Adolf Hitler - New Year’s Proclamation to the Party

 

 

National Socialists!

 

The twelfth year of our Movement’s struggle has come to an end. Thanks to the colossal loyalty of all our fellow fighters, thanks to their sense of duty and sacrifice, the victory march of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party can continue this year as well. We all know one thing: in 1931 our Movement became the largest party in Germany. Tremendous external victories are visible evidence to all of this fact.

 

When six and a half million German adults elected 107 of our trusted deputies to the German Reichstag on September 14, 1930, for the first time the whole world saw rent apart the web of lies with which the internal growth of our Movement has been outwardly veiled for years. Even the lies and slander were forced to halt their workings: a victory had been wrought which lies could not erase. Admittedly, only a few short weeks later, those professional political perverters of the truth had regained their footing and recovered from the initial shock to the extent that their brazen old game of lies could begin anew. They made an attempt to persuade themselves and the world that only a “temporary illness” of the German Volk could be the cause of our success. The Party - according to them - had reached its climax and would now plunge into abrupt decline.

 

Party Comrades! You have witnessed how Fate and the facts have once again proven our official political prophets to be liars. The year 1931 has pinned victory upon victory to our National Socialist flags. In spite of the flood of lies, misrepresentations, and slander which I had predicted, the masses of our adherents have grown enormously in this year’s elections. Germany is in the process of becoming National Socialist at a rapid pace. The elections in Bremen, Hamburg, Oldenburg, Anhalt-Dessau, Mecklenburg, Hesse, and Württemberg have brought about a continuous increase in the greatness and significance of our Movement. However, these external victories, no matter how exhilarating they are, would be worthless were they not ultimately accompanied by a comparable internal growth within the Party.

 

Party Comrades! You should gauge the magnitude of our Movement’s growth by the following: on September 14, 1930, our Party had 293 000 members. Today, on January 1, 1932, membership has already exceeded the 800 000 mark.

 

By January 1, 1931, approximately 100 000 men had joined our SA and SS organizations. Today, on January 1, 1932, there are far more than 300 000. The number of our adherents already exceeds 15 million!

This is a victory march unparalleled in the history of our Volk.

 

This numerical growth corresponds to the unique internal expansion of our organization.

 

Today Bolshevism and its Marxist-Centrist-Democratic helpers are faced with a gigantic front of awakening Germany!

 

Were it not for the pact which the Center and the middle classes have entered into with Marxism as a result of their inner relatedness of character, there would be no red, anti-Christian Germany today.

 

Therefore they are the accursed accomplices of Bolshevism.

 

Just as a figure like Bismarck once rightfully described liberalism as the pacesetter of Social Democracy, Democracy and the Center are today the pacesetters of Bolshevism and thus the parties who are mainly to blame for our misfortune. One merely external demonstration of the greatness of our National Socialist Organization is the establishment of the “Braunes Haus” as central Reich Office. In February of last year, the move was made from the offices in 50 Schellingstrasse to the newly acquired building in the Brienner Strasse. Despite extensions and modifications, today this building is already much too small. A new building is on the rise, another is in the planning stages, and yet another structure neighboring the Braunes Haus has been occupied since December. Not until 1931 was it possible to enlarge Organization Department II.

 

This has led not only to the increased conquest of the worker in the city, but also to the winning of the peasant.

 

The National Socialist German Workers’ Party is a party not only of city dwellers; today it is also already the largest German peasants’ party.

 

Its policy of balancing and reconciling the individual ranks of life, of unifying all Germans for the great political lifework of our Volk, impresses its mark more strongly upon its own composition with each passing month.

 

The inner stability of our Movement and the absolute rightness of the thoughts as well as the foundations of its organization revealed themselves perhaps most clearly when called upon to overcome all of our adversaries’ attempts, by way of internal disturbances, to fragment the party of German resurrection they so abhor.

 

The rejoicing with which our enemies welcomed every apparent indication of inner rebellion in our Movement was just as great as their bitter disappointment: the Party has come out of every test stronger than before. The year 1931 is the most convincing evidence of all!

 

National Socialists! Today you see this evolution clearly behind you. May you set your sights from there on the future. The time is approaching when the world will face a decision which comes about only once in millenniums.

The bourgeois parties view what happens in the world through their own eyes. Small and shortsighted as they are, they suppose the manifestations of the environment to be powers similar to their own. Even now, they have not yet recognized in Bolshevism the destruction of all human cultures but perceive it to be a perhaps still “interesting experiment of a new desire on the part of the State.” They are totally unaware that today a thousand-year-old culture is being shaken to its very foundations; they have no conception of the fact that, if Bolshevism ultimately triumphs, it will not merely mean that a few miserable bourgeois governments will go to the devil, but that irreplaceable historic traditions will come to an end as well. Yes, and that furthermore a turning point in the development of humanity will inevitably be the end result in the worst meaning of the word. Bolshevism’s triumph means not only the end of today’s peoples, their states, their cultures, and their economies; it also means the end of their religions! This world shock will result not in freedom, but in barbarous tyranny on the one hand and a materialistic brutalization of man on the other!

 

As so often before in the history of peoples, Germany’s fate this time will again be of decisive importance for the fate of all. If the flags of the red stultification and brutalization of humanity (Menschheitsverdummung undMenschheitsvertierung) should ever be hoisted over Germany, the rest of the world will share the same lot.

 

For seventy years, disreputable bourgeois parties in Germany have exhausted the power of the national idea and, to a large degree, left our Volk at the mercy of Marxism. For seventy years the parties of democracy and, in their wake, the strictly Christian Center Party, have helped to corrupt our Volk by practicing sodomy with the forerunners of Bolshevism.

 

Today they are clinging with a reprehensible thirst for power to a regime which would no longer belong to them if their own significance alone were any measure.

 

Were the National Socialist Movement to cease existing today as a counterbalance to Marxism, Germany would be Bolshevist tomorrow.

 

But what is Fate’s will? If there was any deeper meaning underlying the events of last year, then it can only be that it is Fate’s own will that a clear line is drawn.

 

We can see how the verse from the Bible which recognizes both the hot and the cold but damns the lukewarm to being spewn forth is coming to fruition in our Volk. The middle will be smashed and shattered. The compromises will come to an end. Today international Bolshevism is faced with the German nation under National Socialism. The Almighty Himself is creating, out of His own merciful will, the prerequisite for the salvation of our Volk; in allowing the lukewarm middle to be destroyed, He intends to give us the triumph.

 

National Socialists! We now enter upon the new year in the conviction that it will be the most difficult year of the struggle of our Movement.

 

A glance behind us shows countless sacrifices. As long as we comprised a small party, we were entitled to perceive in our own sacrifices the magnitude of the obligation for our actions. Now that Providence has granted us such great successes, the extent of our duties to Germany lies in the magnitude of the sacrifices which our Volk has taken on in the course of its historical evolution.

 

We are fighting not for the victory of one party, but rather for the preservation of our Volk.

 

In view of the magnitude of these sacrifices and this task, we cannot expect that the way which lies ahead will be easy!

 

Men of the National Socialist Movement! SA and SS Comrades! I repeat the demands I made last year:

 

Men of my National Socialist Movement! I am not demanding that you do anything illegal, I am not requiring anything which would bring your conscience in conflict with the law, but I do demand that you follow me loyally on the path which the law permits and which my conscience and my insight require, and that you join your fate with my fate.

 

It will be a purgatory of slander, lies, misrepresentations, terror, and suppression through which our Movement must pass!

 

Our opponent fears retaliation for the inordinate number of crimes he has perpetrated upon our Volk. Hence no trick or deed is beyond him in his determination to prevent the victory of our Movement.

 

National Socialists! Expect it from the very beginning, and nothing will surprise you. Then you will overcome everything.

 

The path from seven men to fifteen million was more difficult than the path from fifteen million to the German nation will be.

 

As we once had the audacity to believe in our gigantic goal and its realization, let us today have the courage, like a knight without fear and without reproach, to withstand hell, death and the devil and choose the way to victory and freedom. National Socialists! Each of you shall be proud to be attacked by our adversaries in 1932!

 

He who is not attacked by the Marxist falsifiers and the Centrist liars and their press is useless to Germany and worth nothing to our Volk!

 

Struggle through to the realization that our enemies today are left with only one means of fighting: lying; and gauge from this the necessity of a community welded together for better or worse.

 

Comrades! Let us march into this new year as fighters with the goal of leaving it as victors.

 

Long live our glorious National Socialist Combat Movement!

 

Long live our eternally beloved German Volk!

 

Deutschland erwache!

 

 

Munich, January 1, 1932                                                                                                                                                                                                              Adolf Hitler