Here is a video clip excerpt of Hitler's Sportpalast speech,
including an introduction from
Goebbels. The clip has
English subtitles and is split into 3 parts. Hitler starts
speaking in the second part at 5:00. Scroll down for the
transcript.
It follows the English translation of an excerpt transcript of
Adolf Hitler's Proclamation to the German
Nation, delivered at the Sportpalast in Berlin, Germany -
February 10, 1933.
On January 30 of
this year, the new government of the national
coalition was formed. I, and therefore the
National Socialist movement, entered into it. I
believe that the prerequisites which I have been
fighting for for the past year have been
attained. [...]
[Further against the economic policies of the
Weimar system parties:]
Then they
committed the crime of inflation, and after this
rampage on the part of their Minister Hilferding,
a ruinous usury set in.
Outrageously
exorbitant interest rates, which should never
have been allowed to go unpunished in any state,
are now part and parcel of the "social"
Republic, and this is where the destruction of
production begins, the destruction wreaked by
these Marxist theories of economics as such, and
moreover by the madness of a taxation policy
which sees to the rest; and now we witness how
class upon class are collapsing, how hundreds of
thousands, gradually driven to despair, are
losing their livelihoods; and how, year after
year, tens of thousands of bankruptcies and
hundreds of thousands of compulsory auctions are
taking place.
Then the peasantry
starts to become impoverished, the most
industrious class in the entire Volk is driven
to ruin, can no longer exist, and then this
process spreads back to the cities, and the army
of unemployed begins to grow: one million, two,
three, four million, five million, six million,
seven million; today the number might actually
lie between seven and eight million. They
destroyed what they could in fourteen years of
work, and no one did anything to stop them.
Today this
distress can perhaps be best illustrated by a
single comparison. One Land: Thuringia. Total
revenues from its communities amount to 26
million marks. This money must suffice to defray
the costs of their administration and cover the
maintenance of their public buildings as well as
everything they spend for schools and
educational purposes. This money must cover what
they spend on welfare. A total of 26 million in
revenues, and welfare support alone requires 45
million.
That's what
Germany looks like today! Under the rule of
these parties who
have ruined our Volk for fourteen years. The
only question is, for how much
longer?
Because of my
conviction that we must begin with the rescue
work now if we do not want to come too late, I
declared my willingness on January 30 to make
use of the Movement—which has meanwhile swelled
from seven men to a force of twelve
million—toward saving the German Volk und
Vaterland.
Our opponents are
asking about our program. My national comrades,
I could now pose the question to these same
opponents: "Where was your program?" Did you
actually intend to have happen what did happen
to Germany? Was that your program, or didn't you
want that? Who prevented you from doing the
opposite? Surely they do not intend to now
suddenly recall that they bear the
responsibility for fourteen years. However, we
shall both remind and reproach them and thus
make certain that their conscience may not rest,
that their memory does not fade.
When they say,
"Show us the details of your program," then my
only answer is this: any government at any time
would presumably have been able to have a
program with a few concrete points. But after
your fine state of affairs, after your dabbling,
after your subversion, the German Volk must be
rebuilt from top to bottom, just as you
destroyed it from top to bottom! That is our
program!
And a number of
great tasks tower before us. The best and thus
the first item on our program is: we do not want
to lie and we do not want to con. This is the
reason why I have refused ever to step before
this Volk and make cheap promises. No one here
can stand up against me and testify that I have
ever said that Germany's resurrection was only a
matter of a few days. Again and again I preach:
the resurrection of the German nation is a
question of recovering
the inner strength and health of the German
Volk.
Just as I myself
have now worked for fourteen years, untiringly
and without ever wavering, to build this
Movement; and just as I have succeeded in
turning seven men into a force of twelve
million, in the same way I want and we all want
to build and work on giving new heart to our
German Volk. Just as this Movement today has
been given the responsibility of the leadership
of the German Reich, so shall we one day lead
this German Reich back to life and to greatness.
We are determined to allow nothing to shake us
in this conviction.
Thus I come to the
second item on our program. I do not want to
promise them that this resurrection of the
German Volk will come of itself. We are willing
to work, but the Volk must help us. It should
never make the mistake of believing that life,
liberty and happiness will fall from heaven.
Everything is rooted in one's own will, in one's
own work.
And thirdly, we
wish to have all of our efforts guided by one
realization, one conviction: we shall never
believe in foreign help, never in help which
lies outside our own nation, outside our own
Volk. The future of the German Volk lies in
itself alone. Only when we have succeeded in
leading this German Volk onwards by means of its
own work, its own industriousness, its own
defiance, and its own perseverance—only then
will we rise up, just as our fathers once made
Germany great, not with the help of others, but
on their own.
The fourth item on
our program dictates that we rebuild our Volk
not according to theories hatched by some alien
brain, but according to the eternal laws valid
for all time. Not according to theories of
class, not according to concepts of class.
We can summarize
our fifth item in a single realization: The
fundamentals of our life are founded on values
which no one can take away from us except we
ourselves; they are founded on our own flesh and
blood and willpower and in our soil. Volk und
Erde—those are the two roots from which we will
draw our strength and upon which we propose to
base our resolves.
And this brings us
thus to our sixth item, clearly the goal of our
struggle: the preservation of this Volk and this
soil, the preservation of this Volk for the
future, in the realization that this alone can
constitute our reason for being. It is not for
ideas that we live, not for theories or
fantastic party programs; no, we live and fight
for the German Volk, for the preservation of its
existence, that it may undertake its own
struggle for existence, and we are thereby
convinced that only in this way do we make our
contribution to what everyone else so gladly
places in the foreground: world peace.
This peace has
always required strong peoples who strive for
and protect it. World culture is founded upon
the cultures of the different nations and
peoples. A world economy is only conceivable if
supported by the economies of healthy individual
nations.
In starting with
our own Volk, we are assisting in the
reconstruction of the entire world in that we
are repairing one building block which cannot be
removed from the framework and structure of the
rest of the world.
And another item
reads: because we perceive our highest goal to
be the preservation of our Volk, enabling it to
undertake its own struggle for existence, we
must eliminate the causes of our own
disintegration and thus bring about the
reconciliation of the German classes. A goal
which cannot be achieved in six weeks or four
months if others have been laboring at this
decay for seventy years. But a goal which we
always keep in mind, because we shall rebuild
this new community ourselves and slowly
eliminate the manifestations of this
disintegration.
The parties which
support this class division can, however, be
certain that as long as the Almighty keeps me
alive, my resolve and my will to destroy them
will know no bounds. Never, never will I stray
from the task of stamping out Marxism and its
side effects in Germany, and never will I be
willing to make any compromise on this point.
There can be only
one victor: either Marxism or the German Volk!
And Germany will triumph!
In bringing about
this reconciliation of the classes, directly and
indirectly, we want to proceed in leading this
united German Volk back to the eternal sources
of its strength; we want, by means of an
education starting in the cradle, to implant in
young minds a belief in a God and the belief in
our Volk. Then we want to resurrect this Volk on
the foundation of the German peasants, the
cornerstones of all völkisch life.
When I fight for
the future of Germany, I must fight for German
soil and I must fight for the German peasant. He
renews us, he gives us the people in the cities,
he has been the everlasting source for
millenniums, and his existence must be secured.
And then I proceed
to the second pillar of our national tradition:
the German worker—the German worker who, in
future, shall no longer and must no longer be an
alien in the German Reich; whom we want to lead
back to the community of our Volk and for whom
we will break down the doors so that he, too,
can become part of the German Volksgemeinschaft
as one of the bulwarks of the German nation. We
will then ensure that the German spirit has the
opportunity to unfold; we want to restore the
value of character and the creative power of the
individual to their everlasting prerogatives.
Thus we want to break with all the
manifestations of a rotten democracy and place
in its stead the everlasting realization that
everything which is great can originate only in
the power of the individual and that everything
which is to be preserved must be entrusted once
more to the ability of the individual. We will
combat the manifestations of our parliamentary
and democratic system, which leads us to our
twelfth item—restoring decency to our Volk.
In addition to
decency in all areas of our life: decency in our
administration, decency in public life, and
decency in our culture as well, we want to
restore German honor, to restore its due respect
and the commitment to it, and we want to engrave
upon our hearts the commitment to freedom; in
doing so, we desire to bestow once more upon the
Volk a genuinely German culture with German art,
German architecture, and German music, which
shall restore to us our soul, and we shall thus
evoke reverence for the great traditions of our
Volk; evoke deep reverence for the
accomplishments of the past, a humble admiration
for the great men of German history.
We want to lead
our youth back to this glorious Reich of our
past. Humbled shall they bow before those who
lived before us and labored and worked and
toiled so that they could live today. And we
want most of all to educate this youth to revere
those who once made the most difficult sacrifice
for the life of our Volk and the future of our
Volk. For all the damage these fourteen years
wrought, their worst crime was that they
defrauded two million dead of their sacrifice,
and these two million shall rise anew before the
eyes of our youth as an eternal warning, as a
demand that they be revenged. We want to educate
our youth to revere our time-honored army, which
they should remember, which they should admire,
and in which they should once more recognize the
powerful expression of the strength of the
German nation, the epitome of the greatest
achievement our Volk has ever accomplished in
its history.
Thus this program
will be a program of national resurrection in
all areas of life, intolerant against anyone who
sins against the nation, but a brother and
friend to anyone who has the will to fight with
us for the resurrection of his Volk, of our
nation.
Therefore I today
address my final appeal to my Volksgenossen: On
January 30, we took over government. Devastating
conditions have descended upon our Volk. It is
our desire to remedy them, and we will succeed
in doing so. Just as we have eliminated these
adversaries despite all the scorn, we shall also
eliminate the consequences of their rule.
To do justice to
God and our own conscience, we have turned once
more to the German Volk. It shall now play a
helping role. It will not deter us should the
German Volk abandon us in this hour. We will
adhere to whatever is necessary to keep Germany
from degenerating.
However, it is our
wish that this age of restoration of the German
nation be associated not only with a few names,
but with the name of the German Volk itself;
that the government not be working alone, but
that a mass of millions come to stand behind
this government; that the government have the
will, with the aid of this backing, to fortify
us once again for this great and difficult task.
I know that, were the graves to open today, the
ghosts of the past who once fought and died for
Germany would float aloft, and our place today
would be behind them. All the great men of our
history, of this I am certain, are behind us
today and watch over our work and our labors.
For fourteen years
the parties of disintegration, of the November
Revolution, have seduced and abused the German
Volk. For fourteen years they wreaked
destruction, infiltration, and dissolution.
Considering this,
it is not presumptuous of me to stand before the
nation today and plead of it: German Volk, give
us four years' time and then pass judgment upon
us. German Volk, give us four years, and I swear
to you, just as we, just as I have taken this
office, so shall I leave it. I have done it
neither for salary nor for wages; I have done it
for your sake! It has been the most difficult
decision of my life. I dared to make it because
I believed that it had to be.
I have dared to
make this decision because I am certain that one
cannot afford to hesitate any longer.
I have dared to
make this decision because it is my conviction
that our Volk will finally return to its senses
and that, even if millions might curse us today,
the hour will come in which they will march with
us after all, having recognized that we really
wanted nothing but the best and had no other
goal in sight than serving what is, to us, most
precious on earth.
Also called the
Persian Wars, the Greco-Persian Wars were
fought for almost half a century from 492 BC -
449 BC. Greece won against enormous odds. Here
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