Nuremberg, Labor-Front -- Speech of September 12, 1936

HOW Germany has to work to wrest a few square kilometers from the ocean and from the swamps while others are swimming in a superfluity of land! If I had the Ural Mountains with their incalculable store of treasures in raw materials, Siberia with its vast forests, and the Ukraine with its tremendous wheat fields, Germany and the National Socialist leadership, would swim in plenty! . . . There was sometimes advanced as an excuse for Russia that she had been through war and through revolution. Well, we stood against twenty-six States in the war and we had a revolution, but I have taken as my fundamental law not to destroy anything. Had I done so there would have been an excuse for rebuilding during another eighteen years. But that was not our plan. We wanted additional work for our unemployed and the use of the volume of their increased production to increase every man's share in consumption. Wages are not based on production; production itself is the wage. If I had wished I could have substituted officials for employers, but nature and reality select best. We do not wish bureaucratic economics as in Russia, nor do we wish to establish economic democracy here. Yet that does not mean either that we wish to let things drift as they please. Our fundamental economic principles are, first, to unite all the forces existing, and secondly, to educate our people better in their use. This Labor Front is the greatest element in such education. You are servants of the nation, but you alone are nothing. As part of the organic whole you are everything.... It is hard to build up a new life out of your poverty, but I am not complaining. On the contrary, I find it wonderful to face difficult problems. Some people say, 'He has brought out another plan.' When he had completed the first, why couldn't he leave us in peace? Now he is tackling problems that cannot be solved.' I say that they can be solved; there is no problem that cannot be, but faith is necessary. Think of the faith I had to have eighteen years ago, a single man on a lonely path. Yet I have come to leadership of the German people.... People complain of a shortage of this and that - for instance, of a shortage of cotton. I say that in the next four years we shall produce our own German cloth. Others raise the question of rubber. I tell you that factories will spring from the earth and that in four years we shall ride on our own German rubber tires. It may then be asked, 'With what motive power will you drive you cars?' I say that we shall take gasoline from our own oil and coal. Whenever I see the Labor Front I am impressed by the word 'front.' It signifies one will, one goal of achievement. Life is hard for many, but it is hardest if you are unhappy and have no faith. Have faith. We are not a helpless State. Nothing can make me change my own belief. I am convinced that the unworthiest among us is he who cannot master his ill fortune.