Adolf Hitler - speech to SA, SS & NSKK

(Short excerptions)

 

 

Nuremberg, September 12, 1937

 

It did not want reason and insight to reside in our Volk. And when the first men stood up in order to preach the new reason of a Volksgemeinschaft with me and behind me, those whose interest lay in tearing the Volk asunder rose up against us. We all shared but one possession: a boundless love for our Volk and an unshakeable faith in its resurrection. And today Germany has truly risen once again, and its rising is our achievement!

 

[…]

 

A mere ten or fifteen years ago, these people were only barely able to communicate with one another, and today the entire German nation is following one command, one order! In his life on this earth, man needs external, visible symbols which can be carried before him and which he strives to imitate.

 

For the German, the most sacred symbol has always been the flag; it is not a piece of cloth, but a conviction and a pledge and hence an obligation.

 

In the long yearn of our struggle for the German being against its adversaries, the flag was carried at your fore, the one which is today the flag of the German Reich. These standards of our struggle at that time were inconspicuous and faded, wholly unprepossessing; yet how we loved our flag regardless, a flag that had nothing to do with the disintegration of the nation but to us seemed to be the sunshine of a new and better German future! How the tens of thousands and later hundreds of thousands of our party comrades clung to this flag, and how they rallied around this flag! There are times when we still see them today, these oldest storm banners of the party, so faded and hleached- and nevertheless shining stars for us all. They accompanied us in the time of a fantastic struggle, the likes of which perhaps has never existed in any other country as it has in our Volk and as it has at such length.

 

Today they have been raised before us as symbols of the State we have earned and the German Volksgemeinschaft we have fought for and won.