Adolf Hitler (20.04.1889 – ∞)
Carl R. - Adolf Hitler
Karl Mahr - Der Führer (1942)
Adolf Hitler - Portrait by Max Bruening
Adolf Hitler - Portrait by Unknown Artist
Adolf Hitler - Portrait by Unknown Artist
Adolf Hitler - Portrait by Unknown Artist
Adolf Hitler - Portrait by Max Brüning
Conrad Hommel - Portrait of Adolf Hitler in Profile, 1941
Ludwig Johst - Adolf Hitler
Portrait of Adolf Hitler - by Friedrich Harnisch
1. Germany.
Signing of the Japanese-German Economic Agreement in Berlin on 20 January 1943.
– The signing ceremony.
– Ribbentrop and the Japanese Ambassador Oshima sign the document.
– Germany, Berlin. On 30 January, Reich Marshal Hermann Göring delivers a speech at the Ministry of Aviation before representatives of the air force, navy and army.
– Göring’s speech, as recounted by the announcer, on the continued struggle of the German people and their Wehrmacht as the guarantor of Europe’s existence.
– The audience.
– Close-up of ace pilot Adolf Galland.
Berlin.
– Ceremony at the Reich Chancellery to mark the tenth anniversary of Hitler’s rise to power.
– Speech by Reichsleiter Dr Robert Ley, calling on Germans to mobilise their efforts to bring victory closer.
– Albert Speer, head of the German Labour Front, and Dr Ley present awards to the most distinguished workers on the home front.
The Berlin Sports Palace, the traditional gathering place for Berlin’s National Socialists.
– Reich Minister Dr. Joseph Goebbels addresses the entire German people.
– A delegation from the Italian Fascist Party, led by Council Member Tardini and the Italian Ambassador to Berlin, Dino Alfieri, makes its way through the hall.
– Dr. Goebbels’ speech as narrated by the announcer.
– In his opening remarks, Goebbels says: “We have boundless confidence in our soldiers.
– There is no one among us who lacks the fanatical desire to make a worthy contribution to the struggle through their labour and their faith in victory.”
– In conclusion, the Reich Minister reads out the Führer’s proclamation, in which he states that the German Wehrmacht is destined to defend the whole of Europe. ‘What would have become of the entire German people and of the whole of Europe if, at the last minute, the Wehrmacht had not deployed its forces against the threat from Asia?’
– On the podium: Speer, Himmler, Rosenberg, Ley and others.
– The audience.
– At the end of the meeting, Goebbels calls on the entire nation to unite under the traditional slogan of the National Socialists: ‘The Führer commands – we obey’.
– Shouts of approval fill the hall; everyone raises their arms in the Nazi salute.
2. The Atlantic.
A German submarine is underway.
– The patrol has been going on for over two months; all torpedoes have been used up.
– Another submarine comes to the rescue.
– Signals are sent from the bridge indicating readiness to transfer the torpedoes.
– The commander moves over to it; the process of transferring the torpedoes needs to be discussed in detail.
– The torpedo is lowered into the water; the propeller and warhead are wrapped in life jackets to protect them from possible damage.
– The seven-metre colossus is carefully transferred onto the boat.
– The boat sinks 3 metres; the torpedo is to be secured on the upper deck.
– The torpedo is positioned between the net breakwaters.
– The commander gives the signal, the boat surfaces, and the torpedo is mounted on the guide rail.
– The boat continues on its way.
– An alarm sounds on the boat; the crew take their stations.
– A neutral Swedish fishing vessel is visible through the periscope; they let it pass.
– An American yacht has come into view; in these waters, small vessels of this kind are required to broadcast their position to alert German submarines.
– The sailing vessel will be sunk; the crew is abandoning ship.
The Atlantic.
– A Swedish trawler is visible through the periscope.
– The submarine lets it pass.
– The submarine continues on its way.
– An American yacht in the ocean; the crew abandons ship.
– The submarine fires on it with its guns; the yacht sinks.
3. North Africa.
Tunisia.
– Vehicles head for the front, passing the remains of ancient structures, the ruins of an aqueduct from the time of Carthage.
– A sapper stops a vehicle, warning of mines, and places a sign.
– At the front line of the German forces.
– German officers at a meeting.
– On the right is Knight’s Cross recipient Lieutenant Colonel Walter Koch, one of the heroes of Eben-Emael.
– Arabs carry boxes of ammunition for the German units.
– A breather: the Germans eat local mutton stew, try local oranges from a crate, and get their hair cut.
– Soldiers do their laundry and read newspapers.
– Germans in the trenches.
– An observer climbs up a windmill.
– Camouflaged machine-gun nests; soldiers peer out from their shelters.
– A gun crew at their gun.
– The start of a firefight.
– German soldiers advancing.
– Officers studying a map.
– American prisoners.
– German soldiers on the front line.
– Damaged American tanks.
– A German soldier with a captured machete.
– German fighter planes take off on a combat alert.
– Enemy aircraft attack the German runway; bomb explosions are visible.
– Anti-aircraft gunners lay down covering fire.
– A downed aircraft burns out on the ground.
– Fighter planes return from a successful sortie.
– Captain Kurt Ubbens, a Knight’s Cross recipient with Oak Leaves, steps out of the cockpit; to date, he has shot down 101 enemy aircraft.
– Another pilot, Major Joachim Müncheberg, recipient of the Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves and Swords, shot down four British aircraft during this flight.
– Field Marshal Albert Kesselring talks to the pilots.
– Pilot Captain Heinz Bär tells his comrades about the flight.
– The wreckage of smoking British aircraft lies scattered across the desert.
– The northern sector of the Eastern Front, Northern Karelia.
– A German horse-drawn convoy on sledges travels through the snow.
– Snow-clearing vehicles clear the road.
– Soldiers clear the snow with shovels.
– Motorised columns move through the forest in deep snow.
– A German detachment disembarks from lorries and continues on foot.
– Soldiers on the march.
– Arrival at the front-line positions.
– Soldiers at dugouts.
– Infantry General Karl Weisenberger awards Lieutenant von Ainem the Knight’s Cross for his excellent work as an artillery observer and then inspects the ranks of soldiers with him.
4. USSR. Fighting near Leningrad.
– Delivery of food and ammunition by sledge and lorry.
– Unloading a train carrying ammunition.
– German heavy artillery shelling the Lake Ladoga area.
Central sector of the front, map.
– Colonel-General Walter Model, recipient of the Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves, at his post, talking to soldiers.
– Due to frequent changes in positions, signalmen have to carry out a particularly difficult task.
– They are laying a cable secured to special poles, which will be used to establish communication between the command posts of individual units.
– Signalmen in a trench; communication established.
– A raid by Soviet aircraft.
– Bombs explode in the immediate vicinity of the German trenches.
– Alarm.
– German artillery, mortars and machine guns fire on Soviet tanks.
– A German infantry counter-attack; Germans in camouflage uniforms are running.
– The battlefield after the attack.
– Destroyed Soviet equipment.
– German soldiers taking a smoke break.
– The skirmish continues.
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By His War Comrade Balthasar Brandmayer
Translated from the rare German original, Meldegänger Adolf Hitler: 1914-1918, published in 1931. It was written by one of Adolf Hitler’s closest war comrades, Balthasar Brandmayer, who served in the same courier squad from 1915 to 1918. This first-hand account by a man who fought at Adolf Hitler’s side on the bloody western front – published before Hitler came to power – is certainly of historic interest to any student of the most influential man of the twentieth century or, for that matter, of the First World War.
Source: SS Leitheft, No. 7. 1943
The idea of the nationalist state must be defeated
As clear as the struggle for the defence of our homeland against the onslaught from the East is, so clear are the outlines of a new organisation of Europe, outlines that no longer follow the borders assigned to them by a nationalist conception. What calls millions of men to arms in Europe today is not only the struggle for raw materials and living space, but also the will for a radical reorganisation of this continent for which it is worth living and dying. The fact that thousands of Norwegians, Dutchmen, Flemings and Walloons are fighting on the Eastern Front in the ranks of the Waffen SS can only be seen as a symptom of an awakening of energy among the Germanic peoples, who, beyond the boundaries of the political order in which they have lived up to now, are seeking the path to a new future. There can be no doubt that our vision of what Europe will be one day when this harsh and relentless struggle is over already takes us far beyond the limits of the old nationalistic conception. No thinking mind in Europe believes that at the end of this bitter struggle, as fate will decide for ever, the restoration of the old political order can take place. Just as the sacrifices of the present war legitimize, at its conclusion, the creation of an order which corresponds to the breadth and depth of the National Socialist revolution accomplished in the heart of the continent. This new order can only be established on the basis of the idea of race. The Dutch, the Flemings, the Walloons, the Scandinavians, who today are fighting alongside us in the ranks of the Waffen SS, are not only defending their homes against the Asian wave, they are also the pioneers of a reorganisation of Europe on the foundations of the Germanic idea. In this way, a process similar to that which led to the creation of Bismarck’s Reich seventy years ago is taking place on the European territory.
A young Danish volunteer with the face of a child.
Heinrich Himmler visits his SS on the Eastern Front in 1941.
The SS unites many European nationalities under its runic emblem.
At that time, the German principalities, under the influence of the nationalist principle, joined together to form an Empire. The National Socialist revolution has absorbed the nationalist idea and replaced it with the idea of race. Therefore, at the end of this war, a new European order must be established on the basis of Germanic solidarity. The nationalist idea flourished in Bismarck’s Reich. At the moment when the innumerable waves of Asia are attacking the borders of Europe, the continent is turning back to that great historical construction which it had already built centuries earlier on the basis of Germanness. We have reached a point in evolution where the concept of race begins to become a historical and political reality. The people and the nation appear more and more as particular expressions of this concept. The revolution in political thought which first took place within our Empire soon extended its effects beyond the borders of the old Reich. It can no longer be contained; it is sweeping away the old errors of the old liberal doctrine with the same unyielding rigour with which it is tearing down the small artificial states created by the English policy of balance. The test of the war against the Asiatic enemy no longer permits the survival of the system of States which was born at Versailles. And now we find ourselves in the hour of struggle and danger before a new European organisation; we are witnessing the birth of a racial Empire.
This is the aim of our struggle. All those are called who are influenced in their attitude by the same blood. The German feels, of course, that he is the heart of this Empire which must embrace the whole area of our race. But he must not regard this Empire as an extension of the nationalist idea. The German nationalist idea acquired a new dimension in 1938. Our opponents want to persuade the peoples of Europe of the idea that everything that followed was only the consequence of German imperialism. Here too they have failed to understand the National Socialist revolution. It could not lead to imperialism but must, according to its principles, integrate the national state of the Germans into a vast Germanic Empire. All attempts to define in legal-political terms the future relationship of the Germanic states to the Empire can only fail because existing concepts such as federation, federal system, federalism belong to the realm of the past and miss the revolution in our thinking brought about by the concept of race. The German revolution is becoming a Germanic revolution. On the battlefields of the most terrible war that has ever been waged against a hostile world trying to smother the germ of a new vital order accomplished by the German revolution, there is a powerful appeal to the Germanic peoples to form a Germanic Empire of their own.
The Eternal Empire
The idea of a Nordic Empire is not a product of our time. It accompanies our entire historical existence as the image of an ordered world which invites the man of our race, on the strength of his creative artistic power, his inventive gifts, and his ability to found a cohesive organic system on the model of the Empire. The proud centuries of the history of the German
Empire are still close enough to us to remind us that all states owe their foundation to the energy of Nordic leaders: the state of the Cheruscan Armin, of the Battalion Civilis, of Marbod, that of the Burgundians, of the Vandals, of Theodoric and Charlemagne, the creator of the Germanic West, the state of the Varegues which extended from the Baltic to the Black Sea, that of the Vikings and that of the Normans. The history of these Germanic peoples is our own history. We can experience today that in the ranks of the Waffen SS there are prominent representatives of the Germanic ethnic group who for centuries have waged a difficult and united struggle against the forces of the foreigner and who speak of the Empire as an idea which they have defended with arms and safeguarded. This is proof that the historical structures of the past still have an active influence and that the idea of empire outside the German state has been kept alive. It is now a matter of revising this historical image which hostile propaganda and false schooling have aroused in the Germanic populations of the West and the North and of re-establishing historical relationships such as those which conceded to the Dutch, Flemish, Walloons, and Scandinavians for centuries while they were members of the Reich, a civilised, free and flourishing life. We must think in terms of centuries. Enemy propaganda has profoundly changed the original face of these countries. The state organisations which the French Revolution and the English policy of equilibrium built up with such artifice and tenacity are condemned by the iron law of history. The political creations of the 19th century are now definitively collapsing. The idea of Empire, on the other hand, is being reborn, like the phoenix from its ashes; it is being reborn among all peoples of Germanic blood who no longer believe in the possibility of a political existence distinct from the Reich, if not directed against it. The idea of Empire is the strongest tradition on the continent and, therefore, the most decisive real force for a lasting historical order.
The Empire and Europe
We agree today that the political creations of the Germans in the past could only be ephemeral, for the energy of the race, a feeling of inexhaustible wealth, was diluted in a foreign ethnic group. The idea of the race makes it our duty in the future to preserve and concentrate our energy in the strictest possible way. The tragic division that dominated the Middle Ages Empire arose from its dispersal and from an often deficient or too narrow consciousness. This alone explains why the Europe of the time, already structured according to the Germanic principle, succumbed to the universalism of imperial Rome and Christianity, and why precious blood was shed for ideas that were at odds with its history and way of thinking; it is necessary to acknowledge the faults of the past if the future is to take shape.
It must therefore be made clear that a lasting order in Europe can only be established by the Empire. The destiny of Europe in the future will be as it was in the past, determined by the destiny of the Empire. Europe was a unit, the centre of human civilisation, as long as the Empire was great and powerful. At the time when it reached the height of its power, the kings of England and France considered themselves vassals of the German Empire. But Europe was disturbed and left to the aggression of powers outside its area, when the Empire broke up. We must remember that the name as well as the historical reality we imply in the word “Europe” is a creation of the Nordic race. That is why the Empire is also in the future the European heart and bridgehead, the magnetic centre that attracts and holds together the Germanic peoples. It is not our task to define the political structure that the future holds for the community of European peoples. The answer to the question raised by the situation of the Dutch, Walloons and Scandinavians in relation to the Empire can only be given at the end of the war and in the light of the Fiihrer’s decision. It will certainly result from an examination of the participation of these peoples in the struggle for the regeneration of this continent. It will by no means be formed on the basis of a fixed scheme, valid for all; nor will it proceed from the methods and vocabulary of liberal nationalist and legal theories. What will emerge will be a true community order, within which each one will have a place and a rank according to the results and sacrifices made for the whole and the specificity and particularities of its own being. The position of a particular Germanic people’s unit within this Empire will be determined in accordance with the political and spiritual energy which radiates from it. The ultimate decision will not be taken at a conference table, but on the battlefields where the Germanic peoples under German leadership are fighting for their future as equal members of the future Empire. The Waffen SS has been given the task by the Führer of cultivating the Germanic idea. It is its immediate duty to prepare the way for the new Reich, for which members of all Germanic peoples are fighting and dying in its ranks.
Any Empire that is divided weakens. So, no Empire disappears without internal division. The building of a house and the creation of an Empire require the same unity.
Paracelsus
