Artworks by Hans M. Friedmann

Source: http://galleria.thule-italia.com/hans-m-friedmann/

Postcards Collection – Reich Party Congress in Nuremberg

Die Deutsche Wochenschau – Newsreel No. 539 – 02 January 1941

Germany's and Italy's Ambassadors Attend Ceremonies Commemorating the Formation of the Tripartite Pact in Tokyo;

Marshal Petain Warmly Received by a Large Crowd in Lyons;

Soviet Ambassador Dekanozov greeted by Hitler at Reich Chancellery;

Reich Labor Service Role in the Battle of Britain Hailed;

Extensive Grading Work Along the Vistula River in Occupied Poland;

Former Luxury Hotel in Zakopane now Shelters Berlin Children;

Nazi Leaders and the German People Celebrate their Second Wartime Christmas;

The Reich in Photos - Reichsparteitag Großdeutschland, 5 - 12 September 1938 – Part 3

The 10th Party Congress was named the “Rally of Greater Germany” (Reichsparteitag Großdeutschland, September 5-12).

 

 

The National-Socialist Way of Life

By Dr. Walter Gross, director of the Racial Policy Office of the NSDAP

Source: http://www.national-socialism.com/the-national-socialist-way-of-life/

National Socialism as a political movement will have reached its goal when the Reich has ultimately secured its proper position among other nations. National Socialism as a Weltanschauung [worldview] will only have completed its historical mission when it prevails among all classes in Germany and thus unites the nation in a new character. The political realization of National Socialism will have been reached in a powerful Reich and a new order of living space. The National Socialist Weltanschauung, however has to materialize in the attitude and lifestyles of our nation and its inhabitants.

In National Socialist Germany, life will be very different from what it used to be while many eternal values of our historical past will remain valid for the future as well. In some fields however, the prevailing attitude of German life will have to be significantly different from traditional lifestyles due to the new triumphant Weltanschauung! The National Socialist Weltanschauung and its practical effect on German lifestyle is based on two supporting pillars:

On the one hand, personality is given a chance to unfold and the individual receives an education that is nearly perfect. On the other hand, the individual is ready to contribute to the welfare of the community. These are the two poles that generate the productive potential of National Socialist Germany.

Developing and shaping his abilities makes the individual happy and conscious, and doing this is the prerequisite for the nation to receive his genuine efforts that are of highest value for the community. Only these efforts for the community add meaning and ultimate nobility to the individual personality and its development. In morbid times, personality and community became opposites, but for us they are a full harmonic chord in which the individual strings of life sound together.

For a National Socialist German the key note in life is happiness and joy of life. We do not speak here of a flat and superficial attitude that doesn’t know life or tries to avoid the depths, gravity and pains of life. It is rather the attitude and spirit of a healthy, strong man to whom life itself is joyful and full of beauty; just like the unencumbered child that cheerfully loves its existence. For the growing and maturing man ever struggling with obstacles and difficulties, hard and troublesome periods in life only mean a chance for him to prove his power and they leave him with an elevated existence and a feeling of inner joy. Therefore, the National Socialist way of life affirms everything that increases happiness. Our approach to life only excludes all destructive and degrading influences: the abuse of physical and mental resources, the reduction of individual capacities through an insane consumption of stimulating and inciting drugs, the negligent endangering of the individual’s health and life, which belong not only to the individual, but to the nation as well. Whatever generates strength and happiness is good and therefore required by the new German lifestyle in the same way that all destructive and corrupting influences, whether they affect the nation or the individual, are excluded.

The statement above is valid for both sides of our existence: for the body and its development as well as for the mind and soul. A trained and controlled powerful body stands equal in intelligent sport to a mature mind and elevated thinking skills in a great variety of experiences in spiritual things and in the field of the arts. Both sides are united in the fully and completely developed human being, and only that human is suitable to serve the future of our nation.

In both fields, physical and mental, the individual is limited in his possibilities and disposed towards certain special abilities. Long before our own consciousness awakens we are already determined in this matter by the inexorable laws of heredity. To these laws we owe all variations and differences among individuals as well as the abundant wealth of talents and abilities in the community of our nation. This is why the National Socialist lifestyle does not offer the illusionary phantom of a desolate egalitarianism, or compulsory standards for everybody. The National Socialist ideal is not a silly fashion and not a standardized type of man. On the contrary, our goal is a variety of individual personalities, all educated and trained according to their talents. Only this variety grants a harmony that elevates the individual and bestows the nation with historical power and beauty.

Along with happiness, courage is a dominant value for the new German man. National Socialism created the heroic attitude best displayed in the great military tradition of Germany, the nation’s duty and ideal. Courage proves itself best in times of war. In peaceful times we must also be led in a brave and heroic manner, a demand that addresses both men and women.

In everyday life there are many opportunities to put ourselves to the test: never to avoid difficulties, to walk straight even if there are easier, crooked ways to go, to estimate a goal higher than one’s own laziness, to demand the most from oneself and to ignore lazy wishes, to obey the great national laws rather than to cultivate one’s selfishness, to follow one’s own conscience in grave personal decisions and to take responsibility instead of hiding behind cheap excuses and cowardly submissiveness. All this is courage and is a required part of the lifestyle of the new German man educated by National-Socialism. Mental courage, the fight and struggle with great new ideas, belongs here as well. In the end, only those creeds and beliefs are of value for the nation and the individual which were achieved through honest endeavor, and not those that were gained through indolent repetition of what one has heard from others.

It is courage as well to suffer from inner and outer wounds and pains without getting depressed. Discontent and pessimism, resignation and despair basically prove weakness and cannot exist with the brave attitude of a new generation of Germans.

Beyond one’s own life, beyond the fights and victories of the individual and the nation an eternal future arises for Germans in this world. We will secure our future by the method of new generations who, children today, men tomorrow, ancestors of a new generation the next day, inseparably link us with the past and the future. National Socialism considers these bonds and therefore family and children to be essential elements in National Socialist lifestyle. It means a special fulfillment in any man’s life to be a family-member. Giving birth to many children and raising them is the highest goal for a woman. Family is necessary for anybody unless he wants to carelessly dispense with the strongest forces in human life. Moreover, family and children are the only guarantee for the eternal existence of a nation, and therefore a demand from our national future to the present generation. The rising German Reich, enormously powerful and protected by the sword, now and in coming decades needs families with uncountable children of the finest German blood to fill the spaces we open up and to permanently secure what the courage of the present generations wins for us.

The combination of private life and community service is perfectly expressed in the optimistic large families of National Socialism. It is within the family that the most intimate power of the love and strong tension between the sexes lead to complete fulfillment in private life and to a meaningful contribution to the development of the entire nation. We are equally opposed to negation and unnatural asceticism as we are to the selfishness of those who do not want to commit themselves. In this way, families and children grow up as the nation’s most precious commodity as they combine individual happiness with the profits and gains of the community.

With this attitude, pride in their race is a natural matter for both men and women. In dealing with foreigners the German attitude will show respect, comradeship and cooperation along with an unshakeable self-confidence and a racial pride which identifies a sin against blood as a nation’s fatal sin.

It is this attitude that puts the National Socialist way of life to the crucial historical test. Destiny will always deny to some of us complete fulfillment in life. Those denied fulfillment however, are of equal value and they will work twice as hard so that their performance will compensate for what they were not granted in another field. We cannot speak of a true National Socialist attitude in a case where we do not find the yearning for family and children combined with the knowledge that a nation blessed with children means happiness and duty. For it is only through children that we participate in eternal German life and only a superficial or timid man does not feel the need for such participation. Everybody who lived his life in good days and bad days in accordance with these principles will face death with calmness. He will not desire or carelessly seek his death because even in his darkest hours, his life is meaningful and worth living. He will not fear the end either and piteously flee from it, because death is a part of life, as natural and inescapable as birth. Just like all universal laws of nature, death is forgiving in its pitilessness. What comes after death, nobody knows. In this field, the individual may follow his knowledge or instinct in what he wants to think and believe. In any case, a happy and brave life includes a courageous and confident death. Life has been good and meaningful and coming generations will carry on and complete the work of the person that death took out of our hands.

Internal and External German Freedom

by Reichsleiter Alfred Rosenberg

Whenever talk comes around to freedom, some of the most vehement disputes in world history arise for our mind’s eye. Not only were all revolutions tied to the idea of freedom but severe tyranny was often allied with the idea of freedom in the course of history. It was freedom that the ancient tyrannical murderers called for; it was freedom the slaves in ancient Rome yearned for when they rendered the fatal blow against an honorable system; it was for freedom of conscience that caused religious reformers to fight against traditional dogmas; it was freedom of science that had been defended in thousands of scientific laboratories against the medieval church. Finally, the question of whether human freedom and a free will exist at all has been investigated by many great philosophers. It is clear to see that whenever there was a major movement in religious, scientific or political life, it was almost always bound to the idea of freedom. The fact that millions and millions of people followed this idea and fought for it in all fields, will forever dignify freedom for us regardless of the dross that is attached to this idea.

Nobody dares to make a dogmatic decision on whether man is free or not. The representatives of both sides argue vehemently for their point of view and in an equally compelling manner. Especially since the rise of the exact sciences the attempt to completely integrate man into nature has increasingly been accompanied by the argument that the idea of a free will is an illusion and that therefore all consequences derived from this idea must be declared null and void. Only thinkers who honestly acknowledged both sides of the questions and the consequences of both sides were able to provide an idea of where to surmise a solution. It was especially Kant who anticipated findings of the exact natural sciences and integrated man into the laws of nature, just like any other natural or living phenomena. In the manner of a natural scientist drawing physical conclusions, he investigated just as thoroughly, the inner nature of man. He finally arrived at the seemingly paradoxical conclusion that man is perfectly unfree but nevertheless free.

Similar to Goethe, Kant saw that man is a member of two worlds that mutually influence one another. The origins of these worlds are different and cannot be traced down to their very roots. It seems that, without voicing any dogmatic opinion, we may well stand on Kant’s foundation. With equal truth we can face the fact that human life is dependent on many influences of its world and environment. In the game of life that we will never completely comprehend, man is but a bridged period of power, just like any other living being. We have to acknowledge a certain inner force that enables man to consciously live and die for an idea, which proves the existence of a force of some sort. That contravenes the other principles of existence and thus leaves us to assume a force that is not beyond the ideas of space, time and causality. Certainly there is no perfect freedom, even if we want to acknowledge free will as such. Freedom is contingent on external possibilities and internal „Gestalt’, but in my eyes this very fact is the only possible presentation of freedom. In the life of a nation, therefore, freedom does not mean the opportunity to achieve everything and, individual freedom cannot mean that one can create, invent or form everything. On the contrary, freedom has to be thought or as a „Gestalt”. This means that freedom, in the sense of creative power, opposes the tyranny of performed patterns, and it also opposes the arbitrariness of chaos and the absence of „Gestalt”.

If we take a look at intellectual and political disputes from this point of view, we find nowhere that freedom equals freedom and the claim to be free. This means the claim for opportunities to create is not given to everybody and must not be given to everybody. True freedom, as a demand and opportunity must always be accompanied by biological power, character and a creative soul. There are individual personalities and there are national personalities. For the latter, an over-extension of freedom opportunities cannot be allowed and a limitation is necessary for the benefit of everybody. It can be seen from the life and lot of many fanatic philosophers and demagogic people’s courts that it may result in a fatal destabilization of powers caused by driving ambition and extravagant will that arise because certain external forces are missing. The examples of the Grachas of Rienzi, Mirabeau and many figures in today’s political life show all too clearly that freedom and law have to form a unit. This fact is expressed in Goethe’s very belief that: „only laws will bring us freedom”.

Duly external ties shape internal creation. This is where the old German understanding of freedom that today is represented in National Socialism reappears. This concept is entirely different from the liberte of the French Revolution and different from the raving madness of Marxist-Bolshevist destruction. The other nations never quite understood this German concept of freedom as they generally never grasped the inner side of the concept of personality. The French historian Guizot once coined a phrase that Goethe especially loved: „it was the Germans who first introduced the concept of personality to the European nations“. It was a concept of Gestalt, in sharp distinction to all egalitarian phrases and confused political constructions. However, it was the concept of a personality that consciously defends its individuality and winds circles of creative performances around a deep and firm inner core, thus expanding and being bound to a center at the same time. It was this German idea of freedom that Martin Luther presented when he argued for a spiritual and religious freedom he was ready to risk his life for. But at the same time he demanded a rigid political regime that could protect this inner freedom against the choice of neighbors and also provide defense against individual choice. The very same opinion was expressed by Goethe when he talked about the existence of respect, especially self-respect. He did not argue for a superficial, arrogant overestimation of one’s capacities, but acknowledged the indestructible metaphysical center, without which it would be impossible to understand magnificent creations in the fields of art, sciences and political development.

It is essentially the same concept of freedom (although it might not be present philosophically) that shows itself with increasing clearness in the relation between what we call personality and community. We strive for a community of millions of Germans, firmly shaped and guided, while at the same time we demand that there is room for outstanding, creative personalities. We do not feel that these two demands oppose one another, although other nations do because they only know the choice between tyranny and chaos. The National Socialist Movement followed its inner instinct and arrived on a political basis at the same conclusions that had earlier been drawn by the important religious leaders of the German people as well as by our thinkers and glorious poets. We could achieve this goal because the National Socialist Movement was led by Germans and had come to life in a fight for freedom.

If we look at the German nation as a whole, it is hindered and bothered by other stipulations that affect world history. Neither for Germany nor for any other nation can national sovereignty be absolute. According to our conviction it would only be harmful and dangerous for the creative power of a nation if there were no borders in this world. Demarcation, competition and the constant check of possibilities is not only part of an individual’s life but part of any nation’s existence. This educational and philosophical thought alone makes it clear that Germany does not strive for world dominion. This National Socialist Weltanschauung that has been attacked so often, wants only that the earth finally be given a Gestalt . A transformation that would end the time of chaotic liberalism which on the one hand strived after a world-trust and world-republic that should be built on democratic internationality and Marxism, while on the other hand it called for a world-revolution to be carried out by so-called proletarians. Earth is not populated with an abstract mankind, but with certain races and nations. These nations and races have their own past and their history can more and more be comprehended by examining the outside of their nature as displayed in combat. In this way they reveal their achievements and make claims for further possibilities of performance. In the middle of the process of political formation we find a natural law. It does not make any sense to protest against this law as rejection of a natural fact doesn’t alter its existence. The fact is that in the evolutionary process we find large nations and small nations. It is clear that a giant plant will reach up further into the heavens and will grow its roots deeper into the ground than small bushes or flowers can. This doesn’t tell us anything about the beauty of life forms, and nothing derogatory is said about the creative possibilities of so-called small nations.

The Greeks were once a small nation but they became the magnificent founders of ancient Indo- Germanic culture. For millennia their educational power produced an effect on related Germanic tribes and young as ever, it still reaches into our time that is marked by a Nordic awakening. On the other hand there were giant nations that threatened to break all boundaries. In their destructive power they probably prepared the ground for a change of things but compared to the example of ancient Greece, they left behind little more than memories of a dark age.

Therefore, the political education of the German nation is governed by both the law of limitation and the right to demand a European unity. In the course of centuries other nations did not take advantage of their chance to accomplish this mission. It is not disgraceful for the German nation to acknowledge its spheres of interest and rights among other great nations on this planet. Germany is even prepared to support their creative powers. On the other hand it is an honorable duty for the German nation to carefully treat the people of those small nations that are protected by the Greater German Reich or those who seek to be protected by us. If they have realized their general destiny we let them generously take part in everything that comes with the inner formation of our old and well respected continent. This is an attitude that once prevailed for a short period of time in ancient Rome; at the time when the powerful and strong Roman nation founded its own state, fighting off all oriental influences. In a synthesis of strict Roman laws and the pride of a Roman citizen they gave an admirable example of the ancient Indo-Germanic attitude.

On a small scale many towns in medieval Germany had organized their life in a way that combined outward strength with an inner creative joy. Prussia, although it was harassed by many enemies, was in many fields an example of the Nordic-German attempt to combine law and freedom. The rigid Friederician order was closely related to the ideas proclaimed by Kant and other great Germans. This is why in the German nation the idea of freedom has always been connected with duties rather than with rights. A German philosopher once made the excellent point that freedom had never been a question of „being free from”, but always a matter of being „free to“. This is an important concept that reveals a whole attitude. The German fight, is not a fight for freedom in the sense of being free from duties. It is the fight for a mission in which we try to live up to the great duty we were given. This is why the German nation is the most revolutionary nation in Europe and at the same time it is the nation where the all-enlightening ideas of inner freedom originated. We are convinced that the conscious inner values of the Germans -honor, faithfulness, loyalty and pride- represent the best elements of all European races. Our political power therefore, is justified as it protects these values.

Ever since the medieval Weltanschauung disappeared we saw various confessions, theories of art and philosophical doctrines, but no great Weltanschauung. Such a Weltanschauung (a view that creates an inner unity in all fields of life) has finally been born in National Socialism.

 ALFRED ROSENBERG, „Revolution and Fulfillment”

Rare Colour Footage from the Reich Party Congress “Greater Germany" in Nuremberg, 1938

Die Deutsche Wochenschau – Newsreel No. 538 – 25 December 1940

Japanese Planes Bomb Chiang Kai-shek's Supply Lines on Burma Road;

Abducted Spanish Civil War Children Return Home from France;

Life in Warsaw is back to Normal Again;

New Airfields are Constructed in Norway;

Rifle Making at a Famous Gunsmith Plant in Steyr;

Captured British Submarine is Converted to a U-boat and Commissioned Under the German Battle Flag;

German Soldiers on Guard Duty in Stormy Weather on the Channel and Channel Islands.

Adolf Hitler – excerptions of speeches held at the Reichsparteitag in Nuremberg, 1935

 

Adolf Hitler – proclamation read by Gauleiter Adolf Wagner

Nuremberg, September 11, 1935

l. Jewish Marxism and parliamentary democracy related to it;

2. the politically and morally corrupting Center;

3. certain elements in a stubborn, dumb-reactionary bourgeoisie.

I would like to point out in this context that the battle against the inner enemies of the nation will never be frustrated by formal bureaucracy or its incompetence; where the formal bureaucracy of the State should prove ill-suited to solve a certain problem, the German nation will activate its more dynamic organization as an aid to asserting its vital necessities. For it is a grave error to suppose that the nation would exist only because of some formal phenomenon and that, moreover, when such a phenomenon is not capable of accomplishing the tasks assigned to it, the nation would capitulate in the face of these tasks.

On the contrary: what can be accomplished through the State will be accomplished through the State. But whatever the State is incapable of accomplishing, due to its very essence, will be accomplished by the Movement.

For the State as well is only one of the forms of organization in volkisch life, driven and controlled by the direct expression of the Volk’s will to live, by the Party, by the National Socialist Movement.

Under no circumstances will the National Socialist State tolerate that the politicization of the confessions be prolonged or even begun anew by any type of detour. And let no one delude himself as to the determination of the Movement and the State! We have already fought a battle against the political clergy and ousted it from the parliaments, and that after a long struggle in which we had no state authority and the other side had it all. Today we have this authority and will more easily be able to win the struggle for these principles. But we will never wage this battle as a battle against Christianity or even against one of the two confessions. But we will wage it in order to keep our public life pure and free of those priests who have mistaken their calling, those who should have become politicians and not clergymen.

After an incredible struggle for enlightenment, after endless sacrifices, we have succeeded in converting nine tenths of our Volk to subordinate themselves to one opinion and to one will. The last tenth comprises the remainder of thirtyseven parties, the confessions, the former associations-in short, that very chaos which thrust Germany into one disaster after another for centuries. And thus, when we calmly take in the perspective of what success recent years have given to our German Reich, in the end we must always recognize the most uplifting fact of all, namely: The most valuable thing is and remains the Movement, which has joined the nation to form a whole and which allows its desires to manifest themselves in one single will. What security, and what tranquillity reign in our Germany today! Wherever we look, we see everywhere around us the ferments of decomposition, the elements of dissolution.

Endless strikes, lockouts, street-fighting, destruction, hatred and civil war; rootless Jewish-international wandering scholars are infiltrating the nations, agitating against all healthy common sense and whipping up hostility among the people. Under the guise of representing the interests of the classes, they are putting a civil war in motion which will lead only to the utmost satisfaction of their own interests. And we are witnessing the consequences. In a world which should actually live in affluence, need reigns. Countries with a population of scarcely fifteen persons per square kilometer suffer from hunger, states which are blessed with every conceivable natural resource are simply incapable of reducing their armies of unemployed.

It is a triumph of the effectiveness of the National Socialist regime that it has succeeded-in a country in which 137 persons live in one square kilometer, in a country which has no colonies, which lacks most natural resources, which was drained to its very blood for fifteen years, which lost its entire foreign capital, paid more than fifty billion in reparation dues, which was confronted with the total ruin of its economy-that even given the worst problems, it succeeded in preserving a means of existence, in reducing the number of unemployed, so that today we are better off than many of the world’s richer countries.

Today we can admit it openly: the year 1934 was unfortunately a bad harvest year. We are still suffering from the aftereffects. But it was nevertheless possible to secure the German Volk’s supply of vitally important foodstuffs.

The fact that this was possible, in spite of the many restrictions, is an achievement of which the broad masses of our Volk have perhaps not been sufficiently aware. The difficulties connected with this harvest led many a time to a temporary shortage of this or that foodstuff. We were nonetheless determined that under no circumstances would we capitulate as a certain international press was ardently hoping. And we overcame the crisis. We were forced, in this context, to repeatedly halt with every means available attempts to compensate for the bad harvest by partly understandable but also partly unjustified price increases.

In this year we were-and will likewise be in future-motivated by the unshakeable desire to prevent the German Volk from stumbling unawares into a new inflation. But this would still be the unavoidable result of any increase in salaries or any increase in prices at present. So if today, too, irresponsible egoists or unthinking fools fancy that any kind of shortage-which can always arise- gives them the right to increase prices, this behavior would, if the Government were to let it, set the well-known vicious circle of 1921 to 1923 in motion, leaving the German Volk with an inflation on its hands for the second time around. For this reason we will attack such elements from now on with brutal ruthlessness and-if good intentions fail-will not shrink from using concentration camps to make them conform with and adapt to the national interest as a whole.

Speech at NSDAP congress hall in Nuremberg

September 11, 1935

 National Socialists! Party Comrades!

Sixteen years ago the spiritual cornerstone was laid for one of the greatest and most significant manifestations of German life. The resolution of but a few men at that time to extricate Germany from the fetters of its internal corrupters and to liberate it from the yoke of external bondage constituted one of the boldest decisions in world history. Now, after sixteen years of hard struggle, this scheme has evolved to become a decisive historic achievement. A world of internal adversaries and obstacles was overcome, and a new world is at the verge of being born. On this day, we hereby lay for this new world of the German Volk the cornerstone of its first great monument. A hall shall rise which is to serve the purpose of annually housing within its walls a gathering of the elite of the National Socialist Reich for centuries to come. Should the Movement ever be silent, even after millenniums, this witness shall speak.

In the midst of a hallowed grove of ancient oak trees will the people then marvel in reverent awe at this first colossus among the buildings of the German Reich. With this premonition I hereby lay the cornerstone of the Congress Hall of the Reich Party Congresses in Nuremberg in the year 1935, the year of the freedom of the German nation hard won by the National Socialist Movement.

But if such a so-called “artist” feels himself called upon to portray human life under all circumstances from the viewpoint and perspective of what is inferior and diseased, then he should do so in an age in which there is a widespread appreciation for just this type of viewpoint. Today this age is over, and hence it is also over for this type of “would-be creative artists.” And though we are becoming ever firmer and more strict in our rejection of this, we hold that we are not making a mistake. For he who is chosen by Providence to lend external, graphically visible expression to the innermost and thus eternally healthy substance of a Volk will never find himself on the path to such aberrations.

Thus we are not talking about a “threat to the freedom of art.” Just as a murderer is not granted the right to kill his fellow men in body simply because this would mean interfering with his own freedom, a person similarly cannot be granted the right to kill the soul of the Volk merely so as to avoid placing any restrictions on his dirty fantasy and his total lack of restraint.

In the case of really great tasks, as a general rule, both those men who have commissioned the task and those who accomplish it should bear in mind that, although the assignment was given within a certain age, its accomplishment shall, by being performed to the utmost, become ageless.

To this end it is necessary that the really great tasks of an age must be assigned respectively, i.e. public commissions must, if their accomplishment is to generate eternal value, be placed in a certain proportion in respect to the scale of the rest of life.

It is impossible to place the monumental architecture of the State or the Movement on a scale corresponding to that of one or two centuries ago, while the products of bourgeois creation in the sphere of private or even purely capitalistic architecture have expanded conversely and increased many times over. What lent the cities of antiquity and the Middle Ages their characteristic and hence admirable and endearing features was not the size of the private bourgeois structures but the manifestations of community life towering above them.

In the bourgeois epoch, the architectural expression of public life was unfortunately repressed in favor of buildings documenting private-capitalistic business life. But the great historico-cultural task of National Socialist lies above all in departing from this trend.

We must, however, be guided not only by artistic but also by political considerations in endowing upon the new Reich, with a view to the great precedents of the past, a worthy cultural personification. Nothing is better suited to silence the little carpers than the eternal language of great art.

Millenniums bow to its utterances in reverent silence. May God grant us the stature to formulate these tasks in a manner equal to the stature of the nation.

This is doubtless a difficult undertaking.

The heroic feats of greatness which our Volk accomplished in history over 2,000 years number among the most tremendous experiences of mankind. There were centuries in which works of art corresponded to a spiritual human greatness in Germany-and in the rest of Europe. The unique eminence of our cathedrals represents an incomparable standard for the truly-in a cultural sense-monumental attitude of these ages. They demand from us more than admiration for the work itself; they demand reverence for the races which were capable of planning and carrying out such great ideas.

Since then, our Volk has risen and fallen with the changing tides of Fate. We ourselves were witnesses of a world-defying heroism, of the deepest despair and shocked bewilderment. Through us and in us, the nation has risen once again.

When today we call upon German art to take on new and great tasks, we are assigning these not only in order to fulfill the wishes and hopes of the present, but in the sense of a thousand-year legacy. By paying homage to this eternal national genius, we summon the great spirit of the creative power of the past to come dwell in the present.

But such elevated tasks will make people grow, and we do not have a right to doubt that, if the Almighty gives us the courage to demand what is immortal, He will give our Volk the power to accomplish what is immortal. Our cathedrals are witnesses to the glory of the past! The glory of the present will one day be gauged by the eternal values it leaves behind. Only then will Germany undergo a revival of its art and our Volk become conscious of a higher destiny.

Excerptions of the speech before the DAF and the RAD

Nuremberg, Zeppelin Field, September 12, 1935

Life necessarily divides us into many different groups and professions. It is the job of the political and spiritual education of the nation to overcome this division. This is primarily a job reserved for the Labor Service. It is to unite all Germans in labor and make of them a community.

For this purpose, it shall place in the hand of each the same instrument of labor, the instrument which does a Volk the most credit, the spade! There you march beneath the guardian of peace, the weapon of our inner self-assertion! You march thus today in the entire German Reich. The eye of the nation rests upon you, its hope! It sees in you something better than it has been in the past. If the entire German Volk were to see you today, I believe that even the last doubter would have been persuaded that the raising of a new nation, of a new community of our Volk is not a rumor, but reality.

Address to 100,000 Political Leaders

Nuremberg, September 13, 1935

It is good that we are able to see each other like this once a year, you the Fuhrer, and the Fuhrer yourselves. This can also serve as a lesson to all those who would so gladly make a distinction between the Fuhrer and his following, those who are so incapable of understanding that there can be no distinction between us, who would so gladly say: the Fuhrer, yes! But the Party-is that really necessary?195 I do not ask if it is necessary, but if it was necessary! A commander without officers and soldiers-there are those who would gladly welcome that! I will not be the commander without soldiers; I will remain your Fuhrer.

For me, you are the political officers of the German nation, bound to me for better or worse, just as I am bound to you for better or worse. Not one man alone conquered Germany; all united conquered Germany. One man won you over, and you have won over the German Volk!

We who were able to witness the reinstatement of our peerless Army this year to our most proud good fortune, all of us know that its ultimate and greatest strength lies in the Volk which supports it. For no one is in need of idealism more than the soldier. If ever the hour, that difficult, decisive hour of renunciation, should come upon him, what can but help him then? Only the word faith, idealism. Do not be deluded! All other half-measures are insignificant compared to the power of this destiny, this inner voice.

Hence we are particularly pleased today to have in our midst for the first time the representatives and the representation of our new German Volksheer, the Army from which nearly all of us without exception once came forth and to which the German Volk will once again give its sons in the future, handing them over in trust in the hope that they may once again become brave, disciplined, reliable, and self-assured men. We know that our Army is not educating them in warlike militarism any more than we have ever done. It is only educating them to be reliable, decent Volksgenossen who feel faithfully bound to the nation in the hour of need and danger, and if ever Fate were to subject them to the most difficult test of all, they would defend the freedom of their people bravely and decently. That is the reason behind recreating our Army.

It was not created to wage offensive wars, but to protect and to defend our Volk so that Germany may not be made to suffer yet again the sorry fate we were made to bear in the fifteen years behind us. Not in order to deprive other peoples of their freedom, but to protect our German freedom-that is the Army’s purpose. But it will come all the more naturally for this Army to accomplish its difficult offices the healthier the young German man is whom it receives from us.

And that is our task, too, to educate the German man to be politically clean and pure so that he may truly become a powerful member of our Volksgemeinschaft and assimilate for himself as well a taste of this pure, great idealism which reigned during the age of the struggle for German freedom. For as long as this idealism is alive in Germany, Germany shall never die!

  

Address to the German women

Nuremberg, September 13, 1935

Today women’s battalions were being formed in Marxist countries, and to that one could only reply, “That will never happen here! There are things a man does, and he alone is responsible for them. I would be ashamed to be a German man if ever, in the event of war, but a single woman were made to go to the front.” The woman had her own battlefield. With every child to which she gave birth for the nation, she was waging her battle for the nation. The man stands up for the Volk just as woman stands up for the family. A woman’s equal rights lie in the fact that she is treated with the high regard she deserves in those areas of life assigned to her by nature.

Women still respected brave, daring and determined men, and men had always admired and been attracted to feminine women. These were the two opposites which attracted each other in life.

And if good fortune would have it that these two people find each other, then the question of equal rights became superfluous, for it had already been answered by nature: it was no longer equal rights, but a single unity! Man and woman represented two intrinsically separate natures. In men, reason was dominant. But more stable than this was the emotion evidenced in women.

When I returned from prison after thirteen months of imprisonment, when the Party had been shattered, it was above all female party comrades who had held the Movement together. They did not succumb to clever or reasonoriented deliberation, but acted according to their hearts, and they have stood by me emotionally until today.

If our opponents were to allege, “You want to degrade women by assigning to them no other task beyond providing children,” he would reply that it is not a degradation to a woman to become a mother, but the contrary-it is her utmost elevation.

There was, the Fuhrer continued, no greater nobility for a woman than to be the mother of sons and daughters of a Volk. All the members of our youth lining the streets, so strong and beautiful, these beaming faces, these shining eyes-where would they be had not woman after woman been willing to give them the gift of life? The last immortality here on earth lay in preserving the Volk and the Volkstum.

People should not be able to accuse us that we have no understanding of the dignity of women. Quite the opposite! We have been in power now for three years, but I believe that when we have had a National Socialist government for thirty, forty, or fifty years, women’s position will have become quite different from what it was in the past-a position which cannot be gauged politically but only appreciated in human terms. We are happy knowing that the German woman, with her instinctive insight, will understand this.

There was a time when liberalism was fighting for ‘equal rights’ for women, but the faces of German women and German girls were devoid of hope, bleak and sad. And today? Today we see countless beaming, laughing faces. And here again it is woman’s instinct which tells her for good reason: we can laugh once again, for the future of the Volk is guaranteed.

The compensation which National Socialism gives woman in exchange for her work lies in that it is once again training men, real men, men who are decent, who stand erect, who are brave, who love honor. I believe that when, in the past few days, our healthy, unspoilt women have watched the marching columns, these sturdy and faultless young men of the spade, they must have been saying to themselves: what a healthy, marvelous race is growing up here! That is also an achievement which National Socialism has wrought for the German woman in the scope of its attitude toward women in general.

We have now reintroduced general conscription, because it is a wonderful education we wish to confer upon the upcoming young German generation, a wonderful breed which we are rearing in the Hitler Youth, the SA, and the Labor Service. I believe that the German Volk will not grow older during the next few years, but will create the impression that it remains forever young.

“This all applies to our girls, too. They too are growing up in a different world, with different ideas, and they, too, will become healthier than before. Thus the two columns march along their respective paths and will sooner or later encounter one another.”

Thus I believe that it is a marvelous thing after all to live in such an age and to lend a helping hand at one point or another. When I am one day forced to finish this life, my final conviction will be: it was not in vain. It was good, because it was a life of fighting, a life of struggle; because it was a life of work towards an ideal which often seemed so distant and which many a man believed would never be attained. We have reached our goal! That applies to all of you who are fighting with us here. No German generation will be happier in the end than ours. We have experienced infinite hardships. And the fact that we have succeeded in overcoming them and that we will succeed ever better in overcoming them-that is such a wonderful thing that all of us, men and women alike, can be proud and happy and will also be proud and happy one day. The time will come when you will all think back with proud joy on these years of struggling and fighting for this new Germany. Then it will be your most treasured memory that, as German women, you helped wage the battle for our German Volk in this great age of the German renascence and uprising.

Speech before 54,000 members of the Hitler Youth

in the Nuremberg stadium

September 14, 1935

 German Youth!

You are now lining up for this roll call for the third time; more than 54,000 representatives of a community which grows from year to year. The weight of those you personify here each year has become consistently greater. Not only in terms of quantity, oh no; we can see it: in terms of quality. If I think back on the first roll call and on the second and compare them to this one today, I can see the same development we see evidenced throughout the rest of German Volksleben: our Volk is becoming increasingly disciplined, sturdier, more taut- and youth is beginning to as well. The ideal of the man has been subjected to different views in our Volk as well. There were times-they seem to be long ago and are almost incomprehensible to us-when the ideal of the young German man was, to use the jargon, a beer-drinking, hard-living fellow.

Today we are happy to note that the ideal is no longer the beer-drinking and hardliving young man, but the tough young man, impervious to wind and weather. For the main thing is not how many glasses of beer he can drink, but how many blows he can withstand; not how long he can make the rounds night after night, but how many kilometers he can march.

Today the beer-happy bourgeois (Bierspiesser) of those times is no longer regarded as the ideal of the German Volk, but men and girls who are fit as a fiddle, who are string taut. What we want from our German youth is different from what the past wanted of it. In our eyes, the German youth of the future must be slender and supple, swift as greyhounds, tough as leather, and hard as Krupp steel. We must cultivate a new man in order to prevent the ruin of our Volk by the degeneration manifested in our age.

Speech before the SA and the SS

 (Short excerptions)

Nürnberg, September 15, 1934

Men of the SA and SS!

[…]

Today you present a different picture. I see how much has been learned within a year’s time and what has changed in favor of the Movement. However, even though this external picture has altered, it nonetheless constitutes proof that the spirit of the old-and by that I mean our best-times has remained, times in which the SA man and SS man never asked where the march was headed but stood ever by the flag.

And it is good that your exterior also makes manifest the changing times we are so lucky to witness. For Germany has once again undergone a great historic transition in these past years, and you yourselves, my men of the SA, will notice it visibly and clearly in but a few months. For the first time, many thousands shall report to you for duty: the discharged soldiers of the first round of conscripts in the new German Army.

And just as we once came here, now year after year the German Volk, drilled in protecting the nation, will flock to us and the men will be given the best German home in your ranks.

What was once a two-year temporary schooling of the nation which was afterward lost in the course of life and in the political doings of the parties-that is now being given in trust and held in custody for the German Volk. Only then will the cycle of our Volk’s education be complete. The boys-they will become members of the Jungvolk, and the Pimpfs will join the Hitler Youth, and the young men of the Hitler Youth will then report for duty in the SA, the SS, and the other associations; and the SA men and the SS men will one day report for duty at the Labor Service and from there proceed to the Army; and the soldier of the Volk will return once more to the organization of the Movement, of the Party, to the SA and the SS, and never again shall our Volk degenerate as it once regrettably did!

Speech for the “Wehrmacht Day”

Nuremberg, Zeppelin Field, September 16, 1935

Soldiers of the new German Wehrmacht!

For the second time, units of the Army and the Navy have assembled at this spot; for the first time in the position of a free armed force (Wehrfreibeit). Now you have been joined by the new units of our German Wehrmacht which can now be shown to the German Volk in this, their new context.

The German was always a good soldier. For our Volk the service of arms was never an enforced service, but a service of the highest honor in every period of our history. It was thus all the more painful and dispiriting for the honorloving, decent German man not to be allowed to be a soldier-or if so, under dishonorable and humiliating circumstances. How successfully this situation has now been mastered is something evidenced to you, my soldiers, and today to the entire German Volk, in this display of the union between the German man as soldier and the weapons of modern technology. Now every young German man, should he be found worthy by the nation, will join your ranks. And you will now once again perform your service with arms which are in use today throughout the world.

This service requires of each and every one of you certain sacrifices. Each of you must make a sacrifice in terms of personal freedom; he must exhibit obedience and subordination, but also toughness, endurance and, above all, an utmost sense of duty.

Those who believe this sacrifice must be wrung out of the German man are mistaken! Throughout the centuries, German men have done this voluntarily, and they were proud of their accomplishments. And not only in peacetime did the German man joyfully make this sacrifice to the nation as soldier; he did so no less when the crisis of the Reich called upon him to protect Volk und Vaterland. The German was not only a good soldier in peacetime, but a brave fighter at all times.

But what are all the sacrifices required of you and of us today compared to the sacrifices required of millions of us and our comrades twenty years ago? May each of you, should he ever perceive the duty of the soldier a burden, recall that eight days of drumfire required more in terms of sacrifice from the battalions and regiments of our Old Army than the service of peace during an entire year. The German Volk in arms was not brought to its knees by this. It was brought to its knees only because it lost its inner freedom, its inner belief in its rights. This faith has returned today, and this faith, my soldiers, belongs not only to hundreds of thousands, but to millions of you; and millions of our Volksgenossen embrace you with this burning faith, with this burning confidence and with this warm love.

And if you are personally required to make the sacrifices of obedience, of performing your duty, of subordination, of being tough, enduring, and efficient, do not forget, my soldiers, that the entire German Volk makes great sacrifices for you, too. It is a difficult task for the German Volk to build what is standing here and in countless other places in Germany. Our Volk must make difficult sacrifices, and it does so gladly. For first of all, it does not want to see its sons badly equipped and secondly, it no longer wants to see Germany defenseless.

So we continue to make these sacrifices mutually-the Volk for you, and you for the Volk! Both for Germany, our Volk, and our precious German Reich! And we are also making these sacrifices with the conviction that it does not require a war to reward us for doing so.

Once Germany had a proud and brave army; it had heroic fighters. That is natural for the German soldier.

But the army was not only the nation’s great defense in wartime; in peacetime it was also the splendid school of our Volk. It made men of us all, and the sight of it has always bolstered in us the faith in the future of our Volk.

And this splendid Old Army is not dead; it was only sleeping and has now been resurrected in you! You, my comrades, bear at the points of your weapons and on your helmets a tremendous legacy. You are not something artificially created, something void of tradition and a past; rather, whatever else Germany may have to offer pales compared to what you must and can personify in terms of tradition. There is indeed no need for you to win for the German army any title to fame; it already has that, you need only preserve it! And as we stand here armed in steel and bronze, it is not because we feel it is necessary to repair the honor of the German Volk. As long as this honor was borne by the soldier, no one in the world has ever been able to rob us of it! Germany has never lost its military honor, least of all in the last war. Thus we need not recover this honor. But we will see to it in the future that not as much honor, not as much heroic courage, and not as many sacrifices are in vain as has been the case in the past.

This army of old-of which you are a continuation and whose representative and bearer of tradition you must be-offered the greatest sacrifices on the altar of the Vaterland ever required of an army from its Volk.

Demonstrate that you are worthy and deserving of these sacrifices! See to it that the nation can depend on you just as it could once depend on our splendid old military, on our Old Army and Wehrmacht. See to it that the trust of the nation can be placed in you just as it was once placed in the army, for you wear helmets from its most glorious age. Then the German Volk will love you; it will see in you the best part of the German Volk, just as it sends its best sons into this unique organization year after year. This Volk will then believe in its army and gladly and joyfully make any sacrifice out of the conviction that, in doing so, it is preserving the peace of the nation and securing the education of the German Volk.

For you have become men, and we want the whole of German youth to attend this splendid, final school and likewise become the men you are. We want to raise a tough breed which is strong, reliable, loyal, obedient, and decent, so that we need not be ashamed of our Volk before history.

That is what the nation requests, what the nation hopes for and demands of you! And I know you will fulfill this demand and this hope and this request, for you are the new soldiers of the new German Reich!

Closing speech at the NSDAP congress in Nuremberg

September 16, 1935

When I will breathe my last breath is something I do not know. But that the Party will live on is something I do know, and that it will successfully shape the future of the German nation beyond any individuals, whether they be weak or strong, is something I believe and something I know! For it guarantees the stability of the leadership of the Volk and the Reich, and by its own stability it guarantees the authority this leadership requires. The constitution of the new German Reich will grow out of this solid base. It is the duty of the Party as weltanschaulicb shaper and political navigator of German fate to provide the nation and thus the Reich with its Fuhrer. The more naturally and uncontestedly this principle is established and maintained, the stronger Germany will be.

The army as the representative of and organization for the defensive strength of our Volk must always preserve and maintain the organized military strength of the Reich entrusted to it and place same in loyalty and obedience at the disposal of the Fuhrer given to the nation by the Movement. For when the respective new Fuhrer is appointed, he shall be Herr of the Party, Head of the Reich, and Supreme Commander of the Wehrmacht. If these principles form the unshakeable foundation of the German structures of Volk and State, Germany will be able to withstand any storms which may come its way.

But let the two fundamental manifestations of the new Reich both bear in mind that they can only satisfy the demands placed upon them jointly. The Party gives to the Volk the Army, and the Volk gives to the Army its soldiers; both together thus provide to the German Reich the security of internal peace and order and the power to stand up for itself. Today, as Fuhrer of the Reich and the nation, I can still personally offer help and advice. But these principles must lead from the personal to the eternal.

Fuhrers will come and Fuhrers will die, but Germany must live on. And alone this Movement will lead Germany to this life. All of us, though, will one day be judged by the quality and historic permanency of what we are building today! We, my Party comrades, co-leaders of the Volk and the Army, have been chosen by Fate to make history in the loftiest sense of the word. What millions of people are deprived of has been given to us by Providence. Even most distant posterity will be reminded of us by our work. And it should one day find most noteworthy and distinguished of all the fact that, in an age marked by lack of loyalty and rampant betrayal, it was possible in the Germany of our age to form as never before a mutual league of the most loyal followers. And we know one thing: One day, a page in world history will be devoted to us, the men from the National Socialist Party and the German Army who joined efforts to build and safeguard the new German Reich. One day we will stand then side by side, immortalized in the pantheon of history, immortalized in indivisible loyalty as in the time of the great struggle and the great fulfillment.