Continuing the excerpts from documented Hitler speeches:
Here the Führer addresses the nature and spirit of his opposition in the early years of his power, and as one reads these excerpts, they come across with a strange, surreal kind of poignancy - as if he were unwilling, or unable, to recognize the magnitude of ill will arraigned and consolidated against him and his revolution, even in the very early years. One has to understand this was before fax machines, before a telephone in every house, before the advent of radio and TV in every home. People were largely isolated from the world - even people like Hitler.
* In a speech at Breslau on 1 March 1933, referring to the Reichstag Fire, Hitler said:
"If today any power should think that through an appeal to terrorism it can bend us then that power forgets the character of this Movement. Today the Movement has become Germany and Germany will live. He who raises himself against this life of the nation will meet our resolution and on this resolution he will be dashed in pieces whoever he be."
* In an interview with Mr D. Sefton Delmer, {Ed. a man who would figure prominently during World War II in Britain's Black Propaganda campaign against Germany} the correspondent of the Daily Express, Hitler replied to the suggestion that the Reichstag Fire "was nothing but a put-up job designed to give Hitler the pretext of waging a merciless war against the Communists and Socialists:
"It is nothing but a damned lie and a malicious libel. As base as it is ridiculous.
"Of course there is one way in which I could settle these reports once and for all. I could have the Communist who was caught hanging from the nearest tree. That would dispose forever of this vile insinuation that he is an agent of ours. But these lies are too absurd even to discuss seriously. But I will tell you another thing. Europe, instead of suspecting me of false play, should be grateful to me for my drastic action against the Bolsheviks. If Germany went Communist, as there was every danger of her doing until I became Chancellor, it would not have been long before the rest of civilized Europe fell a prey to this Asiatic pest.
"The onslaught on the Reichstag was just one of a whole series of terrorist atrocities which the police are able to prove were planned by the Communists."
{Ed. Numerous postwar investigations, including one in the 1950s by the Kommittee Freiheitlicher Juristen in Berlin, exonerated Hitler and his Movement in the Reichstag Fire. They concluded that it was indeed started by a Marxist.
* In a speech in Munich on 22 April 1933 Hitler said:
"It is not the lukewarm and those who are neutral who make history but the men who accept battle. Because our movement has marched and still marches at the double it has in itself the strength to prevail against the foe and to win the victory. . . We labor not for the Movement but for the millennia."
* In an interview with Mr. Vernon Bartlett in June 1934 Hitler said:
"I will tell you that this Movement will go on for a thousand years. The people are more behind me today than they were a year ago. They follow me wherever I go and they will continue to do so. We are not the sort of men who capitulate before any difficulties. We are all self-made men who have grown strong in the struggle."
* In the Proclamation read at the Nuremberg Parteitag of September 1934 Hitler said:
"The will of the leadership of the National Socialist State cannot be diverted from its purpose, it cannot be shaken. It knows what it wills, and it wills what it knows.
"And what this leadership has achieved in the short space of fifteen years the children of later generations will be taught to call "The German Miracle".
"Today we see before us a small band of folk who stand aside from our victorious march, a band of renegades or people whom we did not want. To call them 'the Opposition' hits the mark: It is the only true characterization of their miserable existence. . . these folks are just an Opposition and no more: they have neither faith nor programme. They are, beginning from the eternal Ahasuerus of humanity down to the last uprooted anarchist, a Fronde of destructive elements or simple fools whose sole common profession of faith is their 'No' launched against the community of the nation and against constructive work."
* In his speech at the annual harvest celebration on the Bückeberg on 30 September 1934 Hitler said:
"Much would go better in Germany, much would be easier, if those whose interest it was to see Germany weak and disunited would cease to hinder in every possible way the revival of the nation." (...)
"But you must understand, for all that, my fellow countrymen, that it is no easy task to lead the struggle for the restoration of a broken people and of a ruined economy, when we are opposed by so many interests set on our downfall."
{Ed. By then Hitler knew from intelligence sources that Poland and France were thinking of a preemptive strike against Germany - and Samuel Undermeyer's worldwide Jewish boycott against German goods was gaining momentum. See Jewish author Edwin Black's book, The Transfer Agreement)
* In an interview with Pierre Huss of the Hearst Press Hitler was asked whether the Social Democrats and the Communists of the Saar who had voted for Germany would have any difficulty to fear on account of their former attitude; he replied:
"We never ask what the individual man has been, only what he wishes to be today. . . In our community of the people former Communists and adherents of the Centrum to-day join in a common fight for the National Socialist State."
* In his Proclamation to the German people of 30 January 1935 Hitler said:
"The overwhelming majority of all our former opponents have in their inmost hearts long ago repented. What we always hoped for has come about. When they subjected our intentions and our work to a just examination they found in the end that after all they had longed for had been realized in and through us - a Germany of honor, of freedom, and of social happiness."
* In a speech to the Old Fighters in the Lustgarten, Berlin, on 30 January 1936 he said:
"We all know what makes us strong. It was no mechanical organization, it was no external confession of the lips, but it was the strength which lies in the idea of our Movement, that strength which has won over thousands and hundreds of thousands of hearts. . . We know that the National Socialist is not born; he must be trained; he must educate himself.
"Whatever we have achieved is stupendous. Never in German history within the space of three years has anything approaching it been realized. (...)
"National Socialism is no doctrine of indolence, but a doctrine of battle: no doctrine of luck and chance, but a doctrine of work and effort, and thus also a doctrine of sacrifice. That was our view before the battle: In these last three years it has not altered, and in the future so it will remain."
(Ed. Thanks to the Havarra (sp?) Agreement with the Palestinian Zionists, Hitler had weathered the storm - and fought off the boycott. Hjalmar Schacht's brilliant economic moves had averted disaster. See: Hitler: Madman or Genius by Leon Degrelle. $10 E-mail irimland@cts.com for further information)
* In another speech in Berlin on 30 January 1936 (the third anniversary of the assumption of power by the National Socialists Government) Hitler said:
"For that which stands against us today does not stand against us because we are National Socialists, but because we have once more made Germany free and strong. They are the enemies of our people in our own land; we know them from the time of the Great War, from the time of the melancholy revolts of the year 1918; we know them from the time of our worst collapse. They alone it is who not only do not wish to find the way to us, but who will never be able to find it in the future and them we ourselves renounce."
* Speaking at Gera 17 June 1934 Hitler said:
"We have not the feeling that we are an inferior race, a worthless rabble on the face of the world, which may or can be trample on by everyone. No, we have the feeling that we are a great people, a people which forgot itself only once; a people which, led astray by senseless fools, itself destroyed its own strength, but which has now awoken once more from this nightmare of madness. . . This lesson, which we have learnt in so sinister a fashion, will be an historical warning to us for thousands of years. What happened once through our own fault will not be repeated a second time in the life of the German people."
{Ed. Unfortunately, Hitler did not reckon with the worldwide coalition plotting against his regime. After World War II, the same thing happened again, and Germany is still in the throes of this global foe!}
"Convince yourselves that strength finds its expression not so much in army corps, in tanks and heavy guns, but rather ultimately expresses itself in the common working of a people's will. Let yourselves, further, be penetrated with the conviction that men must be taught this community of feeling, and that safeguards for this purpose must therefore be created.
"We all know that we are not an end in ourselves, but the Party, the SA, and SS, the PO, the Labour Service, the Youth Organization, are all means to an end; that end is the inner welding together of the body of our people; and thus will be developed those capacities for work, now latent in our people, which shall truly advance the interests of peace, civilization, and material prosperity.
"(A)nd all those little pigmies who imagine that they can say something against it will be swept away by the might of this common idea of ours. For whatever criticism these pigmies choose to make, there is one thing that they all forget: where is that better state of things to be found which could replace the present? Where have they got anything which they could put in its stead? It is laughable when such a little worm tries to struggle against so mighty a renewal of a whole people. It is laughable when such a little pigmy imagines he can stop with a few phrases the gigantic renewal of a people's life. If these insignificant carping critics were to have their way, Germany would fall to pieces again, as she fell before. But we can assure them of this; they had not the power formerly to hinder the rise of National Socialism, and now that the people is awake, never again will they plunge it into sleep.
{Ed. Hitler won the battle within Germany - but was overwhelmed by the forces outside Germany who in ten short years were going to snuff out all that his Movement had achieved by fire and sword and in a hail of bullets and torrents of bombs.)
* With this attack on the critics of the Movement may be compared a passage from an address to the Ortsgruppe of Rosenheim delivered on 11 August 1935 in which Hitler said that he had fought a fight for the heart and soul of the German people more wonderful than any fight before:
"A small band of men they were, facing an overwhelming mass of doubters and mockers. It was one against ten at that time, and we did not grow weary in the fight till success was achieved. Today, there are nine in the whole German Reich against every one of the little doubters."
{Ed. It seems the odds against Hitler in the beginning were like the odds against Revisionists today - does it not?)
Tomorrow: Hitler and the "Constitution"
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Thought for the Day:
"We will incite a spiritual and material war of the entire world. Our Jewish interests demand the complete destruction of Germany. The German people are a collective and individual danger to the Jews."
(Vladimir Jabotinski in Irgun Zwai Leumi, January 22, 1934)