The Essential Hitler: Speeches and Commentary

881 Pages·2007·4.76 MB·English

by  Max Domarus

Max Domarus
Patrick Romane
Edited by
Charles W. Sydnor, Jr.
Foreword by
Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers, Inc.
Wauconda, Illinois USA
General Editor
Marie Carducci Bolchazy
Contributing Editor
Alex MacGregor
Foreword by
Charles W. Sydnor, Jr.
Cover Design & Typography
Adam Phillip Velez
Cartography
Margaret W. Pearce
The Essential Hitler
Speeches and Commentary
Max Domarus
Edited by Patrick Romane
© 2007 Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers, Inc.
1000 Brown Street
Wauconda, IL 60084 USA
www.bolchazy.com
Printed in the Canada
2007
by Friesens
Paperback: ISBN 978-0-86516-627-1
Hardbound: ISBN 978-0-86516-665-3
————————————————————————————————————————
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hitler, Adolf, 1889-1945.
[Reden und Proklamationen, 1932-1945. English. Selections.]
The essential Hitler : speeches and commentary / Hitler ; [edited with commentary by] Max
Domarus
; [abridgment] edited by Patrick Romane. -- 1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-86516-665-3 -- ISBN 978-0-86516-627-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Germany--Politics and government--1933-1945--Sources. 2. Hitler, Adolf,
1889-1945--Translations into English. 3. National socialism--Sources. 4. Nationalsozialistische
Deutsche Arbeiter-Partei--History--Sources. I. Domarus, Max. II. Romane, Patrick. III. Title.
DD247.H5A575132 2006
943.086092--dc22
2006036890
Contents
Foreword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . v
Editor’s Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi
I. Domarus’ Preface and Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . .1
II. Major Events in Hitler’s Germany 1932–1945 . . . . . . 63
III. What Hitler Believed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133
IV. How Hitler Governed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209
V. Hitler’s Party . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 295
VI. Putting Germany to Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 321
VII. Th e Jewish Question . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 373
VIII. Th e Churches and Hitler . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 427
IX. Hitler Becomes Supreme Commander . . . . . . . . . . 441
X. Life in Hitler’s Germany . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 461
XI. How the Press Viewed Hitler . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 517
XII. Expanding the Reich . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 585
XIII. Hitler Confronts America . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 673
XIV. Hitler Fights His War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 723
XV. Hitler’s War Ends . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 795
XVI. Epilogue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 815
Glossary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 825
Dates in Hitler’s Life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 833
Maps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 839
Chronological Index of Speeches and Events . . . . . . 843
Subject Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 851
◆ iii ◆
iv The Essential Hitler
Photographs:
Th e Might of the Th ird Reich . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . x
Young Hitler, a German Soldier in World War I . . . .xviii
Himmler inspects a concentration camp. . . . . . . . . . 62
Hitler ponders. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 132
Hitler took great care to stage-manage the
sessions of the Reichstag. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207
Hitler explains. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 208
Hitler sets the stage for a party rally. . . . . . . . . . . . 294
Hitler was always afraid. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 372
Hitler willingly appeared to be religious at times. . . . 426
Wehrmacht Day 1935 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 460
Hitler explains a project. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 515
Hitler always paid close attention to what the
press said.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 516
Th e Great Reviewing Stand in the Year 2000 . . . . . . 583
Hitler’s Painting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 584
Allied Buildup in Normandy a Few Days aft er
the Landings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 672
War on the Eastern Front, Winter 1941–1942 . . . . . 722
Hitler’s Bunker . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 794
A Concentration Camp . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 813
Eva Braun . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 814
Hitler in the Reich Chancellery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 824
Maps:
Concentration and Extermination Camps
in Nazi Dominated Europe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 839
Germany aft er World War I . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 840
German Expansion January 1935 to August 1939 . . . 841
Hitler’s Europe 1942 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 842
Foreword
He was the dominant fi gure of the twentieth century. Adolf Hitler qualifi ed
for this role and stature because he was a unique conjunction of personal
and historical forces. Th e enormity of what he attempted and achieved, the
unprecedented confl ict, mass murder and inhumanity he unleashed, and
the political and demographic upheavals he planned and launched aff ected
the entire globe for over a decade, and set in motion historical forces that
persist to this day. No other fi gure in modern history had such a profound,
and profoundly malevolent, infl uence upon humankind, or came nearly as
close to achieving the destruction of civilization as he did. Sixty-two years
aft er his squalid suicide in the shattered ruins of Berlin, we still live in a
world that struggles with forces, conditions, and consequences that persist
from the costs incurred by the massive Allied eff ort to destroy Adolf Hitler
and crush Nazi Germany.
Adolf Hitler rose from complete obscurity, as “the unknown corporal
of the Great War,” to exercise unlimited dictatorial power in the German
Th ird Reich he created. He was the fi rst German ruler to be idolized and
obeyed through an unbroken and unprecedented wave of genuine public
popularity that proved as vital to sustaining the Nazi state as the great
tyranny directed from Berlin through his SS and police terror apparatus,
which aft er 1938 was used even more ruthlessly in brutalizing the popula-
tions in the German conquered and occupied regions of Europe than in the
Hitlerian motherland itself.
An odyssey as improbable as Adolf Hitler’s could not have begun, much
less succeeded, in a politically and economically stable Germany set within
a normal and settled European order. Th e German society and European
system into which Adolf Hitler emerged and rapidly rose aft er the Great
War of 1914–1918 were anything but stable and normal. Th e First World
War had exhausted and then overturned and shattered the European and
world order of the nineteenth century. Millions of young men from the
◆ v ◆
vi The Essential Hitler
belligerent states—for example, France, Great Britain, Russia, and Ger-
many—had been lost in the trenches, cut down in history’s fi rst confl ict of
mechanized, technically feasible mass slaughter. At the end of the confl ict,
in the autumn of 1918, Germany collapsed militarily into a defeat as rapid
and complete as it was incomprehensible to the German people—and to
the German soldier Adolf Hitler.
Hitler had served for four years in the trenches and was a decorated
combat veteran, in a German army that became his home, in a war that
shaped his character and his views, and for a cause with which he identifi ed
his whole existence. Germany’s defeat devastated both Adolf Hitler and
the world Adolf Hitler had known, destroying the meaning and purpose
of his life. Postwar revolution, Communist-directed violence, spreading
political chaos, and the onset of hardship and privation, set against the
backdrop of the humiliating Allied peace terms imposed on Germany in
the Treaty of Versailles, led millions of Germans—like Hitler—to look for
answers, fi nd explanations, search for scapegoats, and seek out individuals
and groups—above all alien, minority groups—to blame for the catastro-
phe of defeat and Germany’s despair and ruin. Postwar political instability
bred new political parties and radical fringe groups—a few on the politi-
cal left , most on the political right—where old resentments, new hatreds,
racist doctrines, and xenophobic proposals for German resurgence and na-
tional revenge all coalesced around the common elements of intolerance
and hatred—vehement, unremitting hatred of those identifi ed as the crim-
inals who stabbed the German army in the back and were responsible for
defeat—liberal and left -wing politicians, union leaders and labor agitators,
military mutineers and Communist insurgents, intellectuals, and Jews.
Operating in this miasmic postwar cauldron as a spy and informer for the
German army, reporting on the new extremist splinter groups on the radi-
cal right until he was discharged from the army on March 31, 1920, Ad-
olf Hitler discovered personal gift s and instincts that suited him perfectly
for the turbulent abnormalities of German politics. His radical German
nationalism and his extreme hatred of Jews, Socialists, Communists, and
all those who supported the new postwar German Republic, burst forth
in a talent for public speaking and demagoguery that was to grow, over
the next two decades, into a genius for compelling, overpowering oratory.
Hitler had an uncanny ability to sense the moods of his audiences and to
tailor the pitch and tone of his speeches to the prejudices, grievances, and
resentments the crowds harbored. He had the capacity to connect with
Foreword vii
individual listeners with such passion and power that he could move huge,
open-air crowds of hundreds of thousands to frenzy, and mesmerize spell-
bound radio audiences of millions of listeners throughout Germany and
beyond. Adolf Hitler was history’s fi rst media tyrant, sensing the advan-
tages and exploiting the potential modern mass communications off ered
in amplifying his oratorical powers.
Hitler’s rise to power in Germany, while built upon the political skills
and alliances he developed, and propelled by his uncanny instincts for
seizing opportunities and capitalizing on luck, ran straight through his
vocal cords—his rise would have come to nothing without his hypnotic
oratory. Until well into his dictatorship, and aft er he began the Second
World War, the essential medium of Hitler’s power was the spoken word.
No other fi gure of the twentieth century mastered or deployed public
oratory to the results and eff ects Adolf Hitler did. He wrote all his own
speeches, the important orations requiring days of elaborate preparation.
He developed and rehearsed exaggerated but powerfully eff ective tech-
niques that included operatic gestures, alternating cadences of speech, lev-
els of voice, sarcasm and irony, and the uncanny timing that charged his
performances with electrifying tones of menace, fury, and hatred. Like an
organ virtuoso, Hitler played upon the hypnotic power in the timber and
emotional range of his voice to break down the resistance of audiences and
sweep them along with him to the frenzied oratorical climax that ended
all his public speeches—leaving both Hitler and his audience spent and
emotionally exhausted.
In all his public oratory, as in all his public life, the raw force of hatred,
depending upon the occasion or the subject of the speech, was either the
central theme or a barely disguised undercurrent to what Hitler said and
did. Hatred was the emotion most natural to Hitler, the staple of his charac-
ter. His capacity for hatred was unlimited and was never satiated by any tri-
umph, achievement, political victory, or military conquest throughout his
entire political career—before and aft er he came to power as the Führer.
At the nadir of his inhumanity, Hitler harbored a murderous, limitless
hatred of the Jews. Once his dictatorship was established, his power un-
challenged, and his war against the world launched, he gave increasing vent
to this all-consuming hatred and his murderous intentions in the rhetoric
of annihilation and extermination—in public speeches, in harangues to
his Nazi Party cronies and satraps, and in the rambling monologues he in-
fl icted on his dinner guests and his inner circle at his headquarters.
viii The Essential Hitler
Th roughout his political life, Hitler’s gift s for oratory also served to es-
tablish and embellish the cult of the Führer and the myth he consciously
created of himself as an historic fi gure. Hitler cast his public speeches, his
proclamations, his remarks at ceremonial occasions, and his participation
in the great public spectacles of the Nazi calendar to perpetuate the aura
of himself as a legendary fi gure, a “world historical genius,” as he oft en re-
ferred to himself. Before the end of his life, Hitler completely subsumed
his private identity into his public persona—the one, all-powerful historic
Führer, with whom Germany and its fate were inextricably tied. Th us, the
surviving records of what he said in public and in private, what he pub-
lished as proclamations and issued as decrees, what he acknowledged in
interviews and revealed in conversations represent an authentic refl ection
of the real Adolf Hitler—the public Adolf Hitler.
For four decades, scholars and students seeking fresh insights or new
perspectives through research in collections of Hitler’s speeches—his spo-
ken and written words—could turn to the defi nitive, four-volume Ger-
man edition Hitler, Reden und Proklamationen, 1932 bis 1945, edited with
commentary by the late Professor Max Domarus, a German historian and
medieval specialist who heard Hitler speak many times, and in 1932 began
collecting copies of the Führer’s speeches, and Hitler’s public comments
interviews and letters, knowing then they would become important his-
torical materials. Aft er more than a decade of labor, Domarus’ fi rst Ger-
man edition of Reden und Proklamationen appeared in 1963, subsequently
reprinted in several German editions down to 1988.
Until the last decade the Domarus collection of Hitler’s speeches re-
mained unavailable to English-reading audiences. Th en, beginning in
1990, and continuing until 2004, Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers of Wau-
conda, Illinois, commissioned and completed an English translation from
the German of the entire four-volume Domarus edition, Hitler, Speeches
and Proclamations, 1932–1945: Th e Chronicle of a Dictatorship,—a stag-
gering undertaking. As a result, English-speaking scholars, students, and
interested lay readers now have access to one of the most important histori-
cal sources documenting the public life of Adolf Hitler and the history of
Nazi Germany. Both the German and English four-volume sets contain a
running commentary Domarus wrote on the historical context and events
Hitler referred to in his speeches, and what consequences developed as a
result of what Hitler said.
Foreword ix
To complete this enterprise in accessibility, Bolchazy-Carducci Pub-
lishers has now fi nished a one-volume English abridged edition of the
complete four-volume set of their English translation. Th e Essential Hit-
ler: Speeches and Commentary includes both the preface and introduction
Domarus wrote originally for the four-volume German work, as well as
Domarus’ observations about Hitler as a personality and political leader,
and the event summaries Domarus penned for each of the four volumes for
the years 1932–1945. Even though many of the Domarus observations and
conclusions are now long superseded thanks to more recent scholarship,
they are nonetheless invaluable as a companion historical source, enabling
the reader to see Hitler as observed by a fi rst-hand witness, from a time
closer to Hitler’s era and to the events described in the speeches, proclama-
tions, and other pronouncements.
Th e main text in this abridged edition centers upon the speeches and
documents selected by the editor, which are complemented by Domarus’
commentary. Chapters are organized topically, each with a particular focus
relating to an important aspect of Hitler’s public life and role as the Führer
of Nazi Germany—what Hitler believed, how he governed, Hitler and the
Nazi Party, the German economy in the 1930’s, Hitler and the churches,
life in Hitler’s Germany, Hitler as a strategist and military commander,
Hitler and the Jewish question, and chapters on how Hitler fought and
lost the war. Edited by Patrick Romane, Th e Essential Hitler: Speeches and
Commentary serves as both a reliable and useful introduction to Hitler
the orator and to Hitler’s use of the spoken and written word. Th e result
is a volume of general interest that should fi nd a prominent place on the
reference shelf of any student or specialist interested in any phase of the
life and career of the most complex, destructive, and central historic fi gure
of the twentieth century.
Charles W. Sydnor, Jr.
Emory & Henry College
Former president,
Commonwealth Public
Broadcasting Corporation
For information on the German and English four volume editions (Hitler: Speeches and
Proclamations, 1932–1945) and for CD versions, go to www.bolchazy.com