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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

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For readers interested in the Third Reich, the Holocaust, Nazism, and genocides. Taken from Hitler: Speeches and Proclamations, 1932 1945, a four-volume set, this 850 page abridgement is arranged by topic: I. Introduction and personal notes; II. Chronology; III. Hitler s ideology (general, race, Jew
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