Reichsminister Dr. Goebbels’ 1939 Speech on Adolf Hitler’s
50th Birthday
The source: Die Zeit Ohne Beispiel (Munich:
Zentralverlag der NSDAP, 1941).
In an unsettled and confused world, Germany tomorrow
celebrates a national holiday in the truest sense of the word. It is a holiday
for the entire nation. The German people celebrate the day entirely as a matter
of the heart, not of the understanding.
Tomorrow
the Führer finishes his fiftieth year. The entire German nation takes pride in
this day, a pride in which those peoples who are friendly with us also take
deep and hearty part. Even those who are neutral or oppose us cannot ignore the
strong impact of events. Adolf Hitler’s name is a political program for the
entire world. He is almost a legend. His name is a dividing line. No one on
earth can remain indifferent to his name. For some, he represents hope, faith,
and the future, for others he is an exemplar of confused hatred, base lies, and
cowardly slander.
The
highest that a person can achieve is to give his name to an historical era, to
stamp his personality indelibly on his age. Certainly the Führer has done that.
One cannot imagine today’s world without him.
Treitschke
once said that men make history. If this is true, when more so than in our era?
He has shown his simplicity and depth in the most wonderful way. Adolf Hitler
has influenced not only the historical development of his country, but one can
say without fear of exaggeration that he has given all of European history a
new direction, that he is the towering guarantee of a new order for Europe.
Our
part of the world looks vastly different today that it would without him, not
to mention his impact on our own people and nation. He has given the German
nation an entirely new face through revolutionary internal transformations.
Someone
who saw Germany for the last time in 1918 would scarcely recognize it today.
The people and nation are entirely different. What seemed like a miracle only a
short while ago is self-evident today.
About
a year ago the Führer solved the problem of joining Austria to the Reich. The
whole people celebrated his 49th birthday then. 7 1/2 million Germans had
returned to the Reich. A Central European problem one almost believed to be
unsolvable was miraculously solved.
On
the eve of his 50th birthday, we can happily see that once again the map of
Europe has changed in the Reich’s favor, and — unique in world history — this
change has occurred without bloodshed. It came as the result of a clear desire
to establish peace in an area of Europe in which the contradictions were so
severe that there was danger that they sooner or later would cause a general
European conflagration.
This
new peace in the threatened areas is not a peace of tired, moralistic theories
that are endangered as often as the false bourgeois democrats praise them. It
is much more a peace that is built on practical realities
Such
a peace could be built only on the foundations of a higher, instinctive
understanding growing from the knowledge that only strength gives a people the
opportunity to finally resolve problems.
Successful
policies require both imagination and reality. Imagination as such is
constructive. It alone provides the strength for powerful, flexible historical
conceptions. Realism on the other hands brings the ideas of political fantasy
in agreement with hard reality.
The
Führer possesses both characteristics in a unique harmony seldom seen in
history. Imagination and reality join in him to determine the goals and methods
of political policy. His contemporaries are constantly astonished and amazed by
seeing how he brilliantly brings goals and methods together to influence
history. He has no stubborn ideas, no tired tactical doctrines, to dim his
vision and reduce his political imagination. His inflexible principles are
joined with changing and flexible political methods that have lead to the
greatest and most unexpected successes for Germany.
That
is nothing new for us old National Socialists. We learned to admire the
Führer’s political abilities in the earliest phases of our party’s hard
struggle for power in the Reich. They were demonstrated in many small and
apparently unimportant ways at the time, though they were then for us and the
movement as important as the goals and problems of today.
Then
too there were doubters who failed to see the greatness and brilliance of the
Führer’s decisions during the struggle for power. They favored the false wisdom
that Clausewitz discussed: they wanted nothing but to escape danger. We are
therefore not surprised or anxious to see the same or similar happenings in
internal German politics that we earlier saw in the National Socialist
movement.
The
only thing that has changed over the years is the scale of the Führer’s
actions; his methods and goals have remained the same. Back then we saw in him
the political instincts of a truly historic genius, able to understand problems
and find the simplest and clearest solution to them from his own greatness and
certainty. That is why we were then his most loyal and obedient servants of
this man and his work, entirely aside from the human element.
So
what we see today is nothing new for us old National Socialists. We therefore
have no doubt of the outcome of Germany’s current battle for its national
existence. Our whole people has the same instinctive feelings, which are the
cause of the blind and unshakable confidence it places in the Führer.
The
man in the street is usually not in a position to understand the entire
political situation. He lacks the practice, the experience and above all the
background necessary to form a clear and certain judgment. It is therefore
entirely understandable why he dislikes theories and programs, and prefers to
place his firm and confident faith in a personality.
A
nation inclines to doctrines only when it is poor in personalities. But when a
man of historic greatness stands at its head, one who not only wants to lead
but is able to do so, the people will follow him with its whole heart, giving
him its willing and obedient allegiance. Even more, it will put all of its love
and their blind confidence behind him and his work.
A
nation is willing to sacrifice when it knows what it is sacrificing for and why
it is necessary. That is true in Germany today. None of the numerous slogans
that the broad masses of our people heard in the years after 1918 has had such
powerful effect on the entire nation as the phrase “One People, one Reich, one
Führer!”
The
first two phrases were heard for the first time in 1937 at a singing festival
in Breslau. The Führer stood high on the platform against the gathering
darkness. Hundreds of thousands of people had gathered from every corner of the
nation and from everywhere in Europe where Germans dwell to hear him speak.
Suddenly, from the corner of this army of hundreds of thousands where the
Austrians stood came the call “One people, one Reich.” It gripped and
fascinated the whole crowd, and for the first time gave concise but clear
expression to a program.
A
year later we saw the Führer on a hot Sunday afternoon standing on the platform
at the Schloßplatz in Breslau once again. German gymnasts performed before him.
As the racial comrades from the Sudetenland passed before him, without command
or order, they suddenly formed a wall before him. These people who had come
from the Sudetenland to Breslau only to see his face, refused to move. Weeping
women seized his hand. One could not understand what they were trying to say,
since tears drowned their voices.
Once
again, it was only a few months before the problem they had brought to the
Führer was solved.
The
Greater German Reich, in the truest sense of the word, has now become a
reality. Even more, the Führer has given his peace to Central Europe. It is
clear that this is not to the pleasure of those democratic enviers of the
National Socialist Reich. Through the Treaty of Versailles they had build a
ring of trouble spots around Germany that they could use to keep the Reich in
constant difficulties.
A
man has come from the broad masses of the German people who removed these
trouble spots with the firmest measures. Democracy sees its hopes vanishing.
That explains their rage and moralistic disappointments. Their hypocritical
prayers came too late. The enemies of the Reich are at the end of their rope. They
look ridiculous, and cannot understand why.
We
greet their hysterical cries with sovereign contempt, a sovereign contempt
shared by the entire German people. The German people know that the Führer has
restored it to its rightful position in the world. The Reich stands in the
shadow of the German sword. Germany’s economy, culture and popular life are
blooming under a security guaranteed by the army. The nation, once sunk into
impotence, has risen to new greatness.
We
remember all of this as we begin to celebrate the 50th birthday of the man whom
we thank for our nation’s might and our people’s greatness. No German at home
or anywhere else in the world can fail to take the deepest and heartiest
pleasure in participation. It is a holiday of the nation, and we want to
celebrate it as such.
A
people fighting for its fate must now and again stop in the midst of the tumult
of events to remind itself of its situation, methods and goals. Today is such a
time. The nation puts on its best clothing and stands before its Führer united
in loyalty and brotherhood, to bring him their heartiest best wishes on his
50th birthday. These are the wishes of all Germans in the Reich, as well as
those in every other nation and continent. Germans throughout the world join
with us who have the good fortune to live in the Reich in these warm and
thankful wishes. To this choir of a hundred million are joined the voices of
all those peoples want true peace and order in Europe, who love its history and
its culture.
As
we begin to celebrate the Führer’s 50th birthday in this festive hour as a
great national community, we join in a fervent prayer to Almighty God that he
graciously preserve in the future his life and work. May he grant the German
people’s deepest wish and keep the Führer in health and strength for many more
years and decades. Then we will not need to fear for the future of the Reich.
The fate of the German nation rests in a strong and sure hand.
We,
the Führer’s oldest followers and fellow fighters join together at this festive
hour with the hearty wish that we have always had on the birthday of this man:
May he remain for us what he is and always was:
Our
Hitler!
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