Speeches by Adolf Hitler

There are only two possibilities: either victory of the Aryan or annihilation of the Aryan and the victory of the Jew.

Our present law regards only the rights of the individual. It does not regard the protection of the race, the protection of the community of the people. It permits the befouling of the nation's honor and of the greatness of the nation. A law which is so far removed from the conception of the community of the people is in need of reform.

In the life of peoples senility means internationalism. What is born of senility? Nothing, nothing at all. Whatever in human civilization has real value, that arose not out of internationalism; it sprang from the soul of a single people. When peoples have lost their creative vigor, then they become international. Everywhere, wherever intellectual incapacity rules in the life of peoples, there internationalism appears. And it is no chance that the promoter of this cast of thought is a people which itself can boast of no real creative force - the Jewish people.

We have faith that one day Heaven will bring the Germans back into a Reich over which there shall be no Soviet star, no Jewish star of David, but above that Reich there shall be the symbol of German labor - the Swastika. And that will mean that the first of May has truly come.

The domestic battle must come before the battle with the world without - the final decision between those who say 'We are Germans and proud of the fact' and those who do not wish to be Germans or who are not Germans at all. Our Movement is opposed with the cry 'The Republic is in danger!' Your Republic of the Ninth of November? In very truth it is: the November-Republic is in danger!

We were given a Free State which never deserved the name of 'free.' Then they called it a 'People's State.' But think you that bankers can form a government which befits a 'People's State'? In fact the Revolution made three changes in our State: it internationalized the German State, the economic life of Germany, and the German people itself. Thereby Germany has been turned into a colony of the outside world. Those who were fed with the ideal of the International were in fact placed under the 'Diktat' of the International. They have their international State: today international finance is king. ... Through the internationalization of the nation itself in the end a people ceases to be master of its own fate: it becomes the puppet of alien forces. Is that, now, a People's Revolution? Is such a construction a People's State? No, it is the Jews' Paradise.

It seems strange to me that a man who, as a soldier, was for six years accustomed to blind obedience, should suddenly come into conflict with the State and its Constitution. The reasons for this stem from the days of my youth. When I was seventeen I came to Vienna, and there I learned to study and observe three important problems: the social question, the race problem, and, finally, the Marxist movement. I left Vienna a confirmed anti-Semite, a deadly foe of the whole Marxist world outlook, and pan-German in my political principles. And since I knew that the German destiny of German-Austria would not be fought out in the Austrian Army alone, but in the German and Austrian Army, I enlisted in the German Army.

The prisons to which our comrades are being sent will be places of honor for German youth.

The maintenance of world peace cannot be the purpose and aim of the policy of a State. The increase and maintenance of a people - that alone can be the aim.

For, gentlemen, it is not you who pronounce judgment upon us, it is the eternal Court of History which will make its pronouncement upon the charge which is brought against us. The judgment that you will pass, that I know. But that Court will not ask of us: 'Have you committed high treason or not?' That Court will judge us ... who as Germans have wished the best for their people and their Fatherland, who wished to fight and to die. You may declare us guilty a thousand times, but the Goddess who presides over the Eternal Court of History will with a smile tear in pieces the charge of the Public Prosecutor and the judgment of the Court: for she declares us guiltless.

World-history, like all events of historical significance, is the result of the activity of single individuals - is not the fruit of majority decisions.

Men do not exist for the State, the State exists for men.

Politics is nothing else and can be nothing else than the safeguarding of a people's vital interests and the practical waging of its life-battle with every means. Thus it is quite clear that this life-battle from the first has its starting-point in the people itself and that at the same time the people is the object - the real thing of value - which has to be preserved. All functions of this body formed by the people must in the last resort fulfill only one purpose - to secure in the future the maintenance of this body which is the people. I can therefore say neither that foreign policy nor economic policy is of primary significance. Of course, a people needs the business world in order to live. But business is but one of the functions of this body-politic whereby its existence is assured. But primarily the essential thing is the starting-point and that is the people itself.

Democracy will in practice lead to the destruction of a people's true values. And this also serves to explain how it is that peoples with a great past from the time when they surrender themselves to the unlimited, democratic rule of the masses slowly lose their former position; for the outstanding achievements of individuals which they still possess or which could be produced in all spheres of life are now rendered practically ineffective through the oppression of mere numbers. And thus in these conditions a people will gradually lose its importance not merely in the cultural and economic spheres but altogether; in a comparatively short time it will no longer, within the setting of the other peoples of the world, maintain its former value.

The conception of pacifism is logical if I once admit a general equality amongst peoples and human beings. For in that case what sense is there in conflict? The conception of pacifism translated into practice and applied to all spheres must gradually lead to the destruction of the competitive instinct, to the destruction of the ambition for outstanding achievement.

I must above all recognize that it is not the primary of foreign politics which can determine our action in the domestic sphere, rather, the character of our action in the domestic sphere is decisive for the character of the success of our foreign policy - nay more - it must determine the success of all the aims which, we set before.

Fourteen years of Marxism have ruined Germany; one year of Bolshevism would destroy her.

We are convinced that the restoration to health of our people must start from the restoration to health of the body politic itself, and we are persuaded of the truth that the future of our people, as in the past so now, lies first of all in the German peasant. If he perishes, our end has come; if he survives, then Germany will never go under. There lie the strength and the source of our people's life, the source of our renewal. The towns would not exist at all, if the peasant did not fill them with his blood. The dweller in our countryside may be primitive, but he is healthy.

Our wish is that responsible folk should once more be brought together so that every class and every individual should be given that authority over those below and that responsibility towards those above which are essential if one is to build up the life of a community. We do not want so to educate the nation that it lives for ideas and artificial constructions; we want to test all ideas and constructions to discover how far they are capable of serving the nation's life.

The great epoch which for fourteen years we awaited has now begun. Germany is awake now...

Amidst all the crises under which we suffer and which do but present a single connected picture, perhaps that which the people feels most acutely is the economic crisis. The political crisis, the moral crisis, are only very rarely felt by the individual. The average man sees in the experiences of his day not that which affects the community as a whole but for the most part only that which strikes himself. Therefore the present has only very rarely any consciousness of political or moral collapse so long as this collapse does not extend in one way or another into economic life.

In any future cases of conflict the vanquished will always be the guilty party, because the victor can establish this fact in the easiest manner possible.

As sole possessor of State power, the Party must recognize that it bears the entire responsibility for the course of German history. The work of education which the Movement must carry on is tremendous. For it is not enough to organize the State in accordance with pacific principles; it is necessary to educate the people inwardly. Only if the people has an intimate sympathy with the principles and methods which inspire and move the organization of its State, will there grow up a living organism instead of a dead, because purely formal and mechanistic, organization.

Nietzsche's word that a blow which does not fell a strong man only strengthens him found its verification a thousandfold. Every blow increased our defiance, every persecution increased our resolution, and that which did fall away proved in its falling away to be the greatest good fortune for the Movement.

National Socialist Germany has no other wish than to direct the competition of European people again to those fields of endeavor upon which they have given to all humanity through the noblest mutual rivalry those magnificent boons to civilization, culture, and art which today enrich and beautify the picture of the world.

If Red insurrection had overswept Germany like a firebrand, certainly Western Europe's lands of culture would have realized that it is not immaterial whether on the Rhine and on the North Sea the outposts of the spiritually and revolutionary expansive Asiatic world empire stood watch or the peaceful German peasants and workers, who, in honest feeling of comradeship with other nations of our European culture, desire to earn their bread by honest labor. When the National Socialist Movement tore Germany back from the brink of this threatening catastrophe, it not only saved the German people but also rendered a historical service to the rest of Europe.

My predecessors in the Government suffered, so to speak, from the 'Geneva sickness.' That made them pessimists concerning the nation, optimists concerning the League. I, on the other hand, am an optimist concerning my people but a pessimist concerning Geneva and the League of Nations.

We may be isolated, but dishonored, never! I would prefer not to enter into agreements which I must purchase at the price of my honor: and when they say 'But then you will be isolated,' then I declare I would rather be isolated with honor, than be tolerated without honor.

I have grown up from amongst yourselves; once I myself was a workman; for four and a half years I served amongst you in the War; I speak now to you to whom I belong, with whom I still feel myself to be united and for whom in the last resort I fight. ... I wage that fight for the millions of our honest, industrious, working, creative people. ... I was in my youth a worker as you are; through industry, through learning, and, I may say, also through hunger I slowly worked my way up. But in my innermost being I have always remained that which I once was.

This Movement must tower above all pettiness and petty ideas. The possibilities which are ours today may perhaps not return for hundreds of years. We shall all one day be together weighed in the balance and together we shall be judged. Either we shall together stand this test or history will condemn us together.

In principle, the German Government starts with the assumption that, as regards the form of our relations with other countries, it is obviously a matter of indifference what kind of constitution and form of government the nations may be pleased to adopt for themselves. It is an absolutely private matter for each nation to determine the form of its internal life in accordance with its own estimation of its requirements. Hence the selection of the spiritual content and the constructive form of the organization and government of Germany according to the German people's own conception is also a private affair which concerns no one except the German people themselves.

There is no romance in world history more wonderful than the development of our Party.

We fight for an independent German people. If God created the German tribes, they will remain. If anyone says, 'What then of the single States? After all God made them too.' No! Men made the States. State forms have always been transitory. Look back a hundred years, two hundred, three hundred years, and study the map and the changes marked on it. And if anyone says to me, 'But from now on things must remain as they are,' I can only answer: 'Sir, if you have grown sterile, our German people is anything but sterile.' The people is still living: it feels its way open towards its goal and strives towards it, and therefore the map of our Reich will change in the future and in it there will be further alterations.

We wished to make a revolution, and a revolution was in fact made. But it is only the meanest spirit which can regard the essence of a revolution as consisting merely in destruction. We, on the contrary, regarded it as consisting in a gigantic work of reconstruction.

January 30 [1933] was therefore not the day when our Government formally took over responsibility from the hands of another Government, it was rather the final liquidation, long desired by the nation, of an intolerable state of affairs.

For I am nothing, my fellow countrymen, but the spokesman on your behalf, and I have no desire to be anything but the representative of your life and the defender of your vital interests.

If one says that man's world is the State, his struggle, his readiness to devote his powers to the service of the community, one might be tempted to say that the world of woman is a smaller world. For her world is her husband, her family, her children, and her house. But where would the greater world be if there were no one to care for the small world? How could the greater world survive if there were none to make the cares of the smaller world the content of their lives?

The Party represents an elite, a natural aristocracy, ... which must be preserved by exercising a rigorous choice of its members.

This day is not a day of good fortune for Germany alone. I believe that this day is a fortunate day for the whole of Europe.

A writer has summed up the impressions made on him by this time in a book which he entitled 'The Decline of the West.' Is it then really to be the end of our history and of our peoples? Not we cannot believe it.

The army was not merely in war the nation's great defense, it was in peace the splendid school of our people.

European peoples represent just one family of this world - often somewhat quarrelsome, but, despite everything, related to one another and not separable spiritually, culturally, or economically.

The opinion that European order can be founded permanently on the defamation of a people numbering 67,000,000 is lunatic and madness. They do not need to think that the German nation has rebelled simply because a certain man, Adolf Hitler, stands at its head. No, if I were not there, another would have come sooner or later. Germany will live longer than such an opinion will live.

Wages are not based on production; production itself is the wage.

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.

This is the greatest crisis in which humanity has ever found itself, the greatest upheaval since the advent of Christianity. It may be unpleasant for democratic statesmen to concern themselves with Bolshevism, but it will not matter whether they will want to or not - they will have to deal with it.

I cannot permit the conclusion to be drawn that we should not be prepared to fight for the principles of justice just because we are not in the League of Nations. On the contrary, we do not belong to the League of Nations because we believe that it is not an institution of justice but an institution for defending the interests of Versailles.

There are more than 10,000,000 Germans in States adjoining Germany which before 1865 were joined to the bulk of the German nation by a national link. Until 1918 they fought in the great war shoulder to shoulder with the German soldiers of the Reich. Against their own free will they were prevented by peace treaties from uniting with the Reich.

If Providence once called me forth from this town to be the leader of the Reich, it must, in so doing, have given to me a commission, and that commission could be only to restore my dear homeland to the German Reich.

... and then one day there came the hour when one had to make a decision before one's conscience, before one's own people, and before an eternal God Who had created the peoples. And a fortnight ago I made that decision, and it was the only possible decision. For when men are deaf to every behest of justice, then the individual must assert his rights himself. Then he must turn to that ancient creed: Help yourself and then God will help you. And God has helped us!

I believe that it was God's will to send a boy from here into the Reich, to let him grow up, to raise him to be the leader of the nation so as to enable him to lead back his homeland into the Reich.

For every people there is only one help possible: the help which lies in itself. But for that there is a condition: the people must come together into a single closely united body, for only from such a unity can the strength to win salvation come.
I have not relied upon Geneva or Moscow, but on one thing alone, on my people, on Germany.
Others have built castles in the clouds, but we build for our German folk an earthly but a decent life.

Perhaps in the future one may speak of a miracle that destiny worked on us. Be that as it may, at the beginning of this miracle stood belief - the betief in the eternal German nation. ... The creative bearer of this rebirth is the National Socialist party. ... It had to cleanse Germany of all parasites for whom the distress of the Fatherland and of the people was a source of personal enrichment. It had to recognize the eternal values of blood and soil and raise them to the level of the governing laws of our life. It had to begin to fight against the greatest enemy that threatened to destroy our people: the international Jewish world enemy. Its task was to cleanse the German nation, our race and our culture from this enemy.

We Germans can today speak with justice of a new awakening of our cultural life, which finds its confirmation not in mutual compliments and literary phrases, but rather in positive evidences of cultural creative force. German architecture, sculpture, painting, drama, and the rest bring today documentary proof of a creative period in art, which for richness and impetuosity has rarely been matched in the course of human history. And although the Jewish-democratic press magnates in their effrontery even today seek brazenly to turn these facts upside down, we know that the cultural achievements of Germany will in a few years have won from the world respect and appreciation far more unstinted even than that which they now accord to our work in the material field. The buildings which are arising in the Reich today will speak a language that endures, a language, above all, more compelling than the Yiddish gabblings of the democratic, international judges of our culture.

This whole work for peace, my fellow-countrymen, is no mere empty phrase, but this work is reinforced through deeds which no lying mouth can destroy.

Opposite us are statesmen who - that, we must believe of them - also want peace. However, they govern in countries whose internal construction makes it possible for them at any time to be supplanted by others who do not aim at peace. These others are there. In England, it merely is necessary that instead of Chamberlain, a Duff Cooper or an Eden or a Churchill come into power. We know that the aim of these men would be to start war. They do not attempt to hide it.

The only thing that can trouble our rejoicing is the thought that some comrades did not live to see the final victory. This is the feeling I had last year. There is the old Austrian general who lived cleanly all his life, thought only of Greater Germany and fought for Greater Germany - old General Krauss. And then, a few days before I marched into his homeland - for he was a Sudeten German - the old man closed his eyes forever. Probably he would have been overcome by his joy. Perhaps it would have killed him. However, though we must regret that individuals, that so many comrades, have not been able to rejoice with us, there is one consolation. We know that their struggle was not in vain; in the end they attained their goal, if only in that their spirit was with us and in us.

Everyone had an idea of some sort. And I, as an unknown soldier of the World War, drew my conclusions. It was a very short and simple program. It ran: Removal of the internal enemies of the nation, termination of the divisions within Germany, the gathering up of the entire national strength of our people into a new community, and the breaking of the peace treaty - in one way or another! ... In place of a great number of parties, social ranks, and societies, a single community now has taken its place - the German national community! To bring it to realization and to deepen it more and more is our task.