April 26, 1942
Deputies! Men of the German Reichstag!
On December 11, 1941, when I was last able to speak to you, I had the privilege of accounting for the course of events during the past year. The full extent of their historic greatness and continued political significance will perhaps not be appreciated until centuries have passed. Only a few weeks after the suppression of the revolt in Belgrade, which was instigated jointly by England and Moscow, Europe realized, perhaps for the first time in centuries, the common threat from the east. The existence or nonexistence of our continent has often depended on the successful defense against it. For many men, the causes of the bloody war, which has been forced on us following September 1939, have now become clearer.
For this war does not share any longer the characteristics of the inner- European confrontations that we have previously grown accustomed to.
Increasingly, the deep impression has taken hold that the usual or reasonable interests of individual countries do not suffice to explain the reasons for this historic struggle. Instead, it seems to be one of those elemental confrontations which, by shaking up the world once every few millennia, herald the millennium of a new era.
Many of the historical figures who appear in its course are no more aware of the profound meaning of their mission and actions than the simple soldier is in the context of a larger military operation. Such eruptive epochs are so long that the individual human being finds it difficult to see the context and even the significance of his life in relation to the overall course of the events. In spite of this, even where there appears to be no sense to or benefit of such a process, which shakes up people and even continents, there are beneficiaries. Many believe they have to drive, but they are only the driven. Others want to strike and, in the end, they are the ones who are stricken.
When, on September 3, 1939, after endless German endeavors for peace, the new Reich was presented with the declaration of war by France and England, after these states pushed Poland to the front as the chosen force, issuing it a carte blanche, one had to despair of the reason of a world which, apparently without reason, virtually forced the catastrophe, instead of attempting to prevent the misfortune of an insane war.
No matter with what great hypocritical friendship its archcapitalists welcome the Bolshevik statesmen, no matter how tenderly its archbishops embrace the bloody beasts of Bolshevik atheism, the more they resort to lies, hypocrisy, and fraud in order to cover morally for the unnatural coalition with this empire before their own people and the rest of mankind, the less they will be in a position actually to deceive the perceptive people, in order to prevent the natural evolution of an inevitable historical development. There is a wise saying dating from antiquity, namely that the gods first blind those whom they have destined to damnation [actually: “the gods first drive insane those whom they wish to destroy”].
I do not know whether all Englishmen today still consider it a wise and enlightened act to have dismissed the numerous opportunities for an understanding, which I had proposed ever since the year 1935. Or whether today they are still as convinced that it was very clever to have turned down my offers for an alliance, which I had renewed even on September 1, 1939, and to have rejected my peace proposals after the Polish and French campaigns.
I also know another commandment. It says that man must give an added push to what the gods have destined to fall. So now what has to happen will happen.
When understanding and reason have apparently been silenced in international life, then this does not necessarily mean that there is not a rational will somewhere, even if from the outside only stupidity and stubbornness can be discerned as causes.
The British Jew, Lord Disraeli, once said that the racial question is the key to world history. We National Socialists have been raised in this belief. By devoting ourselves to the essence of the racial question, we have obtained clarification of many events that would otherwise appear to defy understanding.
The hidden powers that drove England into the first World War in the year 1914 were Jews. The power that paralyzed us at that time and finally forced us to surrender under the slogan that Germany should not be allowed to carry its flag home victorious was a Jewish one. Jews engineered the revolution by our Volk and thereby robbed us of our powers of further resistance. After 1939, Jews maneuvered the British empire into a dangerous crisis. Jews were the carriers of the Bolshevik infection which once threatened to destroy Europe. At the same time, they were the warmongers in the ranks of the plutocracies. A circle of Jews in America once drove this country into the war against all national interest, simply and solely because of Jewish-capitalist motives. And President Roosevelt, lacking capabilities of his own, has the support of said brain trust, whose leading men I need not mention by name: they are only Jews.
Through them, as in the year 1917, the United States of America was driven step by step into a war without reason and sense, by a Jewish-infected president and his completely Jewish cohorts, against nations which have never harmed America, and against people from whom America can never profit.
What sense does a war make that is waged by a state representing a space without a people, against people without space? In this war, politically speaking, it is not a question of the interests of individual people, but a question of the confrontation between nations that seek to secure life on this earth for their members and people, and nations who have become the instrument of an international world parasite. German and allied soldiers have become wellacquainted with the actual activities of this Jewish-international warmongering in a country where Jewry has set up an exclusive dictatorship, preached it as the idol of a future human race to which, as once here with us, other people’s inferior subjects have incomprehensibly become enslaved. At this moment, as always in its history, the seemingly aging Europe again raises high the torch of a realization, and its men march today as the representatives of a new and better order, as the true youth of the social and national freedom of the world.
If I speak to you today in the name of this true youth of Europe and therefore of a younger world, then I do this with the sentiment of a man who, for a sacred mission, has left behind him the most difficult struggle of his life.
Further, I speak to you as the commander of armies. They are mastering a fate that is the most difficult trial, the kind which Providence only imposes on those who are destined for the greatest things.
If the gods love only those who demand the impossible of them, then the Lord will correspondingly give His blessing only to him who remains steadfast in face of the impossible.
My Deputies! During this winter, a battle of the world (Weltkampf) was decided, a battle the problems of which far surpassed the tasks that should and can be resolved in a normal war.
When, in November 1918, the undefeated German Volk, befuddled by the phraseology of the then American president Wilson, laid down its arms and left the battlefield, it did so under the influence of that Jewish race that now hoped to construct a secure bastion for Bolshevism in the heart of Europe. We know the theoretical principles and the cruel reality of this international plague. It is called the reign of the proletariat but it is the dictatorship of Jewry! It is the extermination of the national establishment and intelligentsia of nations, the domination of the proletariat-by that time leaderless and therefore rendered defenseless due to its own fault-by the solely Jewish international criminals.
What happened to such a cruel extent in Russia-the extermination of countless millions of leading persons-was to be continued in Germany. If this intention failed, then it was because our Volk still had too many healthy powers of resistance, but insofar as the establishment on the Bolshevik side is concerned, which consisted only of Jews, it was due above all to the lack of courage and to the unanimous approval by the proletariat for the execution in Germany of what had succeeded in Russia. In individual parts of the Reich at least, we witnessed the beginnings of this development and we eliminated it at the risk of numerous idealists’ lives.
On Hungary, the curse of this satanic work weighed more heavily. There, too, it was only possible to break the power of Jewish might by the use of national force. The name of the man who, as the leader in the struggle against this crime, became the savior of Hungary lives on today among us as that of one of the first representatives of the incipient European uprising.
The most difficult confrontation with this threatening destruction of people and state took place in Italy. In a heroic rebellion, Italian war veterans and Italian youths, led by a uniquely blessed man, defeated the compromise between democratic cowardice and Bolshevik force in a bloody struggle. They have put in its place a new positive idea of people and state.
I recommend every German to study the history of the Fascist revolution.
Not without being deeply moved, he will follow this man’s path. His movement has so much in common with ours that we feel its struggle to be part of our own fate. Only with the victory of Fascism could one speak of the incipient salvation of Europe.
Only then, the conglomerate of ideas of a destructive and disintegrating nature was replaced not by the force of the bayonet but by a truly constructive new idea. For the first time, not only were Bolsheviks defeated in a state but also and above all Marxists were won over. Won over not only for the reshaping of a better and healthier social order, which regards the state not as the protector of a certain social class but as the guarantor of the standard of living of all.
At the same time when these history-making events were taking place, the National Socialist movement undertook the fulfillment of its mission in our own Volk. Here, too, the hour came when-in the confrontation between Jewish internationalism and the National Socialist idea of people and state- healthy nature prevailed.
Also in most other European countries, this conflict occurred. However, there was a difference in that it was at first overshadowed by compromise in some countries; in others, it was temporarily eliminated by public funds. We all remember the next great and decisive confrontation in Spain, where the leadership of a single man forced a clear and final decision. Following a bloody civil war, the national revolution there likewise defeated the Bolshevik archenemy.
With the increasing recognition of Jews as the parasitic germs of these diseases, state after state was forced in the last years to take a position on this fateful question for nations. Imbued with the instinct of self-preservation, they had to take those measures which were suited to protect for good their own people against this international poison.
Even if Bolshevik Russia is the concrete product of this Jewish infection, one should not forget that democratic capitalism creates the conditions for it.
In this way, the Jews prepare what the same Jews execute in the second stage of this process. In the first stage, they deprive the majority of men of their rights and reduce them to helpless slaves. Or, as they themselves put it, they make them expropriated proletarians in order to spur them on, as a fanaticized mob, to destroy the foundations of their state. Later, this is followed by the extermination of their own national intelligentsia, and finally by the elimination of all cultural foundations that, as a thousand-year-old heritage, could provide these people with their inner worth or serve as a warning to the future. What remains after that is the beast in man and a Jewish class that, as parasites in leadership positions, will in the end destroy the fertile soil on which it thrives.
On this process-which according to Mommsen results in the Jewishengineered decomposition of people and states-the young, awakening Europe has now declared war. Proud and honorable people in other parts of the world have allied themselves to it. They will be joined by hundreds of millions of oppressed men who, irrespective of how their present leaders may view this, will one day break their chains. The end of these liars will come, liars who claim to protect the world against a threatening domination but who actually only seek to save their own world-rule.
We are now in the midst of this mighty, truly historic awakening of the people, partly as leading, acting, or performing men. On the one side stand the men of the democracies that form the heart of Jewish capitalism, with their whole dead weight of dusty theories of state, their parliamentary corruption, their outdated social order, their Jewish brain trusts, their Jewish newspapers, stock exchanges, and banks-a combination, a mix of political and economic racketeers of the worst sort; on their side, there is the Bolshevik state, that is, that number of brutish men over whom the Jew, as in the Soviet Union, wields his bloody whip. And on the other side stand those nations who fight for their freedom and independence, for the securing of their people’s daily bread.
So it is the so-called “haves” from the cellars of the Kremlin to the vaults of New York’s banking houses against the “have-nots,” that is, those nations for which a single bad harvest means misery and hunger. In spite of all the diligence of their inhabitants, they are unable to obtain their daily bread at a time when, in the states and countries of the “haves,” wheat, corn, coffee, and so on, are thrown into the fire in order to achieve somewhat higher prices. However, the battleground where the decision will fall is situated in the east of Europe.
I spoke to you about the successes of the years of fighting lying behind us, my Deputies, whenever time and circumstances commanded and made it possible. The last time I spoke about the fight in the past year was on December 11, 1941.
I would like to stress here that my speeches are primarily addressed to the German Volk and to its friends. I do not speak in order to convince people who, because of stupidity or ill intentions, fail deliberately to see the truth and do not wish to hear about it. Because if I compare the true course of events with the conclusions drawn from them by Mr. Churchill-to cite one example-then there appears so wide a discrepancy between the events and their interpretation that every attempt at reconciling these contradictory views must be futile. Since September 1939, indeed ever since the beginning of the seizure of power by National Socialism, I have made mistake after mistake and faux pas after faux pas.
By contrast, there was not a single phase that Mr. Churchill does not claim to represent an “encouragement” for his cause. He will probably claim this to the end.
That England declared war on us was an encouraging sign of its strength.
That others found themselves willing to be led to the slaughter for British egotism was no less encouraging. A mere meeting between Churchill and Daladier or Paul Reynaud produced encouraging symptoms. Discussions between two or more Allied generals are as encouraging evidence of the military progress of the democratic cause as the fireside talks of the sick man in the White House are proof of the intellectual progress. When Mr. Cripps flew to Moscow for the first time, this was no less encouraging than his return flight from India. That General MacArthur was able to flee the Philippines just in time was likewise an encouraging factor. It is just as encouraging when twenty Englishmen with blackened faces and rubber soles, aboard a British inflatable raft, succeed in sneaking up to the coasts occupied by us and land, only to take off again at the appearance of a German patrol. If an emigre government, that is, an assembly of zeroes, issues a declaration against Germany, then this seems encouraging, just as when Mr. Churchill announces the destruction of German U-boats, or speaks of a new invention, or a new offensive, or a second front, and so on.
Nothing can be done about this. Every people has its own type of encouragements. For example, I once regarded it as encouraging that we succeeded within eighteen days in sweeping away the Polish state with its thirty-three million men in a number of mighty battles of annihilation (Vernichtungsschlachten). I further regarded it as encouraging that, in this period, neither France nor England dared to feel their way up to the West Wall. I believe that it was also encouraging that we could land in Norway and that we did not do so at night with our faces blackened and with rubber soles, but in broad daylight and in climbing boots with spikes, and that we gained complete control of this Norway in barely six weeks. It was likewise very encouraging for all of us to see how the British Expeditionary Force was thrown out of Norway within a few weeks.
I likewise believe that we have good reason to find encouraging that it was possible for us in barely six weeks to beat the French-British armies to complete annihilation, to gain control of Holland for good in not even one week and of Belgium in barely three weeks, to defeat the British forces, to capture them, or to force them out to sea at Dunkirk. I myself felt that it was particularly encouraging that, together with Italy, we secured great successes not only in France but also in North Africa.
It was likewise encouraging in my eyes that, together with our allies, we were able within a few weeks to smash the Serbian rebellion inspired by Washington and London and engineered by Moscow. It was further encouraging for us to see that the British Expeditionary Force quickly retreated first to the Peloponnesian peninsula and then across the sea to Crete, to the extent that it was not destroyed or captured by us.
It was no less encouraging for the German Volk that, since June 22 of last year, we have been able, together with our allies, to repel from our borders the Bolshevik danger and to force it back over a thousand kilometers, and that, at the same time, our U-boats and Luftwaffe, as well as our other naval forces, sank more than sixteen million GRT [gross registered tons] of enemy merchant ships, continue to sink them today, and will sink them in the future. I regard it as an encouragement that we were able to adjust to our standard the gauges of the railroad system in the expanses of the east and to operate this system, which at this time is larger than that of the entire English motherland.
On the topic of the Japanese deeds of heroism, that unique triumphant march, I can only say that, in our eyes, they are likewise very encouraging. And in this manner, in response to the encouraging elements of which Mr. Churchill and Mr. Roosevelt speak, I could list countless deeds that represent an encouragement for us. As I see it, the most encouraging thing for Germany and its allies is that Mr. Churchill and Roosevelt work in London and Washington, and not in Berlin or Rome. The English will not believe this, but that is the way it is!
My Deputies! Men of the Reichstag! When I spoke to you the last time, a winter had set in in the east, the like of which Europe had not seen for over a hundred forty years even in this area. In a few days, the thermometer dropped from around zero degrees to minus forty-seven degrees and below. Probably nobody can appreciate what that means unless he has experienced it himself. Four weeks earlier than anticipated, all further operations came to a sudden end. The front, which was in the middle of a forward movement, could not be allowed to be swept back, nor could it be left in the positions taken up at that moment. Therefore, a withdrawal to a general line stretching from Taganrog to Lake Ladoga was made. I can say today that, while this process can be easily described here, it was infinitely difficult to carry it out in reality. The lightning impact of such a cold wave, which even in these areas occurs only once every hundred years, paralyzed not only the men but also and above all the machinery. There were moments when both threatened to freeze. Looking at the vastness of this east, you also have to consider the psychological strain which destroyed the French army in 1812, and whose memory is still capable of paralyzing the vigor of weak natures. The main burden of the battle lay with the army and the allied foreign units. Therefore, I felt it was an obligation of honor for me to tie my name at this moment to the fate of the army.
As a soldier, I felt so very responsible for the conduct of this battle that I would have regarded it as unbearable in this most difficult hour not to confront personally whatever Providence appeared to have in store for us. That we succeeded in completely mastering the threatening catastrophe, I owe primarily and exclusively to the bravery, the loyalty, and the superhuman capacity for suffering of our brave soldiers. They alone have made it possible for me to hold a front against which the enemy began to throw hecatombs of men.
For months on end, ever new, barely trained masses from the expanses of central Asia or the Caucasus assaulted our lines, which, especially at night, could be held only in the form of strongpoints. It is impossible to lie in an open field without cover at minus thirty, forty degrees or lower. If, in spite of this, the Russians succeeded in pushing or seeping through these barely fortified positions with ever new waves of attack, then this was possible only by sacrificing hundreds of thousands of men.
But the problem that weighed on us most heavily at this time was the question of supplies. Neither the German men nor the German panzers, nor regrettably our German locomotives were prepared for the onslaught of the cold. And, still, the existence or nonexistence of our armies depended on the maintenance of our supply lines. You will therefore understand and surely approve that, in one case or another, I acted ruthlessly and harshly in order to overcome a destiny to which we might otherwise have succumbed, by fighting with the fiercest determination.
Because, my Deputies, when in the year 1812, the Napoleonic armies were swept back from Moscow and were finally wiped out, minus twenty-five was the lowest temperature. This year, however, the lowest temperature we measured at one location along the eastern front was precisely fifty-two degrees below zero. In summing up, if I give my view on the accomplishments of the troops themselves, I can only say that they all have fulfilled their duty to the utmost.
But surely the German infantry once again ranks at the top. On the march for thousands of kilometers, forever on the attack, it plunged into a winter practically overnight. It had neither anticipated it in this form, nor had it ever before witnessed it. We all know the paralyzing influence of the cold. It puts man to sleep and kills him painlessly. That we were spared this fate in these critical weeks, we owe to the superhuman fitness and strength of will not only of the soldiers, but also and above all of the noncommissioned officers, and officers up to those generals who, in realizing the approaching danger and at great risk to their own lives, spurred on the men time and again and formed them into that sworn community that today is probably the best the German Volk has ever called its own. In speaking of this infantry, I would today like to underline for the first time the constant and exemplary bravery and toughness of my SS divisions and SS police units. From the start, I regarded them as an unshakable unit, just as obedient, loyal, and brave in wartime as in peacetime.
However, in the ranks of this infantry also fought the panzer grenadiers and panzer destroyers, engineers, gunners, signalers, and, last but not least, the drivers of our columns. They all deserve the homeland’s gratitude. Through its heroic sorties, the Luftwaffe has helped these brave soldiers time and again, and not only through its valiant pilots of fighters, bombers, spotting and transport planes, but also, wherever necessary, through its flak and Luftwaffe battalions which on the ground unshakably defended their airfields and finally also defended the especially threatened sections of the front.
In the fierce cold, construction teams of the Todt organization and the Standarte Speer helped time and again to free arterial roads from interference and to defend the traffic routes-if necessary with their own blood-against the partisans. Men of the Labor Service fought with the spade and the rifle.
Superhuman efforts were demanded of the medical officers and medical noncommissioned officers, the stretcher-bearers, the male nurses, and, above all, the female nurses of the German Red Cross and the NSV.
Railroad engineers set up ever new lines, bridges, and crossings at a time when the steel was so brittle that tracks began to crack when used. In spite of great weariness, train crews and switchmen tried to help their comrades at the front, because there were times when everything depended on a few single railway sections and trains. That all this was achieved, we owe to the deathdefying courage and fighting morale of countless and nameless heroes who will live on through their unfading glorious deeds in the history of our Volk.
It would therefore be a great injustice if I failed on this day to commemorate those who have shared our suffering. It is hardly necessary to speak about our Finnish comrades in arms. They were so excellent and so experienced in this battle that they can only serve as examples to us. In particular, they remained calm in the face of Russian units breaking in or seeping through. By closing their front ranks, they began with the annihilation of the Bolsheviks operating behind their backs. If I start from the north, then I also have to mention the soldiers of one division from the south of Europe who went through everything at Lake Ilmen that our own men had to go through.
When the Spanish division one day returns to its homeland, we cannot neglect appreciation of their loyalty and bravery until death. All other units of our Hungarian, Slovak, and Croatian allies deserve the same evaluation: they have fulfilled their mission with the greatest bravery and reliability. The three Italian divisions remained in their place all winter in spite of the cold, which was particularly painful for them. Thanks to their bravery, every Russian breakthrough was doomed there as well. The same applies to the brave soldiers of the allied Romanian army, under the command of Marshal Antonescu.
There, as everywhere else along the front, a gradual welding together of the various European nations in the face of the common enemy was notable. This applied not only to the Germanic volunteers with the SS units, but also to the Belgian and French participants in this joint venture. But also Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Ukrainians, and Tartars took part in the fight against the Bolshevik enemy of the world. The air forces of our allies, too, dealt the enemy heavy losses, starting with the Finnish down to the Italian fighter pilots.
In the course of these mighty, historic successes, it was necessary for me to intervene only in a few cases. Only when nerves failed, obedience faltered, or a sense of duty was lacking in performing tasks, did I make hard decisions. I did so empowered by the sovereign right that I believe has been accorded to me by my German Volk. For the homeland’s supporting me in this struggle, I wish to say thanks not only in my own name but also and above all in the name of our soldiers.
It fills me with great pride and profound satisfaction that the education of our Volk through National Socialism is increasingly becoming apparent. While the party has by far the greatest number not only of its members but also of its leaders at the front-millions of men from the political organization, the SA, the National Socialist Motorized Corps, and so on, do their duty as soldiers- their leadership truly serves as an example. It helps not only the frequently pressed homeland through its organization of the labor front and the National Socialist People’s Welfare Organization, but also the soldiers in the field.
My appeal for a wool collection has made it possible within the shortest time, together with many organizational improvements, to give the troops warmer clothing than possible before. Therefore, we may all feel proud-and I say so at this moment-particularly of the soldiers in the front lines. We have overcome a fate that brought another man to his knees a hundred thirty years ago. The trial that this winter represented for the front and the homeland should serve as a lesson to all of us. From a purely organizational point of view, I have made the necessary dispositions to prevent a repetition of a similar state of emergency. No matter where the coming winter finds us, the German Reichsbahn will do a better job than in the previous winter. From locomotives to panzers, tractors, and trucks, the army in the east will be better equipped.
For the individual man, however, even in the event that a similar natural disaster repeats itself, experience and work will prevent the development of a situation similar to the one we have witnessed. That I am determined to do everything in order to be able to fulfill these tasks, you will not doubt, my old comrades in arms.
In order to do so, I expect the following: That the nation accords me the right to intervene immediately and act accordingly wherever there is no unconditional obedience and action in the service of the greater mission, which is a question of “to be or not to be.” Front, homeland, the transportation system, the administration, and the judiciary must be subject to only one thought, namely, the struggle for victory. Nobody can in this period insist on acquired rights; instead, he must know that today there are only duties.
I therefore ask the German Reichstag for an explicit confirmation that I possess the legal right to order everybody to fulfill his duties, or if the case dictates to sentence, to a dishonorable dismissal whoever, in my view, fails conscientiously to fulfill his duty, or to relieve him of duty and position, irrespective of his person and acquired rights.
It is precisely because it is a question of a few exceptions among millions of decent men that above all the rights of these exceptions today there stands one common duty.
I am therefore not interested in whether or not, in the present emergency situations, vacation can be accorded to every official or every employee. And I also refuse to tolerate that this vacation, which cannot be accorded, will be given credit for in later years.
If anybody has the right to request a leave of absence, then this would have to be first our frontline soldiers, and second our workers for the front. And if, for months, I have not been in a position to grant this leave of absence to the front in the east as a whole, then nobody in the homeland should come to me insisting on his office’s “acquired right” to leave. I myself have the right to refuse this, because-as these persons may not be aware-I have not even taken three days of vacation for myself since 1933. I likewise expect the German judiciary to understand that the nation does not exist for it, but that it exists for the nation. This means that the world, which includes Germany, should not perish so that a formal law can live, but that Germany should live, no matter what the formal opinions of the judiciary may be. To mention only one example, I fail to comprehend why a criminal, who marries in the year 1937 and batters his wife until she finally becomes mentally ill and dies as the result of the last battering, is sentenced to five years’ imprisonment at a time when tens of thousands of honorable German men must die in order to save their homeland from destruction through Bolshevism, and, most importantly, to protect their women and children. From now on, I will intervene in such cases and I will dismiss from office those judges who obviously fail to recognize the dictates of the moment.
The accomplishments of the German soldier, the German worker, the farmer, our women in the cities and in the country, millions of people of our middle classes, and their sacrifices for the sake of victory demand a congenial altitude in those who have been appointed by the Volk itself to guard its interests. At this time, there can be no highhandedness and acquired rights.
Instead, we all are only the obedient servants of our Volk’s interests.
My Deputies! Men of the Reichstag! We have a mighty winter battle behind us. The hour will come when the front loses its stiffness again. Then history will decide who won this winter: the attacker, who idiotically sacrificed masses of his men, or the defender, who simply held his positions. Week after week, I read about the mighty threats of our enemies. You know that I regard my mission as far too sacred and serious ever to allow me to be careless. What can be done by man to prevent danger, I have done and will continue to do in the future. And to what extent our preparations for the overcoming of this danger were sufficient will be shown by the future. The great warlords of England and the United States of America do not frighten and terrify me. In my eyes, generals like MacArthur do not possess miraculous abilities, as the British press believes, but at best the ability for running away. What I do admire is the modesty of my enemies in assessing the greatness of their own successes or themselves. Should the idea of continuing the aerial warfare with new means against the civilian population prevail in England, then I would like to say the following to all the world: Mr. Churchill began this war in May 1940. I warned and waited for four months. Then came a time when I was forced to act. The man who is solely responsible for this type of combat then began to bemoan it. Now, too, my waiting is not weakness. May this man not again wail and whimper if I am now forced to give a response that will bring much suffering to his own people.
From now on, I will retaliate blow for blow until this criminal falls and his work dies.
If I look at the world we embody and at all the men whom I am fortunate to have as friends and allies, when I further look at the group of my political leaders in the Reich, at my Reichsleiters, Gauleiters, at my ministers, and so on, at my Reichsmarschall, field marshals, admirals, colonel generals, and the numerous other leaders at the fronts, then I look with the greatest confidence to a future where not clowns but men will make history. The war in the east will be continued. The Bolshevik colossus will be beaten by us until it is smashed. And against England, the German U-boats will be increasingly brought to bear. In the autumn of 1939, after he sank about ten U-boats nearly every day, Mr. Churchill assured the English people that he would overcome the danger of the U-boats. Now, I wish to assure him that this danger will more likely overcome him. At another point, I have already stated that the freezing of the German U-boat deployment last year was exclusively due to my efforts which were directed at avoiding every conceivable occasion for a conflict with America. However, this could not prevent the president of the American Union, driven by his Jewish patrons, from attempting to restrict the German conduct of the war by ever new measures and to make U-boat warfare impossible for us through declarations in violation of international law.
Therefore, we were gratified that the valiant Japanese people decided to respond to the impudent provocations by this lunatic in the only way possible in the eyes of its own people and world history. The German U-boats were finally released on the oceans in the full sense of the word. And even if, nearly every week, the British-American press twaddles about a new invention that will lead to the irretrievable loss of the U-boats, this is no newer than the fact that our German and allied U-boats and weapons improve from year to year in the same way. What the German Navy has achieved in spite of its numerically small size far surpasses what our far greater navy was capable of achieving in the World War.
What our U-boats are capable of will be proved month after month.
Because, contrary to the tipsy statements by Churchill in the autumn of 1939 on the end of the German U-boats, I can assure him that their number will increase at a steady pace every month and that today it has already far surpassed the maximum number of U-boats in the World War.
If the Italian-German cooperation in the Mediterranean has led to an ever closer comradeship and to ever increasing successes, then Germany’s cooperation with Italy, Japan, and the other allies will bring equally great results in other theaters of the war. That provoking Japan to enter this war was perhaps the most disingenuous and stupid act by our enemies has already been proved by the few months of heroic struggle by this people. I do not know whether today all Englishmen still firmly believe that the political methods of Mr. Churchill and Mr. Roosevelt were correct, and that the deployment in this war was ever in keeping with a possible profit.
We Germans have everything to win in this struggle of “to be or not to be,” because losing this war would anyway be our end. Central Asian barbarism would sweep across Europe as at the time of the invasions by Huns and Mongols. Nobody knows this better than the German soldier and the nations allied to him, who are getting to know the essence of the Bolshevik liberation of mankind at the front, who are seeing with their own eyes what the paradise of the worker and peasant looks like in reality, and who has described it correctly: National Socialism and Fascism, or our enemies. England cannot win this war. It will lose. And then perhaps the realization will finally go down in its history that one should not entrust the fate of people and states to cynical drunkards or lunatics. In this struggle, truth will win in the end! And it is on our side! That Providence has chosen me and allows me to lead the German Volk in such a great age is my great pride. I will unconditionally tie my name and my life to its fate. I address no other request to the Almighty than to bless us in the future as in the past and to preserve my life for as long as it is necessary in His eyes for the fateful struggle of the German Volk. For there is no greater glory than the honor to be the Fuhrer of a Volk in difficult times and, therefore, the bearer of the responsibility! And I know no greater happiness than the awareness that this Volk is my German one.
Hermann Göring – closing words for the Reichstag session
There can be no doubt that, in the present time of war in which the German Volk struggle for “to be or not to be,” the Fuhrer must possess the right claimed by him to do all that serves the struggle for victory or contributes to it. Therefore-without being bound by existing regulations-in his capacity as the Fuhrer of the nation, as supreme commander of the Wehrmacht, as head of government, and supreme bearer of the executive power, as supreme Law Lord, and as leader of the party, the Fuhrer must be able at all times to order every German-whether he is a common soldier or officer, low or high-ranking administrator, or judge, leading or lesser functionary in the party, worker or employee-to fulfill his duties by all means that appear appropriate to him; and if he neglects these duties, the Fuhrer must be able to assign him a suitable punishment following a conscientious examination, irrespective of so-called acquired rights, and, in particular, without initiating prescribed procedures, to relieve him of his office, rank, or position.
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