Chancellor Adolf Hitler

at the Congress of the German Labour Front in Berlin, 10 May 1933

Important changes cannot take place in the life of a nation unless there is the most urgent necessity for them.

Nobody can bring about a really decisive revolution unless the people themselves in their inmost souls are crying out for one,

unless the state of affairs makes such a revolution inevitable. It is easy to alter the form of government of a state, but a nation can only be remoulded from within when a certain process of development has already more or less taken place of itself, when that nation has discovered—perhaps not quite clearly and only subconsciously— that it has been following the wrong path, and would like to leave that path, and is only prevented from doing so by the sheer inertia of the masses until, from somewhere or other, the impulse comes, or until a movement, which has seen the new way, one day leads the nation into it. At the first moment the nation may wish to go this new way or it may seem not to wish to—but it will go if the realization is there, consciously or unconsciously, that the path is has been following is not the right one. Of all the crises under which we are suffering, all of which are but different aspects of the same picture, the one which perhaps affects the people themselves most directly is the

Economic Crisis.

The political crisis and the moral crisis are not as a rule perceived by the individual. The man in the street does not usually notice what is affecting the community but only what is affecting himself directly. It is seldom that a political or moral state of decay makes itself perceptible in the present unless it in some way affects the economic situation. But when this happens, it is no longer a question of some abstract problem which can be observed or studied from outside; one day the individual will be brought face to face with the situation, and his recognition of the impossibility of the existing state of affairs will be the more pronounced the more he himself is affected by it. Then people suddenly begin to talk about an economic crisis and economic distress and then it is possible too, taking this as the starting point, to awake an understanding for that other crisis which usually remains hidden so long from the individual.

It is natural too that even the economic crisis cannot at first be accurately diagnosed, that one does not immediately perceive all those causes which are working together to bring about this crisis. It is also quite natural that at first everyone lays the blame on somebody else and is particularly prone to hold the community, the corporations, etc. responsible for that for which he himself must bear part of the blame. At such a time it is a great good fortune if one is gradually able to make dear the reasons for such a crisis, so that they become evident to more and more people, since that is the first essential for finding the way out of the morass.

It is not enough to say that the German economic crisis is merely the result of a world crisis, and that industry is in a bad way everywhere. If that be our excuse, then every other nation can find exactly the same excuse for itself. Even so, it becomes evident that this evil is not rooted just somewhere in the world but in the nations themselves. One thing only is probable; that the root is perhaps the same in various different countries but that one cannot hope, merely by demonstrating that a certain evil seems to be a symptom of the age, thus to overcome this evil. It is clear, on the other hand, that what we have to do is to dig up this root in the individual nations, in order that one may Attack the evil there where one can hope to attack it with success.

Unfortunately the German is only too inclined at such times to gaze into the distance instead of turning his attention to what is going on at home. The fact that for a long time our people have been trained to take an international outlook results, even in such a crisis, in their seeking to solve this problem from an international standpoint. It has even caused many people to believe that it is not possible to overcome such a misfortune otherwise than by international methods. This, however, is not true. It is clear that international ills under which all nations are suffering must be cured by those nations themselves, but that does not alter the fact that every nation must take the cure into its own hands, and that no nation can be relieved by international measures which does not take the necessary steps for itself.

These measures can, of course, be consistent with international measures, but what we undertake ourselves must not be made dependent upon what others undertake.

The German economic crisis is not merely one which expresses itself in economic indices but is primarily one the cause of which is to be sought partly in the internal course of our economic life, in the type of our economic organisation, etc. In this connection one crisis should be mentioned which has affected our nation more than the others.

It is the crisis which we observe in the relationship between capital, economic life and nation.

This crisis is especially striking in the relationships between our employers and our employees. In this respect it has reached a higher peak than in any other country in the world. If this question is not satisfactorily solved, all other attempts to overcome the economic distress will be ultimately fruitless.

If we examine the real nature of the German labour movement as it has gradually developed in the course of the last fifty years, we shall be brought up against three reasons which have brought about this peculiar development.

The first reason is the change in the very nature of our economic system.

This change is just as apparent in the whole world as it is in Germany. Beginning early in the last century and increasing up to the present time, there has been a metamorphosis of our—I would almost say—petty bourgeois economic system which is resulting in its industrialisation, and finally doing away with the patriarchal relationship between employer and employee. This process was accelerated from the moment when the shareholder took the place of the owner. We can observe the beginning of an estrangement between the head worker and the hand worker, for that is actually the only decisive difference.

The word "owner" cannot be regarded here as characteristic, for we know that very many of the men who were the founders of our productive system came originally not from the owner class but from the labouring class. In them, strength of arm was united to genius, and they became the divinely gifted inventors and organizers to whom we, my comrades, owe our very existence; for without the ability of these men the nourishing and preserving of sixty-five million people on a restricted area would never have been possible.

Without these men we should have remained an export land for man-power, and with the workers we should have had to send abroad would have gone, as cultural manure for the rest of the world, the spirit which those workers possessed. That this has not been the case, we have those countless men to thank who have worked their way up from the bottom of the ladder and now, through their ability and their genius, provide a livelihood for millions of human beings. We cannot then simply speak of employers and employees, the fact is that, as is always the case in the sphere of human endeavour, the man of genius raises himself to a position of command over his fellow men. This genius is not, however, a prerogative of birth but is to be found in all castes and classes. One can say with truth that in Germany every status in life has produced such men.

The separation of interests which gradually became apparent gave rise to certain special interests of the employees, and thus began the unfavourable development of our economic system. Once we had started upon this way, it was bound to lead us further and further apart. This is the result of a law:

When once one has started upon a road which is not the right one, it will lead ever further away from the path of reason. We have experienced this in practice in the last seventy years. This road in all its consequences led us so far away from natural reasonableness that individual men of intelligence, who were themselves leading us along this road, had to admit, when the question was put to them personally, the madness of this course. Individually, they have always admitted it, but, caught up in the machinery of the system, they were unable to find the way back to reason.

On the contrary; the road let inevitably to a further separation, helped on, as has been said, by the

gradual removal of the personal element from ownership.

The result of this was moreover a seemingly scientific corroboration of the rightness of the way. There thus arose gradually a theory which conceived that the idea of property can be permanently maintained, even when those who actually benefit from this idea form only a minimal percentage of the nation. On the other hand, some people began to think that, just because only a small part of the nation benefitted from this idea, the idea itself should be done away with. Thus began the endless discussions and the battle over the idea of private property and of property as such. The result was a continually widening split between the exponents of the two ideas in economic life.

The ensuing developments led again to an unnatural state of affairs.

As soon as the two parties no longer regard their task as a common one, it is clear that only organised labour can hold its own against the employers, and it is quite natural that the power which is inherent in the employer can only be met by the united power of the employees.

Once this course is started upon, the logical result is that organised labour finds itself faced with the organisation of the employers. It is then inevitable that these two organisations will not tolerate one another, but will fight for their seemingly contrasted interests with the weapons which they have to hand—lock-out and strike. In this warfare sometimes one side and sometimes the other wins, but in either case it is the nation which has to pay the price and suffer the resulting loss.

The final result of this is that the organisations which are thus built up become, as a result of the German's tendency to bureaucracy, continually larger and more unwieldy. In the end these apparatuses no longer serve the interests behind them but those interests become the slaves of the apparatuses, so that the fight continues in order to give the apparatuses a reason for existence. And so it goes on, even when reason steps in and says: "The whole thing is lunacy. Measured by the sacrifices, the gains are utterly ludicrous; reckoned together, the sacrifices which the apparatus demands are far greater than any possible gains." Then it is up to the apparatus, more than ever before, to show how necessary it is in order to fan the flame of conflict on the respective sides. This can even result in the apparatuses coming to a certain understanding between themselves.

For example. Apparatus A says: "I am glad that apparatus B is there because I can always find a way of getting even with it. Supposing B was not there but some honest fanatics were to be fighting in its place—that would be much worse! We know the people in apparatus B and how to handle them." And so a way is found. To Caesar is rendered what is Caesar's, to the people what is the people's and—to the trade unions what is theirs. Thus a "peaceable" arrangement can always be come to. Sometimes it becomes a regular farce. The two sides rant and rage but never destroy each other of course—one can't do that or neither trade unions nor employers' organisations could exist! In the end it is the public that pays.

This conflict, which has devoured incalculable wealth and manpower, is one of the reasons for the catastrophe which has slowly but surely come about.

The second reason is the rise of Marxism.

Marxism, which is essentially a destructive philosophy, perceived at once in the trade union movement the possibility of using this as an annihilating weapon in its attack against the state and the human community. Not of course to help the working-man—what is the working-man of any country to these apostles of internationalism? Nothing at all!

They do not see him at all! They are no workers, they are intelligentsia without a country, a denationalised gang!

They saw only too well that with the help of the trade union movement, while kindly supporting the excesses of the other side, they were in the best position to forge an instrument which would carry on the fight while it took care of them at the same time, for in the entire preceding decade political social democracy has nourished itself from this fight and from the trade unions.

It was necessary for them to imbue the trade unions with the thought that they were the instrument of class warfare—which, of course, could only be brought to a successful conclusion under the leadership of Marxism. What can be more natural than that one pays the leader tribute? And they exacted plenty. These gentry were not contented with a tenth but demanded a considerably higher percentage.

This class warfare led to the proclamation of the trade unions as nothing more than instruments for the representation of the economic interests of the workers, and thus for the purpose of the general strike. The general strike thus appears for the first time as a political weapon and shows what Marxism really hoped for from this weapon: not a means to save the worker but on the contrary only a weapon for the destruction of the state which was opposed to Marxism. How far this madness could go we Germans had an unparalleled example, which was as frightful as it was instructive, during the war.

Today a number of the leaders of the Social Democrats come to me, completely changed at heart by the new spirit of the new time, and say, with somewhat deficient memory: "Social Democracy fought in the field too."

No, Marxism never fought but the German working-man fought.

In 1914 the German working-man, in a sudden inner, I might almost say, clairvoyant, recognition of the truth turned his back on Marxism and returned to his own people. The leaders of Marxism, who saw this happening, could do nothing to stop it. Some of them, a very few, returned in their hearts to their own people too. We know that one great man who has today played a decisive part in the history of the world, Benito Mussolini, returned at this hour to his own people. There were a few in Germany too. The overwhelming majority of the political leaders however did not, in comparison to the enormous response of the workers, offer themselves immediately and. voluntarily for service at the front. In spite of all their protests today they seem to have been spared this spiritual conversion. Working-men fell—their leaders took very good care of themselves to the extent of some 99 percent.

They cannot show the percentage of fallen and wounded that the entire nation can. They considered their political activities more important. Then, in 1914 and 1915, they considered their task to consist in a careful reticence; later, while delegating certain individual outsiders, they more and more began to take up a passive attitude towards the national task. The revolution was the fulfilment of their ideas.

We have only one thing to say to that:

Had the German trade unions been in our hands during the war, had they been in my hands if you like, and had they been aiming at the same wrong ends as they actually were, we National Socialists would have brought this gigantic organisation into the service of the fatherland. We should have said: "We know, of course, the sacrifice, we are ready to make it ourselves, we do not want to hold back but we will fight too, we put our fate and our lives into the hands of Almighty God just as the others must do." That we should have done without hesitation.

For you, the German workers, must realise: the present decision has to be made not about Germany as a state, not about the empire as a political.form. We are not deciding for or against monarchy, capitalism or militarism but whether our nation is to exist at all, and we German workers make up 70 per cent of the nation. It is our fate that is being decided upon.

That should have been known and could have been known at the time. We would have known it. We should all have taken the consequences for our own lives and should, of course, also have taken the consequences for the trade-union movement. We should have proclaimed: "German workers, we want to represent your rights." True, we should have had to stand in opposition to the state at times for this reason, that is to say we should have protested against the monstrosity and shamelessness of the war-time monopoly companies.

We should have protested against this pack of profiteers and would have seen to it that they were brought to reason, if necessary with the halter.

In the same way we should have put down everyone who withheld his services from the fatherland. We should have said: "In facing the enemy our only aim is the victory of our nation, for that is not the victory of a form of government but a victory which is necessary for our very lives. If we lose the war, it is not a form of government that we have lost but millions of us will lose our very means of existence, and the first to do this will not be the capitalists and the millionaires but the working masses."

It was a crime that this was not done. It was not done because this course of action was opposed to the very nature of Marxism which wished for nothing better than the destruction of Germany. The Marxists waited until they believed that nation and country, crushed by superior forces, could no longer withstand the attack from within. And then they struck.

And it was Germany that they struck and the German worker was the first to suffer and suffered the hardest.

The sum total of misery and suffering which since then has weighed upon millions of small workers' families and small households is something which the November criminals can never make good. For this reason they have nothing to complain of today. We have not exacted vengeance. If we wanted to do so we should have had to slay them by tens of thousands!

They talk so much about the Social Democrats having fought at the front. The German workers fought at the front! But even if at that time they still felt themselves in some dim way as Social Democrats—it was not the case, and everyone who fought at the front knows that at that time no one thought about parties—but even if it had been the case, how mean of those leaders that they then betrayed their own followers, who were making all the sacrifices, of the fruits of those sacrifices, that they robbed their own people of the reward for their misery, hunger, torture, sleeplessness and fear of death. They can never make good what they did to our people by their crime of that time. And, above all they can never make good that for decades they led the German worker into ever deeper spiritual isolation and in November 1918, through the meanness of small, irresponsible groups, laid on him the responsibility for a deed for which he could never be made responsible. For since November 1918 there are millions of Germans who believe that the German workers were responsible for the collapse. They, who endured such unspeakable sacrifices, who filled our regiments with millions of men, were suddenly made collectively responsible for the deed of the perjured, lying and rotten destroyers of the fatherland. That was the worst that could have happened, for at that moment the community ceased to exist for millions of men in Germany. Millions were in despair, others gazed blankly ahead and could not find the way back to their own people. The inevitable result of the breaking up of the community was the breaking down of German economic life since economic life is not a thing of itself but is a living process, a function of the national community and its course is determined by the people that make up that community. If the people thus break down, one cannot be surprised if the entire economic life gradually falls into decay too. When the individual is working on false premises, the result is that the community does the same thing, and thus something is destroyed the destruction of which has the worst possible effect on the community itself.

The third reason lies in the State itself.

There was one thing which could have kept a hold upon the masses. That was the State, if it had not itself sunk to the status of a plaything of the groups of special interests. It is not chance that the general collapse ran parallel to the democratizing of our public life. This process resulted in the state's falling into the hands of certain groups which identified themselves with property and the employing class. The masses gradually came to the conclusion that the state itself was no longer an impartial institution independent of contemporary phenomena, and, above all, that it no longer incorporated an objective authority but that it had come to be simply the tool of certain economic interests and that the very conduct of the state justified this assumption. The victory of political bourgeoisie was nothing else than the victory of a definite class which had come into being as the result of economic laws and which for its part had not the slightest qualification for political leadership and which made this leadership dependent upon the ever-changing phenomena of economic life and upon the effect of this economic life on the masses and public opinion. In other words; the people rightly felt that a natural selection takes place in all spheres of activity, always provided that the individual is qualified for this particular sphere, but that one sphere was excepted, the sphere of political leadership. In this sphere they suddenly found a process of selection based on quite other premises.

While it is quite natural that a leader in the army can only be one who has been trained for this post, it was not then taken for granted that a political leader can only be one who has had training in this work and, moreover, especially one who has shown what he can do in this line. Unfortunately people began to get the idea that the capacity for political leadership was the prerogative of a certain class which had come into existence as the result of economic laws. We have seen the results of this mistake. The class which had allocated this leadership to itself failed in every critical hour and, in the Slackest moment of the nation's history, collapsed miserably.

The German battalions did not behave in this way. Consider for a moment that this German nation of ours had at that time millions of men at the front. Everyone knows what superhuman power of determination was needed to lead a troop, let us say of the reserve, against the enemy once more, to march once more into the zone of fire with death staring one in the face and not to falter. And at home the political leaders break up and give way before a miserable gang of deserters who were too cowardly to face the enemy, and those at home capitulated in the face of these cowards. Let nobody say there was no other way; only for these men was there no other way.

For any other leaders the way would have been quite clear and there would have been no question of excusing the capitulation on the ground that higher orders had been received to this effect. At certain moments in the history of a nation there are no orders which can compel the people or the leaders of a state to give way and leave the field in the hands of cowards and incompetents.

In my opinion, if anybody had the right to lay down his arms it was the German soldier who, in his thousands, had the misfortune to have to face for four and a half years, thanks to the weakness of German diplomacy, an enemy who was nearly always superior in strength, but nevertheless, convinced that he was fighting for his nation, knew no other duty than that of every decent soldier, to conquer or to die.

No, it was not chance; on the 9th November a false development finally proved itself as a false development and false methods have proved themselves today to have been false, and it was only a question of time whether these false methods finally ruined Germany completely or whether there would yet be found in Germany sufficient strength to get rid of them. I believe we are now in a period when they have finally been got rid of.

But we are also in a period when the question of the reconstruction of our German economic system must not only be thoroughly thought out but must also be completely solved, not from without but by a thorough examination of the inner causes of the collapse and by the determination to get rid of these causes. I believe we shall have to begin where a beginning is indicated today; that is with the state itself.

A new authority must be set up

and this authority must be independent of temporary political fluctuations and, above all, of those fluctuations which allow narrow, selfish and material interests to predominate. The state must be led by a real authority and one which is not dependent on any one class. The leaders must be such that every citizen can trust them and be sure that they do not wish for anything but the happiness and the good of the German nation; they must be able to say with right that they are completely independent.

People talk so much of the absolutism of past times, of the absolutism of Frederick the Great and the democratic times of our parliamentary era. From the point of view of the nation those past times were more objective. Then people were able to perceive the interests of the nation in a more objective manner, whereas in later times the interests of individual classes came exclusively to the fore. There can be no better proof of this than the class warfare whose slogan is: "The dictatorship of the bourgeoisie must make way for the dictatorship of the proletariat." It is simply a question of a change from the dictatorship of one class to that of another,

while we wish for the dictatorship of the nation, that is, the dictatorship of the entire community.

We do not regard any one class as being of paramount importance, such distinctions disappear during the course of centuries, they come and go. What remains is the substance, a substance of flesh and blood, our nation. That is what is permanent and to that alone should we feel ourselves responsible. Only then can we prepare the way for the overcoming of our dire economic distress, only then shall we be able to restore to the millions of our people the conviction that the state does not represent the interests of a single group or class, and that the government is there to manage the concerns of the entire community. If, on one side or the other, there are people who believe that they cannot reconcile themselves to this state of affairs, then the new authority will have to be brought to bear against the one side or the other. All will have to realize that the new leaders do not hold their authority at the pleasure of any one class, but that it is theirs by virtue of a law and that law is: the necessity of preserving the nation as such.

And further: all those who play upon human weakness in order to carry out their deadly plans must be got rid of. For fourteen or fifteen years I have continuously proclaimed to the German nation that

I regard it as my task before posterity to destroy Marxism,

and that is no empty phrase but a solemn oath which I shall perform as long as I live.

I have made this confession of faith, the confession of faith of a single man, that of a mighty organisation. I know now that even if fate were to remove me the fight would be fought on to the end; this movement is the guarantee for that. This is for us no fight which can be finished by a compromise. We see in Marxism the enemy of our people which we shall root out and destroy without mercy.

We know too that only too often in economic life the interests seem to be opposed to one another, that the worker feels himself out-maneuvered—and often is out-maneuvered—that the employer often feels himself hard-pressed—and perhaps often is hard-pressed—that what seems to be profit for one is considered as loss by the other, and that success for one sometimes means the ruin of the other. We know that and see it and know that humanity has always suffered under it. All the more dangerous is it then when an organisation has as its only aim the exploitation of this fact for the destruction of. the entire nation. Because this is so, that organisation must be destroyed and that doctrine wiped out which abuses this natural weakness which has its roots in the foibles of human nature. We know quite well that the final end of this entire development, of this fight between hand and brain, between the masses, that is quantity, and quality can only be—destruction of quality, of brain. But that will not benefit the masses or improve the lot of the worker but will result in misery and want, will mean total extinction.

We see the economic distress and are not children who believe that good will can get rid of it overnight. We are reckoning too with human weakness which is always playing new tricks on mankind and which often simply brings to nought the best of intentions and the best of ideas. But we have the firm intention not to give way but to fight day in and day out—the whole of life is a battle— against these things and to oppose them by reason and to keep the interests of the community in the foreground. If we do not succeed today, where we fail today we must succeed to-morrow. And if we are asked whether we believe that we can do away with suffering, we can only reply that this will happen when there are no more fallible people on earth. As I am afraid that mankind will always be fallible, I am afraid there will also always be suffering. At any rate one generation cannot set the whole world right.

Every nation has the duty of looking after itself. Every age has the duty of solving its own particular problems. Do not think that we are leaving nothing for future generations to accomplish. No, no, we do not want to bring up our children to be lazy parasites who shall reap the harvest that others have sown. No, what you wish to possess you must continuously build up anew for yourself, you must ever be fighting for it. It is to this that we wish to train the people. We have no idea of teaching them that this sort of strife is something unnatural or unworthy; on the contrary, we want them to realize that this strife is the necessary prerequisite of selection, that without this eternal struggle there would be no human race. No, what we are doing today we are doing for ourselves.

In combatting the need of the present we are building for the future,

in that we are showing our successors how they must carry on the fight, just as we could only learn from the past what we have to do today. If the generation before us had thought in the way in which people would like to persuade us that they thought, we should not have been here. I cannot recognize as right for the future what I must designate as wrong in the past. What gives life to me and to us must also be right for the life of our successors, and we are in duty bound to act on this principle.

We must then fight to the very end those tendencies which have eaten into the soul of the German nation in the last seventeen years, which have done us such incalculable damage and which, if they had not been vanquished, would have destroyed Germany. Bismarck told us that liberalism was the pace-maker of social democracy. I need not say here that social democracy is the pacemaker of communism.

And communism is the forerunner of death, of national destruction and extinction.

We have joined battle with it and shall fight it to the death. As so often in the history of Germany, it will be proved once more that the greater the need is the more strength the German nation finds to rise once more above it. It will find it this time too and I am convinced that it has already started on the road upwards.

I must now speak of another measure, the freeing of the at present existing unions from the influence of those men who believe that they possess in those unions a last line of defence. Let them have no illusions as to this. What they built up we hold for wrong. We see however that the German genius, working against the will of the founders of these unions, gradually awoke in millions of individuals a feeling which found its outward expression in mighty organisations. Those men would have destroyed those organisations. We are taking them over, not to preserve everything in the same form for the future but to save for the German working-man all that he had put by in these organisations in the way of savings and, furthermore, in order that the German worker might cooperate in the building of the new state, to enable him to do this on a basis of equality. We are not erecting a state against him; no, with him must the new state be built up.

He must not have the feeling that he is something inferior and to be despised. No, on the contrary! We want to fill him from the very beginning, already in the earliest stages, with the feeling that he is a German with the same rights as any other. And, in my eyes, equal rights have never been anything else than the cheerful undertaking of equal duties.

One must not be always speaking of rights but one must also speak of duties.

The German worker must show the others that he no longer stands outside the German nation and its rebirth. There will, of course, be elements who do not agree. There will, however, be people like this in the right wing too. The day's work will be carried on regardless of them.

Those in Germany who in purity of heart and profound earnestness wish for nothing else than the greatness of their nation will find the way to one another. Such men will be able to come to an agreement, will be able to understand one another, and, if sometimes doubts should arise once more and hard facts play unpleasant tricks upon them, it is our desire to play the part of honest brokers.

Then it will be the task of the Government, as upright and honest broker, to join together once more the hands of those who are on the point of separating

and more and more to impress upon the German people that they must not fight against one another, they must not break with one another on superficial questions and forsake one another because in the course of centuries things may have taken a course which we as individuals regret, but that they must always keep in mind that the common duty of all is to preserve the national community. If this is done, a way will be found—a way must be found. We cannot simply say the way to national life has become impossible because at the moment there are certain difficulties. The moment will pass, but life must and will go on.

In this way the unifying of the German labour movement takes on a profound moral significance. In thus building up a state which will have to be the result of great concessions on both sides, we wish to have two contracting parties face one another who think nationally with their whole hearts and see only the nation and are ready to put all other considerations in the background in order to serve the community. Only when this is accomplished can we be confident of success.

And here the will from which the deed proceeds is decisive.

There can be no victors and vanquished but only one victor: our German nation.

Victor over classes, victor over statuses and victor over the individual interest groups in our nation. And thus we shall arrive naturally at an understanding of the nobility of work. That too is a task which cannot be fulfilled overnight. Just as it took centuries to pervert the meaning of the word "labour" so it will take centuries to restore to it its original value in the minds of the German people. It will be the steadfast aim of the movement which I and my fellow-workers represent to exalt the world 'worker' to the greatest title of honour in the German nation. Not for nothing have we included it in the name of our party—certainty not because it has been of great advantage to us. On the contrary, it has brought us hatred and enmity from the one side and lack of understanding from the other. We chose this word because we wished, with the victory of our movement, to bring honour to it too.

We chose it that, with the word 'nation' it might be made to form the basis of national unity, for every honourable man cannot but be proud of such a title.

Personally, I am against honorary titles and I do not think any one can reproach me very much for this. What is not absolutely necessary for me to do I do not do. I should never care to have visiting cards printed with the titles which in this world are given with such ceremony. I do not want anything on my gravestone but my name. All the same, owing to the peculiar circumstances of my life, I am perhaps more capable than any one else of understanding the nature and the life of the various German castes. Not because I have been able to observe this life from the higher ranks but because I have participated in it, because fate in a moment of caprice, or perhaps fulfilling the designs of Providence, cast my lot in that of the great masses. Because I myself was a labouring man for years. And because for the second time I lived for years among the masses as a common soldier, and then fate lifted me into another class of our people so that I learned to know this class better than many another. And so fate has perhaps destined me more than any other to be—I can apply this word to myself—an honest broker,

an honest broker for both sides.

I am not personally interested here. I am neither dependent on the state, nor on an official office, nor am I dependent on any industrial or economic concern nor on the trade unions. I am an independent man and I have set myself no other aim than to serve the German people to the best of my ability and above all to be of service to those millions who, thanks to their trusting simplicity and, above all, to the ignorance and wickedness of their leaders, have perhaps suffered most of all.

It has always been my idea that there can be nothing finer than to be the advocate of those who cannot defend themselves.

I know the people and should like to say just one thing to our intellectuals: "Any country that is founded only upon the intellectual classes is built on a weak foundation."

I know the intellectual too; always indulging in sophistry, always probing and searching but always wavering and uncertain, mobile but never sure. Whoever tries to build a state on this intellectual class alone will see that he is not building securely. It is not chance that the religions are more stable than forms of government. They usually sink their roots deeper in the soil; they would not be conceivable without the masses. I know that the intellectuals are only too prone to look down upon the masses and to judge them by their own standards and their own so-called intellect, and yet there are things here which the intellectual cannot understand because he cannot see them. It is true however that the masses are often somewhat slow of comprehension and are, in certain respects, backward, not so mobile, not so bright. But they have something, they have faithfulness, tenacity and stability.

I can safely say that the revolution would never have succeeded had it not been for my comrades in the masses who stood with such steadfastness and faithfulness behind us.

I can conceive nothing better for our Germany than that we should succeed in bringing those of the masses who now stand outside our ranks into the new state and making them the foundation of that new state.

A poet once said: "Germany will then be truly great when her poorest son is her most devoted citizen." I knew these poorest sons for four and a half years as soldiers in the great World War; I have known those who, with perhaps nothing to gain for themselves, have followed the call of the blood and become heroes for no reason but that they felt themselves part of the nation.

No nation has more right to erect a monument to its unknown soldier than the German nation. That unshakaeble guard which stood firm in a thousand battles, which never shirked and never gave way, which has given a thousand examples of courage, devotion, self-sacrifice, discipline and obedience must be won for the state, for the coming Reich, for our Third Reich. That is perhaps the most priceless gift we can give it.

Because I know these men perhaps better than any one else who also knows the others, I am now not only ready to act as honest broker, but I am happy that fate has given me the opportunity to play this part.

Nothing in life could make me prouder than, at the end, to be able to say: "I have won over the German worker for the German Reich."