Adolf Hitler’s appeal on August 23, 1932

 

National Socialists! Germans!

 

In November 1918, Marxism attacked and destroyed the old Empire in a cursed revolt, aided and abetted by the cowardice and weakness of bourgeois politicians. Ever since this atrocity, Germany’s misery has been unutterable. The counterpart to the terror of the November Criminals at home was the ensuing terror of our opponents from abroad.

 

While the bourgeois politicians subscribed to the new system in pitiful obsequiousness, if not at least drawing back from it in cowardice, our National Socialist Movement alone has taken up the fight for our Volk’s everlasting rights to live.

 

Ever since, we have been pursued by the hatred of those very parties which, in the name of Marxism, have from the beginning always used violence and terror as standard weapons in class conflict. Their pre-war slogan, “Und willst du nicht Genosse sein, so schlag ich dir den Schädel ein”218 has been upheld since the revolution with appalling frankness as a natural right and even recognized by bourgeois bureaucrat-governments. The fact that we National Socialists were not willing to surrender our constitutional rights of freedom of speech and freedom to demonstrate was interpreted as a “provocation of the proletariat” and thus as justification for our persecution.

 

For fourteen years the public authorities of this system have, more often than not in a scandalously one-sided fashion, rebuked not the oppressors, but rather forbidden the oppressed, time and time again. Uncounted are the sacrifices which young Germany, possessing no other representation but the National Socialist Movement, has been forced to make for its ideals.

 

More than 300 massacred-one could literally say, butchered-party comrades number among our dead martyrs. Tens of thousands and even more tens of thousands have been injured, and some will be crippled for the rest of their lives. The bourgeois constitutional state and the yellow bourgeois press barely took any notice. Only when the cup began to run over and the terror of the red bands of organized murderers and criminals became unbearable did von Papen’s “National Government” rouse itself to take instant action. We have now become acquainted with the first evidence of their national will. On nearly the same day on which the murderers and tormentors of our party comrades in Ohlau escaped with mild sentences, although we suffered two dead and 27 seriously injured, the courts of Herr von Papen’s Government sentenced five National Socialists to death. German Volksgenossen! Whoever of you harbors sentiments for the fight for the honor and freedom of the nation will understand why I refused to join this bourgeois Government. The courts of Herr von Papen will ultimately sentence many thousands of National Socialists to death. Did they really believe that they would be able to cover up this action, an action which is struck with blindness and challenges the entire Volk, with my name as well? The gentlemen are mistaken! Herr von Papen, I will have nothing to do with your bloody objectivity, I wish for victory for national Germany and annihilation for its Marxist destroyers and corrupters. But I am not suited to be the hangman of the national freedom fighters of the German Volk.

 

With this deed, our standpoint in respect to this national Cabinet has been mapped out once and for all. Whatever agony upon agony the Heavens above us may send, our Movement will still come to terms with this Government which executes our fellow fighters. Herr von Papen can feel free to set up such blood tribunals to pass judgment on our Movement. The power of the national uprising will come to terms with this system as surely as it will eliminate Marxism in spite of these attempts to save it. In view of this most atrocious of unjust death sentences, there is all the more reason for us to have only one single mission in life: to fight, and fight once again!

 

We shall liberate the word “national” from the grip of an objectivity whose real innermost essence is inflamed by the judgment passed in Beuthen against national Germany. Herr von Papen has thus engraved his name in German history with the blood of national fighters. The seed which will nevertheless bear fruit from this will be one which can no longer be appeased by punishment. The fight for the lives of our five comrades begins now.

 

Adolf Hitler