30 January
1943
Introduction by a soldier: I open the rally of the NSDAP at the
Sportpalast in Berlin to celebrate the seizure of power by the Führer, tenth
year to the day.
Gauleiter (District leader Dr. Goebbels)
speaks to us.
(Shouts: Sieg Heil!)
Dr. Goebbels: My German compatriots, Party comrades,
Since the seizure of
power on 30 January, 1933 every year the Führer personally has spoken mainly
from the Sportpalast to the German people and has given to them the slogan for
the next year of struggle.
The Führer has
instructed me to inform you that it was his very warm desire to talk today to
the German nation.
He is as deeply sorry
as us to have to break the deeply felt tradition of the celebration of this
commemoration day this year desire but the hard necessities of the war
leadership does not permit him presently to abandon his headquarters from where
he leads the big defence battles in the East. He thus addresses the German
people in a proclamation instead of a speech. I will be reading out this
proclamation on behalf of the Führer in the course of my speech.
Allow me to give an
introduction with some explanations about the present situation.
It is not the first
time that I take the floor at this place before the German people in a
difficult moment of our national life. In the Sportpalast in Berlin we lived in
the last 15 years all the ups and downs of the German political and in war of
the military progress. The dangers that have threatened our nation in these
eventful one and a half decades were explained from this place before the
German people and the decisive decisions to its rectification were also
proclaimed. This room never saw a following that were discouraged or with no
hope. We have received many strikes in these 15 years from our enemies but we
have always responded to every strike with a counterstrike.
Who does not remember
the numerous occasions the Party or the National-Socialist state got involved
in a more or less important crisis, our enemies thinking that they were now
able to definitively triumph over us!
They have always
triumphed too early!
Enemy men and forces
that even today had completely faded from our memory whose names and
descriptions can barely be remembered have opposed us in these 15 years. The
time went by for them. Yet we have stayed.
We have coped with all kind of dangers and crises. And just as it was in
the past, so it will be in the present and in the future. We National-Socialists
have never allowed ourselves to play down or deny arising problems to the
people. On the contrary, it was always a sign of our unbroken sense of power to
explain every danger to our following and to the whole German people so that
our Party and our People can prepare and get ready for it.
It is always a question of self-assurance and of fierce determination
whether one movement or one people cope with difficulties appearing sometimes
overwhelming. If these are ready and willing to use its whole internal and
external force against it, then they will always triumph.
Only if they capitulate to the dangers, they perish. For us it is always
been a sure and irrevocable principle that the word capitulation does not exist
in our vocabulary.
We are and will be always sticking to it!
Just as it was yesterday it is today.
The times have changed but we National-Socialists have stayed the same.
When I speak to you in this moving moment on the 10th anniversary of the
takeover of power by the Führer from the tribune of the Sportpalast in Berlin
and to the whole German people through the radio waves that fills me with deep
emotion. I stand again on this podium where history was made on. As we entered
this wide spacious hall for the first time, a fighting arena was opened where
in the following time the deciding clashes over the power in Germany were
decided.
I don’t know how many hundreds of times the Führer and we, his near
helpers, have from this place spoken to you, to the National-Socialist Movement
in Berlin, in good and bad moments, and with a deep action further into the
nation to the whole German people. Here the struggle for the power in the
nation’s capital saw its more striking expression.
Here we lived the fantastic moments of the National-Socialist enthusiasm
for the struggle, though also of a fierce resolution when dangers and
difficulties piled up a mile high before our eyes. Here we gathered in moments
of very high pressure and very strong willpower where we had to affirm
ourselves against our enemies when they gave us hard knocks or inflicted a
severe defeat on us.
Just as it was yesterday it is today. From this podium the arousing
political slogans that merged and merge the Nation into a fanatical will to
struggle went and go into the people. The German people find itself again in
the middle of a hard struggle for his destiny. Its traditional enemies, against
whom we had so often to clash until 1933, at times under hopeless circumstances
although we eventually were victorious, have congregated again against us. The
old enemy coalition well known to us has risen anew but this gigantic struggle
for our life has now taken the form of an extra-continental one.
Fight was the then slogan of the National-Socialist movement from the
beginning, and fight is still today our slogan. Just as we got nothing for
free, so today we get today nothing for free. We have to conquer and work for
ourselves. In this moment of present hard fights in the East the enemy thinks
again to be able to triumph over us.
The English and American newspapers nature a complacent certainty as if Plutocracy
and Bolshevism stood right before the achievement of their goal. International
Jewry is gloating as it has so often been doing. The enemy newspapers lie
through their teeth, it is stated that in Germany the state of emergency has
been proclaimed, the nation is falling through, etc... I can lay out
well-established facts against it: In Germany only prevails the state of a
total willingness of our people to the concentration of its forces... willingness
and a determination for war and for victory. The whole German people are united
in this fierce and fanatic determination. Up and down our nation the shout for
the most total war effort in the broadest sense of the word penetrates our ears.
Just as before the 30th January 1933 we dedicated all forces to the
takeover of power and thus we came to power, so it is today our firm intention
to dedicate all forces of the nation to achieve the victory.
And we are firmly convinced that we will also achieve it quicker as some
may think.
As far as the fight against the bolshevism goes, we have fought against
this Jewish terrorist idea of world conquest inside our nation for 14years
under the most unfavourable circumstances. In these 14 years the fight also
always raged up and down, and sometimes we thought it impossible to continue,
but victory came at the end.
Today it is the same in our fight against soviet bolshevism on the
military field. No one thinks about minimizing the difficulties of this
international struggle. It is extremely hard and places superhuman demands on
our troops and their leadership. Yet as back then we also know today what the
deal is. We fought in the East not only against a way of thinking but also
against the most violent threat to our national and individual life. When our
enemy refers to military victories in this winter, we can only answer that as a
result of it we were shaken up out of our contentment and comfort. Now the
German people take up their position. From this moment on they only want to
fight and work for the victory.
We learned from London that we have no more available reserves. They
will get to know these reserves before they think and wish. In the last year our
enemies have also put their hopes on a military defeat of the Axis powers. On
this respect we have suffered defeats of a serious kind; but hardly came the
spring and approached the summer that the German army has again compensated for
our losses and driven the enemy again further into the East. Just as in Poland
the whole German nation is resolved to quickly overcome all the difficulties
that this winter brings with it.
From now on we want to do everything and anything imaginable to
accelerate the victory. It does completely not matter to us if our enemies don’t
take us seriously in our determination. It is a good help in war to be
underestimated by the enemy. One will get to know about the consequences of our
fanatic work on the enemy later on in this war before one thinks.
Just as in the struggle for the domestic power the Jewry attacks us from
two sides in this gigantic struggle.
Bolshevism sends its mass army ahead, while the plutocracy sends a heavy
barrage of lies and slanderous propaganda to be rained upon us. The struggle
for our life nears its dramatic high point. It is not only a struggle for the
freedom and security of the German nation but a gigantic clash on the future
destiny of Europe, definitely of the civilized Western world.
Against this backdrop takes place the 30 January, 1943, the tenth anniversary
of the National-Socialist takeover of power.
20 years ago, on 9 November, 1923 the Party suffered its most terrible
disaster. Who talks still today about its consequences? It has again recovered
from it through the most marvellous victory of our national history. Today we
are in the battlefields in a fight for our people’s destiny. It is of really
symbolic importance that the young National-Socialist state at its 10th
anniversary be subject to this present hard burden.
It is obvious why our enemies fight against the new Nation from all
sides as if despairingly. They don’t want to tolerate any people’s state in Germany.
That’s the only reason why plutocracy and bolshevism have forced this war on
us. The democratic Republic that arose from the Peace Treaty of Versailles was
not attacked by the eternal enemies of the Nation because it was run by their
lackeys. She was weak and dishonourable.
We became a people of Helots with no will to resist, defenceless at the mercy
of the plundering attempts by our enemies. The National-Socialism has succeeded
in bringing a change. It has to defend militarily in the international arena
the things that it created domestically. In this struggle for the existence or
inexistence it is not about a type of state but on our national life.
We still have the election between being slaves and the existence of a free
people in a socialist community of a state. This war puts us before the
historic mission of confirming on foreign affairs and militarily what we have
domestically secured ten years ago.
I don’t need to waste any word on our fanatic determination to employ and
exhaust from now on all energy of the German people in this fight of extermination
against bolshevism. The second gigantic winter battle in the East is for the
German nation the signal to total war. The Soviet Union has been arming for
twenty-five years to militarily prepare for this war. Bolshevism made war
robots out of people. In 1936 we pronounced the slogan: „First cannons, then
butter“, on the other hand Bolshevism has taken it to another level for
twenty-five years using the slogan: „Socialist misery, hunger and mass distress
but on top of weapons, cannons and armament. Against this abnormal military
threat we have to defend ourselves with all our national energy if we don’t
want to lose our freedom and our national life.
In the middle of the gigantic deployment of Stalin the German sword went
in. Today our troops fight deep into enemy’s territory. A whole continent
stands menacingly before us. We have taken control of an important part of it
in the triumphant victories of two summers. Like in the past winter of war in
the East, now we have to defend the conquered territory in this second winter
of war in the East in a supple way and under superhuman tests. I don’t need to
express that, the German people already knows it.
So a second time German soldiery finds itself as to its power of resistance
and its heroism on the balance of the goddess of destiny. Our confidence in our
Führer cannot ever be outdone at all.
Our confidence in our soldiers knows no limits.
Our troops were and are, I have to assure you, superior to the Bolshevik
enemy.
In numerous letters from all classes of our people the cry for the most
total war effort penetrates the ears of our leadership.
People won’t talk in Germany anymore about the past comforts that were, at
least in a couple of things, a burden to peace.
Our people sacrifice itself with joy to transform the already mentioned force
into tanks, weapons, munitions and national resistance.
We are more than a so far working and fighting community lending its
support to the war and its requirements with fanatic determination, and which
longs for the hour where the Führer with our new weapons can give the order of
attack to his troops.
Many have so far only talked about people’s war, now we will wage it as
a nation. The total war effort demands giving up all comfortable bourgeois habits.
A complete readiness for action fills our whole people.
They champion the better cause with the deeper faith. They have already
proved their superiority in the most convincing way in the last winter.
In this winter they are engaged in a new defensive action of unimaginable
violence. The superhuman burdens and dangers they are exposed to have ripened
the motherland for last decisions. There is no one at home who would not be
imbued of this fanatical will to be worthy of the heroic fighting front through
their work and through their faith in the victory.
The German leadership has quite openly presented the harshness and
gravity of this fight to the people and to the world. We have nothing to hide.
The motherland answers with the firm will to commit herself strongly. Everyone
at home only asks themselves what they can do to help our soldiers, to protect
the nation and to secure victory.
Heaps of still unexhausted or not completely exhausted energies are ready
to feed into the gigantic war procedure of our civil life. What is called for
now is mobilize them. If the enemy thought they would be able to discourage us
with a couple of strikes, they were very wrong. These strikes were and are an
alarm signal to total war for us, to which we are now determined.
Party and state will exemplarily lead the way in preparation for total
war. There have been measures taken and will be still taken in the next days
that should organize and in practice carry out the total deployment for total
war. The situation demands that we act quickly and ruthlessly.
Our Party’s National-Socialist history is a unique proof that we National-Socialists
can do that and always, if need be, gather the energy necessary. The Party will
be as always in important national crucial moments the engine of this
magnificent change in the life and work in our motherland. Its revolutionary
vigour will determine the pace of this revolutionizing process. The leadership
expects from the whole people not only that orders and laws be respected.
Furthermore, everyone puts themselves to the disposal of any work
necessary for the war knowing that he was asked by the Führer to do it.
The war laws are naturally binding for everyone. No exceptions can be
made. Whether high-class or low-class, poor or rich in the life struggle of the
German people no one is too good to put their whole energy and everything that
he possesses at the disposal of the fatherland.
Against saboteurs of our leadership in the war, we have so far taken
hard actions and will also do that in the future. However, they hardly deserve a
public denunciation being in very small numbers. We only need to appeal to the
fanaticism and the respectability of the German people, and we have a following
that includes the whole nation.
On 30th January when we step before the world on the 10th anniversary of
our revolution to express our determination to continue this fight with all
necessary means until victory, the world should know that behind our words are
our actions.
We find ourselves in the middle of this dramatic decision in the
historic clash of the 20th century.
Our soldiers have performed incredible feats. They still have to do incredible
feats. Under the unimaginable burden of a second winter in war in the East our
heroic troops fight courageously, tenaciously and doggedly through all dangers
and superhuman difficulties. The Soviet Union throws at them masses of people
and materials that seem inexhaustible. We have to assert ourselves in this
fight if the German people are not to lose its life.
On the other hand, this gigantic struggle is exposed to many weaknesses and
chance happenings. We know that since we frequently went through it during the
time before the seizure of power, although in a smaller scale.
We certainly know that if a people of fight-ready men and women are prepared
at whatever cost to stand up and fight for their great goal, they will achieve
it at the end.
Crises and fluctuations come and go but a nation remains if it fights
its way up courageously, bravely and undeterred. Today we are facing again the
same enemies as before. They use the same methods to outwit and fight us down.
The same crises and fears that then overwhelmed us.
Though at the end one day the same victory as then will triumph.
This war in a national resistance war. It has been imposed to us by our
enemies. They want to defeat us to lower us to the level of a slave people.
There is only one means against it: not softness but iron spirit of resistance.
The struggle has to and will be overcome.
At the end, we steadfast believe it, victory will smile on us. This
winter will finish too. The Führer leads the gigantic defensive battle in the
East. Although it runs under extremely difficult circumstances, we put our firm
and trusting confidence in his leadership and in the historically proved
bravery of our soldiers.
Just as we frequently succeeded in overcoming the hardest burdens, so we
will also succeed this time, and again the word of the philosopher will prove
well-founded in ourselves: „That, which does not kill us, will make us stronger.
„Now the Führer addresses at this historic commemoration a proclamation to the
German people. From his headquarters he addresses his appeal to the nation. It
is a proud honour for me in this memorable moment to be able to read out the
Führer’s proclamation in front of the whole German people.
It contains everything that we have to know in this moment, and the orders
that the German people has been impatiently waiting for. Here are the slogans
of the struggle and of a fierce resolution that warms our hearts, and strengthen
and puts new heart into us.
It reads as follows: „From the big North to the African desert, from the
Atlantic Ocean to the expanses in the East, from the Aegean to Stalingrad, an
epic song sounds that will last thousands of years.
That the homeland remains equal to these unique and, especially this
year, difficult feats are a dictate of its honour.
Although it so far makes its huge contribution to the carrying through of
this fight in the cities and the countryside, the whole work of the nation has
to be increased.
The epic struggle of our soldiers on the Volga should be a reminder for
everyone to do their best for the struggle on the freedom of Germany and on the
future of our people, and at the same time in the broader sense for the
preservation of our whole continent.
The National-Socialist party has the obligation as well as its members in
all arms of service in our army to compete with each other in exemplary bravery,
even to be. It was the intention of our enemies to threaten our peaceful cities
and villages by way of terrible destruction. However, it has been proven that
they only destroyed houses and annihilated people, but were not capable of
breaking the spirit but only to boost it.
At the beginning of the war what many German men and women were unaware of,
has now become clearer to them.
The fight that the enemies have forced on us like in 1914 decides on the
existence or the annihilation of our people. The Almighty will be the just
judge. However, our mission is to fulfil our obligation so that we are able to
continue to live according to the survival law given by Him as the creator of
all the worlds, so that, without ever becoming disheartened, we spare no life
and shirk no work in order to keep a future life for our people.
In this fight one day the crucial hour will strike where our people will
be liberated from foreign enemies, from the sacrifice of the dead and the ruins
of our cities and villages will blossom a new life to continue to shape the
state, we believe in and we fight and work for.
To the German state of the German nation as the eternal and same homeland
of all men and women of our people. The National-Socialist Greater German
Nation, in it, however, will at all times be present that energy that is
necessary to protect the future of the European family of peoples against the
dangers of the East. The Greater German Nation and its allied nations together
will also have to secure those spheres of influence that are essential for the
keeping of their material existence.
Headquarters, January 30th, 1943, signed Adolf Hitler.
The German people know what to do.
A belligerent and ready-to-fight people come back again to the place of
their fight and work.
More trusting as ever we want to feel committed to the Führer especially
in these fateful moments. A short time ago an English journalist asked where we
National-Socialists take again and again the energy from to believe in the
certainty of victory in such a strong and unshakable way during all the war
fluctuations. I will give the interviewer our National-Socialist answer: We National-Socialists
believe in the victory because we know our people which we come from. We
believe in the victory because we are convinced that this people will be able
to surmount any danger and any burden with the right political leadership. We
believe in the victory because we know the inexhaustible material and emotional
aid and reserves of this people that we ourselves have awaken, built up and
organized. We believe in the victory because our enemies are not unknown to us,
because we know for certain as to their threats and boasts what is pretence and
what is reality. We believe in the victory because we have already clashed with
these enemies. At that time we had the impression sometimes that our cause was
a lost one, living to see at the end that we were stronger than they were when
we only used our energy and had trusting and loyal confidence in the Führer.
We especially believe in the victory because the German nation knows this
time what it is about. She hardens herself in these hard tests of her political
and military character against all enemy insinuations and temptations. They don’t
reach up to their iron heart. We are determined to remain hard and to work and
fight with determination until the victory lies in our hands.
Is it still necessary among Germans and especially among National-Socialists
to give the last and most convincing reason for our unshakeable faith in the
victory? We believe in the victory because we have the Führer. He hassled us National-Socialists
from 1919 to this moment. What dangers have we not gone through and still we
were always victorious at the end? How many strikes have we received in the
struggle for a new Germany but how many blows have we given back! The proud
chain of our historic successes from 1919 to this moment is a single convincing
piece of evidence for the deep legitimacy of our unshakeable faith in the final
victory of the German people and their Allies over the tyranny of the
international plutocracy and the bare-faced threats by the Jewish bolshevism? When
we look at the Führer, we see in him the sure guarantee of the future final
victory. What importance it has to his historic phenomenon the political
adventurers of the like of Churchill or Roosevelt or Stalin? We know for
certain that the world-deciding clash of this war will take place between our National-Socialist
nation and the bolshevist Soviet Union. It was also like that in the struggle
for the power.
We have had to fight with the communism until the day of the seizure of
power, yes, a long time ago. Things were always touch-and-go but then came the
ardently-awaited, blissful hour where the Goddess of History handed us the
laurels of victory for all our efforts and troubles, for all the valour and all
the overcome dangers.
Who knows when and where we are called to the last decision in this war!
The more we believe in its victorious outcome, and the more fanatic we fight
and work, the more certain will it be ours.
National-Socialists! On this day we rally around our Führer with
trusting confidence.
Above all his old fighting guard presents him today with moved heart the
most profound feelings of their admiration, their blind confidence and also
their enormous, indelible gratitude. He has got us through the perils of this
stormy and eventful time. He has elevated the Nation from nothing to a great
power again.
It would lie crushed on the ground if he had not come to bring us to our
senses. With him striding in front of us today, we clearly see the way to the
victory. So we want to ask the Almighty a single favour on the tenth anniversary
of our revolution in this dramatic hour of our gigantic fight against our old
enemies, in memory of our national uprising, to keep the Führer healthy and
full of energy and decisiveness.
We know that in the past we overcame all dangers, and victory and peace were
finally achieved.
Faith moves mountains. This mountain-moving faith has to fill us all up.
It drives us to work and to fight for our people and nation.
On the place I am standing now and I speak to the German people from, it
was held for the first time in front of our old guard in difficult and critical
moments the speech that has faithfully accompanied us all the following years
until this hour. Today it is still valid as exhortation and demand on us and
our followers. Again it has come a time of burden and of utmost commitment for
the nation.
More than ever it is necessary to direct the look of the nation to the man
who is for us the personification of our fanatic determination, our unbroken
fighting will and our ready trust.
So I shout to the Führer, in the name of the whole German people on the
tenth anniversary of the national uprising through our revolution for the most
difficult fight for our international freedom, our old slogan as confirmation
of our determined preparedness for all: Führer order, we follow! We stand up
from our seats. With us the whole German people in deep respect to their
heroes, and it greets the Führer in this moment of fanatic fighting will with
our old salute:
Adolf Hitler - Sieg
Heil! Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!
Audio version of this speech with English subtitles:
Part 1:
Part 2:
Part 3:
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