Berlin, 1 February 1933
More than fourteen years have gone by since that unhappy day on which the German nation, deceived by promises from without and from within, forgot the glories of its past, forgot its honour and its freedom and thereby lost everything. Since that day of betrayal the Almighty has turned His countenance away from us. Strife and hatred have been the order of the day. Millions of the finest German men and women in all stations of life have had to behold with heavy hearts the unity of the nation breaking up and disappearing in a welter of egoistic political theories, selfish business interests and conflicting social doctrines.
Since that day of revolution, Germany has presented, as so often before in our history, a heartbreaking picture of disunity. We have not received the promised equality and fraternity, and we have lost our liberty. The collapse of the spiritual unity at home was followed by the loss to our people of their political standing in the world.
We are firmly convinced that the German nation entered the fight in 1914 without the slightest feeling of guilt on its part and filled only with the desire to defend its Fatherland which had been attacked and to preserve the freedom, nay, the very existence, of the German people. This being so, we can only see in the disastrous fate which has overtaken us since those November days of 1918 the result of our own collapse at home. But the rest of the world too has suffered no less since then from overwhelming crises. The balance of power which had evolved in the course of history, and which formerly played no small part in bringing about the understanding of the necessity for an internal solidarity of the nations, with all its advantages for trade and commerce, has been set on one side.
The insane Conception of Victors and Vanquished destroyed the confidence existing between nations, and, at the same time, the industry of the entire world. The misery of our people is appalling! Millions of our proletariate are without work and without means of existence, and the entire middle class is rapidly becoming impoverished. If the German peasantry is to go under too, we shall be faced by a catastrophe beyond all conception, for this will not only mean the collapse of a single nation but of a cultural inheritance of the highest importance which has stood for two thousand years.
Symptoms of approaching collapse are all around us. Communism, with its method of madness, is making a powerful and insidious attack upon our discouraged and shattered nation. It wishes to poison the minds of the people, and to drive them into a period which will fall far shorter of its promises than the period through which we have just passed falls short of the promises of the very same apostles of November 1918.
This negative, destroying spirit has spared nothing of all that is highest and most valuable. Beginning with the family, it has undermined the very foundations of morality and faith, and scoffs at culture and business, nation and fatherland, justice and honour. Fourteen years of Marxism have ruined Germany: one year of Bolshevism would destroy her. The richest and fairest territories of the world would be turned into a smoking heap of ruins. Even the sufferings of the last decade and a half could not be compared to the misery of a Europe in the heart of which the red flag of destruction had been hoisted. The thousands of wounded, the hundreds of dead which this inner strife has already cost Germany should be a warning of the storm which would come.
In this hour of overwhelming anxiety as to the future of the German nation, the aged leader of our armies in the War summoned us men of the national parties and organisations to fight at home under him once more, as of old at the front, in unity and loyalty, to save the Reich. Our venerable President has joined our hands together in this spirit and for this purpose, and we are determined, as leaders of the nation, to fulfil, as a national Government, the task which has been allotted to us, swearing fidelity only to God, our conscience and the nation.
The inheritance which has fallen to us is a terrible one.
The task with which we are faced is the hardest which has fallen to German statesmen within the memory of man. But we are all filled with unbounded confidence, for we believe in our people and their imperishable virtues. Every class and every individual must help us to found the new Reich.
The National Government will regard it as their first and foremost duty to revive in the nation the spirit of unity and cooperation. They will preserve and defend those basic principles on which our nation has been built up. They regard Christianity as the foundation of oar national morality, and the family as the basis of national life. They are determined, without regard for class and social status, to restore the nation to a consciousness of its political and national unity and of the duties consequent upon this realisation. They intend to make respect for our glorious past and pride in oar ancient traditions the ground principles for the education of German youth. In this way they will wage a pitiless warfare upon spiritual, political and cultural Nihilism. Germany must not, Germany shall not go under in the chaos of Communism.
Turbulent instincts must be replaced by a national discipline as the guiding principle of our national life. All those institutions which are the strongholds of the energy and vitality of our nation will be taken under the especial care of the Government.
The National Government intends to solve the problem of the reorganisation of trade and commerce with two four-year plans:
The German farmer must be rescued in order that the nation may be supplied with the necessities of life.
A concerted and all-embracing attack must be made on unemployment in order that the German working class may be saved from ruin.
The November parties have mined the German peasantry in fourteen years.
In fourteen years they have created an army of millions of unemployed.
The National Government will, with iron determination and unshakeable steadfastness of purpose, put through the following plan:
Within four years the German peasant must be rescued from the quagmire into which he has fallen.
Within four years unemployment must be finally overcome.
At the same time the conditions necessary for a revival in trade and commerce are provided.
The National Government will couple with this tremendous task of reorganising business life a reorganisation of the administration and fiscal systems of the Reich, of the Federal States and the Communes.
Only when this has been done can the idea of a continued federal existence of the entire Reich be fully realised.
Compulsory labour service and the "back-to-the-land" policy are two of the basic principles of this programme.
The securing of the necessities of life will include the performance of social duties to the sick and aged.
In economical administration, the promotion of employment, the preservation of the farmer as well as in the exploitation of individual initiative the Government see the best guarantee for the avoidance of any experiments which would endanger the currency.
As regards their foreign policy, the National Government consider their highest mission to be the securing of the right to live and the restoration of freedom to our nation. Their determination to bring to an end the chaotic state of affairs in Germany will assist in restoring to the community of nations a State of equal value and, above all, a State which must have equal rights. They are impressed with the importance of their duty to use this nation of equal rights as an instrument for the securing and maintenance of that peace which the world requires today more than ever before.
May the good will of all others assist in the fulfilment of this our earnest wish for the welfare of Europe and of the whole world.
Great as is our love for our army as the bearer of our arms and the symbol of our great past, we should be happy if the world, by reducing its armaments, would see to it that we need never again increase our own.
If, however, Germany is to experience this political and economic revival and conscientiously fulfil her duties towards the other nations, one decisive step is absolutely necessary first: the overcoming of the destroying menace of Communism in Germany.
We of this new Government feel ourselves responsible to posterity for the reorganisation of an ordered national State, and, at the same time, for the overcoming of class mania and class warfare. We are not concerned with only a part of the nation but with the entire German people, with the millions of peasants, working men and members of all classes who will either vanquish together the difficulties of this time or together succumb to them.
With our minds made up and true to our oath, we wish, in the face of the inability of the former Reichstag to support this work, to set the German nation itself the task which lies before us.
The President, Field-Marshal von Hindenburg, has summoned us with the command to give to the nation by our united front the possibility of a recovery.
We now therefore call upon the German people to set its signature to this act of reconciliation.
The Government of the national renaissance wishes to work and will work.
It was not this Government which in the course of fourteen years brought the German nation to ruin. What this Government intends to do is to restore the nation to its former eminence.
They are determined to make good in four years the evil done in fourteen.
They cannot, however, subject the work of restoration to the approval of those who are responsible for the collapse.
The parties of Marxism and their followers have had fourteen years to show what they can do.
The result is a heap of ruins.
We now appeal to the German nation to give us four years' time and then to pass judgement.
Obedient to the command of the Field-Marshal, we are ready to begin. May God Almighty give our work His blessing, strengthen our purpose and endow us with wisdom and the trust of our people, for we are fighting not for ourselves but for Germany!
The Government of the Reich.
Adolf Hitler, von Papen, Freiherr von Neurath, Dr. Frick, Graf Schwerin von Krosigk, Dr. Hugenberg, Seldte, Dr. Giirtner, von Blomberg, Eltz von Rubenach, Goring.