by Joseph Goebbels
Background: Dr. Goebbels gave an annual
speech on New Year’s Eve in which he reviewed the old year and sometimes made
predictions for the new one. This is the first of the series. He looks back on
the first year of National Socialism and declares the revolution over.
The source: “Zum Jahreswechsel 1933/34,” Signale
der neuen Zeit. 25 ausgewählte Reden von Dr. Joseph Goebbels (Munich:
Zentralverlag der NSDAP., 1934), pp. 337-344
My fellow German citizens!
My goal is not to add a bitter
taste to the holiday’s festive glass of cheer. I believe that every level and
class of the German people has reason to celebrate today with confidence. And
there is no reason to be moderate. We Germans over the last 20 years have had too
much pain, sorrow, and disappointment to run the risk of overdoing our
celebration. A bit of pain is behind all our joy, and the cheer with which we
look back on the past year and forward to the coming one is filled with
earnestness and proud manliness.
But now we raise our hearts
and see with satisfaction that a year of success is behind us, and that the
blessing of heaven has fallen on the German people. Our whole hearts rejoice.
It is a kind of joy that looks back with pride on what has been accomplished,
and that gives strength for new plans and decisions. The powerful movement that
has seized the entire German people in the past year is a movement of life that
is filled with a firm and faithful optimism that gives endurance and strength.
We Germans have once more learned to love life in all its splendor. We affirm
it and accept all its demands, even if they be hard and pitiless. National
Socialism affirms life, it does not deny it. We draw from it the joyful
strength that so wonderfully fills us in the last hours of the passing year.
No one is left out. It fills
the festive streets of the great cities and the lonely alleys and paths of our
German villages. It fills huts and palaces, the rich and the poor. It fills the
heart of the lonely wanderer who greets the new year in the snow-capped and
towering mountains, or those who are part of the crowds on Berlin’s Unter den
Linden. It was a blessed year. The German people found themselves once more,
and regained a hope that lets them look confidently into the coming year.
What a difference from the New
Year’s Eve of a year ago. Then the Reich stood before the abyss. The people
were torn by hatred and civil war. The parties and the government lacked the
strength even to recognize the catastrophe, much less to deal with it. Collapse
and desperation were rising wherever one looked, and the specter of Bolshevism
was everywhere. But today? The Reich is once more strong and powerful, the
people more united and firm than ever before, led by a strong hand who is dealing
with the problems we face. Where once there was hopelessness and despair, today
a whole nation is filled with faithful devotion.
A year of unprecedented
victories and triumphs is behind us. What twelve months ago seemed the product
of an overactive imagination has become reality. The flags of national renewal
fly over the Reich, and a revolution of vast extent has captured the German
people and given them back their true nature.
There were probably only a few
last 30 January, when the great transformation began, who imagined that a new
era of German history was beginning, and that within a year the revolution
would be over. Remember 21 March, 1 May, the unforgettable days in Nuremberg, 1
October, and 12 November. A wonderful transformation unified the nation, one
that future generations will scarcely be able to comprehend. They will judge
the year 1933. It will go down in history as the year the German nation finally
broke free of its two thousand years of misery.
What an astonishing collection
of significant political, cultural and economic events mark this year of German
awakening! It finally destroyed the Marxist nonsense that had tortured the
German people for six decades, condemning them to political impotence. Only a
year ago it threatened the Reich, ready at any moment to seize power. Today we
know of it only through stories. It was replaced by the idea of a true
community of the people that was not the empty theory of a meeting hall, but
rather step by step and piece by piece became a total and happy reality. The
socialism that we preached for years found its living expression in the active
participation of all Germans, perhaps the most wonderful and exciting event of
the past year.
Twelve months ago the parties
carried on their nonsense in the parliaments, government crisis followed
crisis, and the fate of the Reich was determined by special interests that used
the holy idea of Germany only for their party’s benefit. This contemptible
parliamentarianism, whose only Christmas gift to the people was the collapse of
a cabinet, is gone. The German people overwhelmingly has affirmed one man and
one idea. A movement fully aware of its responsibility governs the Reich.
The people itself, however,
could not support the new regime any more strongly than it does. People, state
and nation have become one, and the strong will of the Führer is over us all.
The eternal quarreling particularism that threatened the Reich has been
overthrown. Germany once more stands before the world as an unshakable unity,
and no one inside our outside of our borders is able to damage the interests of
the German nation by using some kind of group within the Reich.
This political foundation had
to be established if the government had any intention of dealing with the big
problems of the day, if it was to do everything possible to deal with the
specter of unemployment. The government had not only the intention to do
something, it acted. It attacked unemployment with impressive measures. With
God’s help, it was able to do even more than it promised: over two million
people are at work again, and even the hard winter did not slow us down. The
entire world admires this accomplishment of the German people, gained by our
will and toughness. The world is just as astonished as it watches the German
people fight hunger and cold; the first half of the battle has already been
won. It fills us with pride that in this first National Socialist winter no
one, however poor and needy, has been left alone, that none of us, no matter
how heavy our burdens, has gone uncared for through winter’s cold months, that
we have done our duty and need not fear anyone’s gaze.
Is it any wonder that courage,
confidence and optimism in growing measure fill the German people? Is not the
flame of a new faith rising in the people from this sacrificial readiness? This
people is noble, brave, generous, willing, and full of devotion under the care
of a strong hand, and it may rightly believe that it is spotless and pure, and
that it has the blessing of God.
Is there any reason to doubt
that we will return this people to its just place among the nations of the
world? We have had the courage to break with the unacceptable methods of
international post-war diplomacy and claim the absolute right of the German
nation to national honor and equality. We knew from the beginning that it would
take a tough battle. Today we think we can say that we will win if we keep our
nerve.
The year 1933 ends under this
happy sign. With nostalgia we look back once again. It was a proud and manly
year. It was a year of beginning and renewal, the first since the end of the
war of which we can say that it ended for Germany better than it had begun.
As always, we stand at the
helm even more firmly after the battle. The new year is before us, with its new
challenges and tasks. Nothing will be given to us; we will have to seize it.
Hard and challenging problems await us. We will need all our strength and
intelligence to hold the ground that we have won, to increase it, to build on
it, for only from it can we make the leap to new territory.
The comradeship of the people
that has begun in so wonderful a way is not something that has found eternal
root in German hearts. It is the foundation from which we will find the
strength to bring a victorious end to coming battle against hunger and cold,
and then to begin in the spring a second great campaign against the
unemployment that we will eliminate in the coming year.
A major political problem in
the coming year will be to give a new and organic structure to the Reich. Based
on the firm ground of tradition, a reform must be implemented that will give
the same unity to the Reich as to the people. The National Socialist idea and
movement will fill both people and state for all time. Then we will be able to
view our foreign problems with calmness. The people and nation stand on firm
ground. No power on earth can split them apart.
The tasks before us are large
and difficult, almost discouragingly so. Only our strong and fanatic faith will
give us the strength to solve them. If the German people stay united and work
together, it will master fate and build a new future. Peoples never lose
because of inadequate weapons, only through a lack of self- confidence and
will.
Let us then stand together and
enter the new year with courage. The whole people should be confident of the
government’s thanks. Each of us is proud that we serve the people in a high
position. We are all members of the people, we express its spirit and its will.
The lowliest of our people is dearer to us than the king of another nation. And
we would rather be the lowliest citizen of our nation than the king of another.
This nation has displayed
remarkable heroism both during the war and thereafter. Covered with scars, it
has recovered from the blows dealt us by fate. It lives once more and will live
as long as we faithfully affirm its life.
No one has the right to become
weary. Everyone is needed, each in his place. We know full well how much need
remains in Germany, but we will never surrender to it. We do not stick our head
in the sand, but rather we raise it high and offer it to fate.
No one should lose courage.
Only he who thinks he is lost is lost.
In these last hours of the
year, we join in humble thanks to the great God who gave us the gift of doing
our work loyally and industriously. We ask his blessings for the coming year,
and promise that we will not be unworthy of his blessings.
The year of revolution is
over. The year of construction is beginning.
We give our respectful
greeting to the General Field Marshall and Reich President [Hindenburg], who in the past year was once
more the loyal Ekkehard of his people. May fate preserve him for us for many
years to come. We give our loyalty and eternal allegiance to the Führer, who,
never wavering, bore the flag through storms and dangers. May he stay strong
and healthy, and complete his work.
I wish a happy New Year,
filled with struggle and victory, to all good Germans at home and to our
brothers on the other side of the border.
We
will not fail if we have the courage to be stronger than the misery that once
defeated Germany.
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