creative artists.” And though we are
becoming ever firmer and more strict in our rejection of this, we hold that we are
not making a mistake. For he who is chosen by Providence to lend external,
graphically visible expression to the innermost and thus eternally healthy
substance of a Volk will never find himself on the path to such aberrations.
Thus we are not talking about
a “threat to the freedom of art.” Just as a murderer is not granted the right
to kill his fellow men in body simply because this would mean interfering with
his own freedom, a person similarly cannot be granted the right to kill the
soul of the Volk merely so as to avoid placing any restrictions on his dirty
fantasy and his total lack of restraint.
In the case of really great
tasks, as a general rule, both those men who have commissioned the task and
those who accomplish it should bear in mind that, although the assignment was
given within a certain age, its accomplishment shall, by being performed to the
utmost, become ageless.
To this end it is necessary
that the really great tasks of an age must be assigned respectively, i.e.
public commissions must, if their accomplishment is to generate eternal value,
be placed in a certain proportion in respect to the scale of the rest of life.
It is impossible to place the
monumental architecture of the State or the Movement on a scale corresponding
to that of one or two centuries ago, while the products of bourgeois creation
in the sphere of private or even purely capitalistic architecture have expanded
conversely and increased many times over. What lent the cities of antiquity and
the Middle Ages their characteristic and hence admirable and endearing features
was not the size of the private bourgeois structures but the manifestations of
community life towering above them.
In the bourgeois epoch, the
architectural expression of public life was unfortunately repressed in favor of
buildings documenting private-capitalistic business life. But the great
historico-cultural task of National Socialist lies above all in departing from
this trend.
We must, however, be guided
not only by artistic but also by political considerations in endowing upon the
new Reich, with a view to the great precedents of the past, a worthy cultural
personification. Nothing is better suited to silence the little carpers than
the eternal language of great art.
Millenniums bow to its
utterances in reverent silence. May God grant us the stature to formulate these
tasks in a manner equal to the stature of the nation.
This is doubtless a difficult
undertaking.
The heroic feats of greatness
which our Volk accomplished in history over 2,000 years number among the most
tremendous experiences of mankind. There were centuries in which works of art
corresponded to a spiritual human greatness in Germany-and in the rest of
Europe. The unique eminence of our cathedrals represents an incomparable
standard for the truly-in a cultural sense-monumental attitude of these ages.
They demand from us more than admiration for the work itself; they demand
reverence for the races which were capable of planning and carrying out such
great ideas.
Since then, our Volk has risen
and fallen with the changing tides of Fate. We ourselves were witnesses of a
world-defying heroism, of the deepest despair and shocked bewilderment. Through
us and in us, the nation has risen once again.
When today we call upon German
art to take on new and great tasks, we are assigning these not only in order to
fulfill the wishes and hopes of the present, but in the sense of a
thousand-year legacy. By paying homage to this eternal national genius, we
summon the great spirit of the creative power of the past to come dwell in the
present.
But such elevated tasks will
make people grow, and we do not have a right to doubt that, if the Almighty
gives us the courage to demand what is immortal, He will give our Volk the
power to accomplish what is immortal. Our cathedrals are witnesses to the glory
of the past! The glory of the present will one day be gauged by the eternal
values it leaves behind. Only then will Germany undergo a revival of its art
and our Volk become conscious of a higher destiny.
Excerptions of the speech before the DAF and the
RAD
Nuremberg, Zeppelin Field, September 12, 1935
Life necessarily divides us into many different
groups and professions. It is the job of the political and spiritual education
of the nation to overcome this division. This is primarily a job reserved for
the Labor Service. It is to unite all Germans in labor and make of them a
community.
For this purpose, it shall
place in the hand of each the same instrument of labor, the instrument which
does a Volk the most credit, the spade! There you march beneath the guardian of
peace, the weapon of our inner self-assertion! You march thus today in the
entire German Reich. The eye of the nation rests upon you, its hope! It sees in
you something better than it has been in the past. If the entire German Volk
were to see you today, I believe that even the last doubter would have been
persuaded that the raising of a new nation, of a new community of our Volk is
not a rumor, but reality.
Address to 100,000 Political Leaders
Nuremberg, September 13, 1935
It is good that we are able to see each other
like this once a year, you the Fuhrer, and the Fuhrer yourselves. This can also
serve as a lesson to all those who would so gladly make a distinction between
the Fuhrer and his following, those who are so incapable of understanding that
there can be no distinction between us, who would so gladly say: the Fuhrer,
yes! But the Party-is that really necessary?195 I do not ask if it is
necessary, but if it was necessary! A commander without officers and
soldiers-there are those who would gladly welcome that! I will not be the
commander without soldiers; I will remain your Fuhrer.
For me, you are the political
officers of the German nation, bound to me for better or worse, just as I am
bound to you for better or worse. Not one man alone conquered Germany; all
united conquered Germany. One man won you over, and you have won over the
German Volk!
We who were able to witness
the reinstatement of our peerless Army this year to our most proud good
fortune, all of us know that its ultimate and greatest strength lies in the
Volk which supports it. For no one is in need of idealism more than the
soldier. If ever the hour, that difficult, decisive hour of renunciation,
should come upon him, what can but help him then? Only the word faith,
idealism. Do not be deluded! All other half-measures are insignificant compared
to the power of this destiny, this inner voice.
Hence we are particularly
pleased today to have in our midst for the first time the representatives and
the representation of our new German Volksheer, the Army from which
nearly all of us without exception once came forth and to which the German Volk
will once again give its sons in the future, handing them over in trust in the
hope that they may once again become brave, disciplined, reliable, and
self-assured men. We know that our Army is not educating them in warlike
militarism any more than we have ever done. It is only educating them to be
reliable, decent Volksgenossen who feel faithfully bound to the nation in the
hour of need and danger, and if ever Fate were to subject them to the most
difficult test of all, they would defend the freedom of their people bravely
and decently. That is the reason behind recreating our Army.
It was not created to wage
offensive wars, but to protect and to defend our Volk so that Germany may not
be made to suffer yet again the sorry fate we were made to bear in the fifteen
years behind us. Not in order to deprive other peoples of their freedom, but to
protect our German freedom-that is the Army’s purpose. But it will come all the
more naturally for this Army to accomplish its difficult offices the healthier
the young German man is whom it receives from us.
And that is our task, too, to
educate the German man to be politically clean and pure so that he may truly
become a powerful member of our Volksgemeinschaft and assimilate for himself as
well a taste of this pure, great idealism which reigned during the age of the
struggle for German freedom. For as long as this idealism is alive in Germany,
Germany shall never die!
Address to the German women
Nuremberg, September 13, 1935
Today women’s battalions were being formed in
Marxist countries, and to that one could only reply, “That will never happen
here! There are things a man does, and he alone is responsible for them. I
would be ashamed to be a German man if ever, in the event of war, but a single
woman were made to go to the front.” The woman had her own battlefield. With
every child to which she gave birth for the nation, she was waging her battle
for the nation. The man stands up for the Volk just as woman stands up for the family.
A woman’s equal rights lie in the fact that she is treated with the high regard
she deserves in those areas of life assigned to her by nature.
Women still respected brave,
daring and determined men, and men had always admired and been attracted to feminine
women. These were the two opposites which attracted each other in life.
And if good fortune would have
it that these two people find each other, then the question of equal rights
became superfluous, for it had already been answered by nature: it was no
longer equal rights, but a single unity! Man and woman represented two
intrinsically separate natures. In men, reason was dominant. But more stable
than this was the emotion evidenced in women.
When I returned from prison
after thirteen months of imprisonment, when the Party had been shattered, it
was above all female party comrades who had held the Movement together. They
did not succumb to clever or reasonoriented deliberation, but acted according
to their hearts, and they have stood by me emotionally until today.
If our opponents were to
allege, “You want to degrade women by assigning to them no other task beyond
providing children,” he would reply that it is not a degradation to a woman to
become a mother, but the contrary-it is her utmost elevation.
There was, the Fuhrer
continued, no greater nobility for a woman than to be the mother of sons and
daughters of a Volk. All the members of our youth lining the streets, so strong
and beautiful, these beaming faces, these shining eyes-where would they be had
not woman after woman been willing to give them the gift of life? The last
immortality here on earth lay in preserving the Volk and the Volkstum.
People should not be able to
accuse us that we have no understanding of the dignity of women. Quite the
opposite! We have been in power now for three years, but I believe that when we
have had a National Socialist government for thirty, forty, or fifty years,
women’s position will have become quite different from what it was in the
past-a position which cannot be gauged politically but only appreciated in
human terms. We are happy knowing that the German woman, with her instinctive
insight, will understand this.
There was a time when
liberalism was fighting for ‘equal rights’ for women, but the faces of German
women and German girls were devoid of hope, bleak and sad. And today? Today we
see countless beaming, laughing faces. And here again it is woman’s instinct
which tells her for good reason: we can laugh once again, for the future of the
Volk is guaranteed.
The compensation which
National Socialism gives woman in exchange for her work lies in that it is once
again training men, real men, men who are decent, who stand erect, who are
brave, who love honor. I believe that when, in the past few days, our healthy,
unspoilt women have watched the marching columns, these sturdy and faultless
young men of the spade, they must have been saying to themselves: what a
healthy, marvelous race is growing up here! That is also an achievement which
National Socialism has wrought for the German woman in the scope of its
attitude toward women in general.
We have now reintroduced
general conscription, because it is a wonderful education we wish to confer
upon the upcoming young German generation, a wonderful breed which we are
rearing in the Hitler Youth, the SA, and the Labor Service. I believe that the
German Volk will not grow older during the next few years, but will create the
impression that it remains forever young.
“This all applies to our
girls, too. They too are growing up in a different world, with different ideas,
and they, too, will become healthier than before. Thus the two columns march
along their respective paths and will sooner or later encounter one another.”
Thus I believe that it is a
marvelous thing after all to live in such an age and to lend a helping hand at
one point or another. When I am one day forced to finish this life, my final
conviction will be: it was not in vain. It was good, because it was a life of
fighting, a life of struggle; because it was a life of work towards an ideal
which often seemed so distant and which many a man believed would never be
attained. We have reached our goal! That applies to all of you who are fighting
with us here. No German generation will be happier in the end than ours. We
have experienced infinite hardships. And the fact that we have succeeded in
overcoming them and that we will succeed ever better in overcoming them-that is
such a wonderful thing that all of us, men and women alike, can be proud and
happy and will also be proud and happy one day. The time will come when you
will all think back with proud joy on these years of struggling and fighting
for this new Germany. Then it will be your most treasured memory that, as
German women, you helped wage the battle for our German Volk in this great age
of the German renascence and uprising.
Speech before 54,000 members of the Hitler Youth
in the Nuremberg stadium
September 14, 1935
German Youth!
You are now lining up for this roll call for the
third time; more than 54,000 representatives of a community which grows from
year to year. The weight of those you personify here each year has become
consistently greater. Not only in terms of quantity, oh no; we can see it: in
terms of quality. If I think back on the first roll call and on the second and
compare them to this one today, I can see the same development we see evidenced
throughout the rest of German Volksleben: our Volk is becoming
increasingly disciplined, sturdier, more taut- and youth is beginning to as
well. The ideal of the man has been subjected to different views in our Volk as
well. There were times-they seem to be long ago and are almost incomprehensible
to us-when the ideal of the young German man was, to use the jargon, a
beer-drinking, hard-living fellow.
Today we are happy to note
that the ideal is no longer the beer-drinking and hardliving young man, but the
tough young man, impervious to wind and weather. For the main thing is not how
many glasses of beer he can drink, but how many blows he can withstand; not how
long he can make the rounds night after night, but how many kilometers he can
march.
Today the beer-happy bourgeois
(Bierspiesser) of those times is no longer regarded as the ideal of the
German Volk, but men and girls who are fit as a fiddle, who are string taut.
What we want from our German youth is different from what the past wanted of
it. In our eyes, the German youth of the future must be slender and supple,
swift as greyhounds, tough as leather, and hard as Krupp steel. We must
cultivate a new man in order to prevent the ruin of our Volk by the
degeneration manifested in our age.
Speech before the SA
and the SS
(Short
excerptions)
Nürnberg, September 15, 1934
Men of the SA and SS!
[…]
Today you present a different picture. I see how
much has been learned within a year’s time and what has changed in favor of the
Movement. However, even though this external picture has altered, it nonetheless
constitutes proof that the spirit of the old-and by that I mean our best-times
has remained, times in which the SA man and SS man never asked where the march
was headed but stood ever by the flag.
And it is good that your
exterior also makes manifest the changing times we are so lucky to witness. For
Germany has once again undergone a great historic transition in these past
years, and you yourselves, my men of the SA, will notice it visibly and clearly
in but a few months. For the first time, many thousands shall report to you for
duty: the discharged soldiers of the first round of conscripts in the new
German Army.
And just as we once came here,
now year after year the German Volk, drilled in protecting the nation, will
flock to us and the men will be given the best German home in your ranks.
What was once a two-year
temporary schooling of the nation which was afterward lost in the course of
life and in the political doings of the parties-that is now being given in
trust and held in custody for the German Volk. Only then will the cycle of our
Volk’s education be complete. The boys-they will become members of the Jungvolk,
and the Pimpfs will join the Hitler Youth, and the young men of the
Hitler Youth will then report for duty in the SA, the SS, and the other
associations; and the SA men and the SS men will one day report for duty at the
Labor Service and from there proceed to the Army; and the soldier of the Volk
will return once more to the organization of the Movement, of the Party, to the
SA and the SS, and never again shall our Volk degenerate as it once regrettably
did!
Speech for the “Wehrmacht Day”
Nuremberg, Zeppelin Field, September 16, 1935
Soldiers of the new German Wehrmacht!
For the second time, units of the Army and the
Navy have assembled at this spot; for the first time in the position of a free
armed force (Wehrfreibeit). Now you have been joined by the new units of
our German Wehrmacht which can now be shown to the German Volk in this, their
new context.
The German was always a good
soldier. For our Volk the service of arms was never an enforced service, but a
service of the highest honor in every period of our history. It was thus all
the more painful and dispiriting for the honorloving, decent German man not to
be allowed to be a soldier-or if so, under dishonorable and humiliating
circumstances. How successfully this situation has now been mastered is
something evidenced to you, my soldiers, and today to the entire German Volk,
in this display of the union between the German man as soldier and the weapons
of modern technology. Now every young German man, should he be found worthy by
the nation, will join your ranks. And you will now once again perform your
service with arms which are in use today throughout the world.
This service requires of each
and every one of you certain sacrifices. Each of you must make a sacrifice in
terms of personal freedom; he must exhibit obedience and subordination, but
also toughness, endurance and, above all, an utmost sense of duty.
Those who believe this
sacrifice must be wrung out of the German man are mistaken! Throughout the
centuries, German men have done this voluntarily, and they were proud of their
accomplishments. And not only in peacetime did the German man joyfully make
this sacrifice to the nation as soldier; he did so no less when the crisis of
the Reich called upon him to protect Volk und Vaterland. The German was
not only a good soldier in peacetime, but a brave fighter at all times.
But what are all the
sacrifices required of you and of us today compared to the sacrifices required
of millions of us and our comrades twenty years ago? May each of you, should he
ever perceive the duty of the soldier a burden, recall that eight days of
drumfire required more in terms of sacrifice from the battalions and regiments
of our Old Army than the service of peace during an entire year. The German
Volk in arms was not brought to its knees by this. It was brought to its knees
only because it lost its inner freedom, its inner belief in its rights. This
faith has returned today, and this faith, my soldiers, belongs not only to
hundreds of thousands, but to millions of you; and millions of our
Volksgenossen embrace you with this burning faith, with this burning confidence
and with this warm love.
And if you are personally required
to make the sacrifices of obedience, of performing your duty, of subordination,
of being tough, enduring, and efficient, do not forget, my soldiers, that the
entire German Volk makes great sacrifices for you, too. It is a difficult task
for the German Volk to build what is standing here and in countless other
places in Germany. Our Volk must make difficult sacrifices, and it does so
gladly. For first of all, it does not want to see its sons badly equipped and
secondly, it no longer wants to see Germany defenseless.
So we continue to make these
sacrifices mutually-the Volk for you, and you for the Volk! Both for Germany,
our Volk, and our precious German Reich! And we are also making these
sacrifices with the conviction that it does not require a war to reward us for
doing so.
Once Germany had a proud and
brave army; it had heroic fighters. That is natural for the German soldier.
But the army was not only the
nation’s great defense in wartime; in peacetime it was also the splendid school
of our Volk. It made men of us all, and the sight of it has always bolstered in
us the faith in the future of our Volk.
And this splendid Old Army is
not dead; it was only sleeping and has now been resurrected in you! You, my
comrades, bear at the points of your weapons and on your helmets a tremendous
legacy. You are not something artificially created, something void of tradition
and a past; rather, whatever else Germany may have to offer pales compared to
what you must and can personify in terms of tradition. There is indeed no need
for you to win for the German army any title to fame; it already has that, you
need only preserve it! And as we stand here armed in steel and bronze, it is
not because we feel it is necessary to repair the honor of the German Volk. As
long as this honor was borne by the soldier, no one in the world has ever been
able to rob us of it! Germany has never lost its military honor, least of all
in the last war. Thus we need not recover this honor. But we will see to it in
the future that not as much honor, not as much heroic courage, and not as many
sacrifices are in vain as has been the case in the past.
This army of old-of which you
are a continuation and whose representative and bearer of tradition you must
be-offered the greatest sacrifices on the altar of the Vaterland ever required
of an army from its Volk.
Demonstrate that you are
worthy and deserving of these sacrifices! See to it that the nation can depend
on you just as it could once depend on our splendid old military, on our Old
Army and Wehrmacht. See to it that the trust of the nation can be placed in you
just as it was once placed in the army, for you wear helmets from its most
glorious age. Then the German Volk will love you; it will see in you the best
part of the German Volk, just as it sends its best sons into this unique
organization year after year. This Volk will then believe in its army and
gladly and joyfully make any sacrifice out of the conviction that, in doing so,
it is preserving the peace of the nation and securing the education of the
German Volk.
For you have become men, and
we want the whole of German youth to attend this splendid, final school and
likewise become the men you are. We want to raise a tough breed which is
strong, reliable, loyal, obedient, and decent, so that we need not be ashamed
of our Volk before history.
That is what the nation
requests, what the nation hopes for and demands of you! And I know you will
fulfill this demand and this hope and this request, for you are the new
soldiers of the new German Reich!
Closing speech at the NSDAP congress in
Nuremberg
September 16, 1935
When I will breathe my last breath is something I
do not know. But that the Party will live on is something I do know, and that
it will successfully shape the future of the German nation beyond any
individuals, whether they be weak or strong, is something I believe and
something I know! For it guarantees the stability of the leadership of the Volk
and the Reich, and by its own stability it guarantees the authority this
leadership requires. The constitution of the new German Reich will grow out of
this solid base. It is the duty of the Party as weltanschaulicb shaper
and political navigator of German fate to provide the nation and thus the Reich
with its Fuhrer. The more naturally and uncontestedly this principle is
established and maintained, the stronger Germany will be.
The army as the representative
of and organization for the defensive strength of our Volk must always preserve
and maintain the organized military strength of the Reich entrusted to it and
place same in loyalty and obedience at the disposal of the Fuhrer given to the
nation by the Movement. For when the respective new Fuhrer is appointed, he
shall be Herr of the Party, Head of the Reich, and Supreme Commander of
the Wehrmacht. If these principles form the unshakeable foundation of the
German structures of Volk and State, Germany will be able to withstand any
storms which may come its way.
But let the two fundamental
manifestations of the new Reich both bear in mind that they can only satisfy
the demands placed upon them jointly. The Party gives to the Volk the Army, and
the Volk gives to the Army its soldiers; both together thus provide to the
German Reich the security of internal peace and order and the power to stand up
for itself. Today, as Fuhrer of the Reich and the nation, I can still personally
offer help and advice. But these principles must lead from the personal to the
eternal.
Fuhrers will come and Fuhrers
will die, but Germany must live on. And alone this Movement will lead Germany
to this life. All of us, though, will one day be judged by the quality and
historic permanency of what we are building today! We, my Party comrades,
co-leaders of the Volk and the Army, have been chosen by Fate to make history
in the loftiest sense of the word. What millions of people are deprived of has
been given to us by Providence. Even most distant posterity will be reminded of
us by our work. And it should one day find most noteworthy and distinguished of
all the fact that, in an age marked by lack of loyalty and rampant betrayal, it
was possible in the Germany of our age to form as never before a mutual league
of the most loyal followers. And we know one thing: One day, a page in world
history will be devoted to us, the men from the National Socialist Party and
the German Army who joined efforts to build and safeguard the new German Reich.
One day we will stand then side by side, immortalized in the pantheon of
history, immortalized in indivisible loyalty as in the time of the great
struggle and the great fulfillment.
No comments:
Post a Comment