Speech given in Paris on 5 March 1944 at the Palais de Chaillot by SS-Sturmbannführer Leon Degrelle.
The health of the people
Unity there is made, and it is the only unity that will triumph. Europe is made not only because it is in danger, but because it has a soul. We are not only united by something negative, like saving our skin. What matters on earth is not so much to live as to live well. It is not to have dragged on fifty years of inactivity, it is, for one year, for eight days to have led a proud and triumphant life.
Intellectuals can develop their theories. They have to. These are innocent games, often games of decadence. How many French people take pleasure in these subtleties! How many French people believe that they have made the revolution when they have written a fine article on the revolution! Europe is the old country of intelligence, and the great laws of reason are indispensable to European harmony. But all the same, our century means something more than the awakening of the forces of intelligence alone. There have been so many intelligent people who were sterile beings. By awakening all the instinctive and rumbling forces of the human being, by recalling that there is a beauty of the body and a harmony, that one does not lead people with dwarfs, gringos and deformed beings, by reminding us that there is no action without joy, nor joy without health, racism, awakening those great forces that come from the depths of the world, brings back to the leadership of Europe a healthy and indomitable youth, a youth that loves, a youth that has an appetite. So, when we look at the world, it is no longer to analyse it... but to take it!
Germany will have done a priceless service to a decadent Europe by bringing it health. When we looked at pre-war Europe, when we went to the menageries that were the parliamentary assemblies, when we saw all those grinning faces, all those old, stultified gentlemen, their bellies falling out as if they had had too many pregnancies, their tired faces, their stained eyes, we wondered: “Is this our people? The French people still knew how to be witty, which was basically a form of sneer and revolt, but they no longer had this great innocent joy of strength, whereas Germany had this reservoir of limitless strength. What surprised you, men and women of France, when you saw them arrive in 1940? It was that they were beautiful as gods, with harmonious and supple bodies, that they were clean. You have never seen a young warrior, you don’t see him yet in Russia, with a democratic beard. All of this is clean, all of this has allure, race, mouth.
With racism, with this awakening of healthy strength, Germany restored health to her people first, and then to the whole of Europe. When we left for Russia, we were told: “Ah, you will suffer over there, you will be prematurely aged men”. When we came back from the front and looked at the others, we found them all to be old coils, while we felt in our veins a strength that nothing would stop.
People’s revolution
Everywhere in Europe the people were unhappy, everywhere happiness was monopolised by a few dozen anonymous monsters – material happiness locked up in bank vaults, spiritual happiness smothered by all forms of corruption. Europe was old because it was not happy; the people were no longer smiling because they no longer felt alive.
At this very moment, what else is going on? Whether you look at Paris or Brussels, you find the same humiliated people in the suburbs, with starvation wages, with leper supplies. You arrive on the boulevards and find these big indolent pashas, larded with beefsteak and thousand-dollar notes, and who say to you: "It’s practical, the war: before the war we were winning, during the war we are winning, after the war we will win. Oh, let them count in the end, they will win our machine-gun discharges, they will win the rope of the hangmen!
For what interests us most in the war is the revolution that will follow, it is to give back to these millions of working-class families the joy of living, it is that the millions of European workers should feel free, proud, respected beings, it is that throughout Europe capital should cease to be an instrument of domination of the peoples, to become an instrument in the service of the happiness of the peoples.
The war cannot end without the triumph of the socialist revolution, without the worker in the factories and the worker in the fields being saved by the revolutionary youth. It is the people who pay, it is the people who suffer. The great experience of the Russian front still proves this. The people have shown that they are capable of making their revolution without the intellectuals. In our ranks, eighty per cent of our volunteers are workers. They have shown that they have a clearer head and that they can see further than thousands of intellectuals who have nothing left but ink in their penholders, nothing left in their heads and above all nothing left in their hearts, intellectuals who claim to be the elite. That is all over.
The real elites are formed at the front, a chivalry is created at the front, young leaders are born at the front. The real elite of tomorrow is there, far from the gossip of the big cities, far from the hypocrisy and sterility of the masses who no longer understand. It is created during grandiose and tragic battles, like those of Cherkasy. It was a great joy for us to find ourselves there among young people from all corners of Europe. There were thousands of Germans from old Germany, men from the Baltic – and in particular the Narva Battalion with the Latvians – there were tall blond boys from the Scandinavian countries, the Danes, the Dutch, our brothers in arms the Flemings, Hungarians, Romanians. There were also a few Frenchmen, who represented you in this scrum, while so many of your compatriots were engaged in other sectors of the Eastern Front And there, between all of us, a complete fraternity was established, because everything has changed since the war. When we look at a slouching old bourgeois in our Fatherland, we do not consider that man to be of our race, but when we look at a young revolutionary from Germany, or from elsewhere, we consider him to be of our Fatherland, since we are with the youth and with the Revolution.
We are political soldiers, the SS badge shows Europe where the political truth is, where the social truth is, and, joining this political army of the Führer from everywhere, we are preparing the political frameworks of the post-war period. Tomorrow Europe will have elites such as it has never known before. An army of young apostles, of young mystical men, stirred up by a faith that nothing will stop, will one day emerge from this great seminary at the front. It is there too, Frenchmen, that we must be present
Every people must earn their place
In the national parties, there are now in France, men who have understood that it is necessary to work with the whole of Europe, who have understood above all that the revolutionary unity of Europe is the SS. The first, the SS, had the courage to go straight ahead, to hit hard and to want the real socialist revolution. For a year or two, at the front, we have seen France. And now inside, we see France: the France of the de Brinons, the Deats, the Doriots, the Darnands, and above all the France of the young. We see something other than little guys on the corner of bars, with a cigarette falling out and a Pernod ready to be swallowed. We see big, well-built boys, capable of making the revolution and then choosing a beautiful girl in France to give her vigorous children.
For years, you have had proportionally three times fewer children than the Russians, twice as few as the Germans. One wonders why in this country of love. Love cannot go without children! Aren't they the poetry and the resurrection of love?
This denatality was one of the symptoms of the general impotence of democratic peoples, impotence to think far ahead, impotence to be bold, impotence in the face of revolutionary fervour and impotence in the face of privations, in the face of suffering itself. You must be told, Frenchmen, that you have lost fifty years in a Europe of soldiers, which is fighting, which is showing its courage, which needs to be heroic, but which is preparing a social revolution and a moral foundation for each people. It is no longer possible for these hundreds of thousands of men to have died, borne by the most sublime virtues, only to return to the dunghill of mediocrity, baseness and spinelessness. The front has created not only forces of salvation on the military field, revolutionary forces which tomorrow will pass through everything, but it is preparing the revolution which is most necessary for Europe: the spiritual revolution. We need upright and pure men, who know that the highest joys of man are in the soul. We will no longer admit the mediocrity of souls, we will no longer admit that men live for sordid joys, for their egotism, in a narrow atmosphere. We want to elevate the people, to give them back their appetite, their grandeur. We want people to have the sovereign joy of rising above everyday life.
That is why, my dear comrades, we must be united. Europe, standing up against Communism, in defence of our civilisation, our spiritual heritage and our ancient cities, must be united, and each people must earn its place, not by adding up the past, but by giving the blood that washes and purifies. Europe must be united in order to carry out, under the sign of the SS, the National Socialist revolution, and to bring to souls, the revolution of souls.
You don’t beg for a right.
We fight for him.
Adolf Hitler
