Source: Domarus, pp. 255-256.
February 20, 1933
The compulsory labor service to which we aspire has nothing in common with a militia. A militia should serve as a form of national defense. The concept of compulsory labor service originated in the catastrophic economic need and its resultant unemployment. Compulsory labor service is designed primarily to prevent hundreds of thousands of our young workers from helplessly degenerating on our streets. However, providing a general education in the world of work will also help to bridge the gap between class differences. As a National Socialist, I regard a general compulsory labor service as a means of providing an education in respect for work. Our young people should learn that work ennobles man.
In the year 1919, Germany suggested that we be given permission to establish a militia. At that time, we were required to establish a professional army with a compulsory twelve-year term of conscription. Thus Germany has no reserves with military training worthy of mention. Now people have suddenly begun talking about abolishing the professional army and installing a militia. It is my feeling that this is only happening in order to distract from the real core of the issue. Not the type of defense system, but rather the question of equal rights is decisive. If this question is settled, general and reasonable disarmament worldwide will become a possibility; for no one will be willing to claim that the world is made to suffer from the fact that Germany has only a ridiculously small professional army and no militia at all.
The world is made to suffer from the fact that the Treaty of Versailles provides for the concept of two different types of rights to be established for all eternity. This ridiculous division of the nations into victors—who have a right to exist—and vanquished—who have a lesser right to exist—is untenable and leads to general mistrust and in turn to an added strain on military armaments. Personally, we could not care less which systems of defense the other nations choose to implement.
Professional armies, for all we care; but we do care whether one nation has a force of 100,000 without reserves, while another, together with its allies in case of war, has a force of over twelve million. And we do care whether one nation has been disarmed of all technical weapons while another has at its disposal the most modern offensive weapons available and is thus more than ten times superior.
The Treaty of Versailles stipulated that we were to disarm—not so that a discussion about defense systems would take place thirteen years later, but so that other peoples would be in a position to disarm as well. We have been waiting for this disarmament now for more than ten years.