Showing posts with label 1936. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 1936. Show all posts

Sunday, November 20, 2016

Nuremberg -- Speech of September 14, 1936

I CAN come to no terms with a Weltanschhauung [bolshevism] which everywhere as its first act after gaining power is - not the liberation of the working people - but the liberation of the scum of humanity, the asocial creatures concentrated in the prisons - and then the letting loose of these wild beasts upon the terrified and helpless world about them.... Bolshevism turns flourishing countrysides into sinister wastes of ruins; National Socialism transforms a Reich of destruction and misery into a healthy State and a flourishing economic life.... Russia planned a world revolution and German workmen would be used but as cannon-fodder for bolshevist imperialism. But we National Socialists do not wish that our military resources should be employed to impose by force on other peoples what those peoples themselves do not want. Our army does not swear on oath that it will with bloodshed extend the National Socialist idea over other peoples, but that it will with its own blood defend the National Socialist idea and thereby the German Reich, its security and freedom, from the aggression of other peoples.... The German people as soldiers is one of the best peoples in the world: It would have become a veritable 'Fight to the Death Brigade' for the bloody purposes of these international disseminators of strife. We have removed this danger, through the National Socialist Revolution, from our own people and from other peoples.... These are only some of the grounds for the antagonisms which separate us from communism. I confess: these antagonisms cannot be bridged. Here are really two worlds which do but grow further apart from each other and can never unite. When in an English newspaper a Parliamentarian complains that we wish to divide Europe into two parts, then unfortunately we are bound to inform this Robinson Crusoe living on his happy British island that - however unwelcome it may be - this division is already an accomplished fact.... That one should refuse to see a thing does not mean that it is not there. For many a year in Germany I have been laughed to scorn as a prophet; for many a year my warnings and my prophecies were regarded as the illusions of a mind diseased.... Bolshevism has attacked the foundations of our whole human order, alike in State and society, the foundations of our conception of civilization, of our faith and of our morals: all alike are at stake. If this bolshevism would be content to promote this doctrine in a single land, then other countries might remain unconcerned, but its supreme principle is its internationalism and that means the confession of faith that these views must be carried to triumph throughout the whole world, i.e., that the world as we know it must be turned upside down. That a British headline-writer refuses to recognize this signifies about as much as if in the fifteenth century a humanist in Vienna should have refused to admit the intention of Mohammedanism to extend its influence in Europe and should have objected that this would be to tear the world asunder - to divide it into East and West. Unfortunately I cannot escape the impression that most of those who doubt the danger to the world of bolshevism come themselves from the East. As yet politicians in England have not come to know bolshevism in their own country; we know it already. Since I have fought against these Jewish Soviet ideas in Germany, since I have conquered and stamped out this peril, I fancy that I possess a better comprehension of its character than do men who have only at best had to deal with it in the field of literature.... I have won my successes simply because in the first place I endeavored to see things as they are and not as one would like them to be; secondly, when once I had formed my own opinion I never allowed weaklings to talk me out of it or to cause me to abandon it; and thirdly, because I was always determined in all circumstances to yield to a necessity when once it had been recognized. Today when fate has granted me such great successes I will not be disloyal to these funda- mental principles of mine.... . . .: It is not necessary for me to strengthen the fame of the National Socialist Movement, far less that of the German Army, through military triumphs. He who is undertaking such great economic and cultural tasks as we are and is so determined to carry them through can find his fairest memorial only in peace.... But this bolshevism which as we learned only a few months since intends to equip its army so that it may with violence, if necessary, open the gate to revolution amongst other peoples - this bolshevism should know that before the gate of Germany stands the new German Army.... I believe that as a National Socialist I appear in the eyes of many bourgeois democrats as only a wild man. But as a wild man I still believe myself to be a better European, in any event a more sensible one, than they. It is with grave anxiety that I see the possibility in Europe of some such development as this: democracy may continuously disintegrate the European States, may make them internally ever more uncertain in their judgment of the dangers which confront them, may above all cripple all power for resolute resistance. Democracy is the canal through which bolshevism lets its poisons flow into the separate countries and lets them work there long enough for these infections to lead to a crippling of intelligence and of the force of resistance. I regard it as possible that then - in order to avoid something still worse - coalition governments, masked as Popular Fronts or the like, will be formed and that these will endeavor to destroy - and perhaps will successfully destroy - in these peoples the last forces which remain, either in organization or in mental outlook, which could offer opposition to bolshevism. The brutal mass-slaughters of National Socialist fighters, the burning of the wives of National Socialist officers after petrol had been poured over them, the massacre of children and of babies of National Socialist parents, e.g. in Spain, are intended to serve as a warning to forces in other lands which represent views akin to those of National Socialism: such forces are to be intimidated so that in a similar position they offer no resistance. If these methods are successful: if the modern Girondins are succeeded by Jacobins, if Kerensky's Popular Front gives place to the Bolshevists, then Europe will sink into a sea of blood and mourning.

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.

Schwerin, Gustloff's Funeral -- Speech of February 12, 1936

BEHIND every murder stood the same power which is responsible for this murder; behind these harmless insignificant fellow-countrymen who were instigated and incited to crime stands the hate-filled power of our Jewish foe, a foe to whom we had done no harm, but who none the less sought to subjugate our German people and make of it its slave - the foe who is responsible for all the misfortune that fell upon us in 1918, for all the misfortune which plagued Germany in the years that followed. Those members of the Party and honorable comrades of ours all fell, and the same fate was planned for others: many hundreds survived as cripples or severely wounded, blinded or lamed; more than 40,000 others were injured. And among them were so many loyal folk whom we all knew and who were near and dear to us, of whom we were sure that they could never do any harm to anyone, that they had never done any harm to anyone, whose only crime was that they devoted themselves to the cause of Germany. In the ranks of those whose lives were thus sacrificed there stood also Horst Wessel, the singer who gave to the Movement its song, never dreaming that he would join those spirits who march and have marched with us. And now on foreign soil National Socialism has gained its first conscious martyr - a man who did nothing save to enter the lists for Germany which is not only his sacred right but his duty in this world: a man who did nothing save remember his homeland and pledge himself to her in loyalty. He, too, was murdered, just like so many others. Even at the time when on January 30 three years ago we had come into power, precisely the same things happened in Germany, at Frankfort on the Oder, at Köpenick, and again at Brunswick. The procedure was always the same: a few men come and call someone out of his house and then stab or shoot him down. That is no chance: it is the same guiding hand which organized these crimes and purposes to do so again. Now for the first time one who is responsible for these acts has appeared in his own person. For the first time he employs no harmless German fellow-countryman. It is a title to fame for Switzerland, as it is for our own Germans in Switzerland, that no one let himself be hired to do this deed so that for the first time the spiritual begetter of the act must himself perform the act. So our comrade has fallen a victim to that power which wages a fanatical warfare not only against our German people but against every free, autonomous, and independent people. We understand the challenge to battle and we take up the gage! My dear comrade! You have not fallen in vain!