01-03 September 1933 - Adolf Hitler - excerptions of speeches at the Party Congress in Nuremberg

Power and the brutal use of force can accomplish much, but in the long run, no state of affairs is secure unless it appears logical in and of itself and intellectually irrefutable. And above all: the National Socialist Movement must profess its faith in the heroism which prefers any degree of opposition and hardship to even once denying the principles it has recognized as right. It may be filled only by a single fear, namely that one day a time might come when we are accused of insincerity or thoughtlessness. The heroic idea must, however, be constantly willing to renounce the approval of the present if sincerity and truth so require.

Just as the hero has renounced his life to live on in the Pantheon of history, so must a truly great movement perceive in the rightness of its concept, in the sincerity of its actions the talisman which will safely lead it from a transient present to an immortal future.

The fact that something has never existed before is no proof for the quality of an accomplishment; it can just as easily be evidence for an inferiority which has never existed prior thereto. Thus if a so-called artist perceives his sole purpose in life as presenting the most confusing and incomprehensible portrayals of the accomplishments of the past or the present, the actual accomplishments of the past will nevertheless remain accomplishments, while the artistic stammerings of the painting, music, sculpture, and architecture produced by these types of charlatans will one day be nothing but proof of the magnitude of a nation’s downfall.

I would be happy if the gentlemen would leave Nuremberg with the impression that the National Socialist Rule in Germany was not a rule of force or, much less, tyranny, but that here the voice of the Volk truly found its innermost and deepest expression.

You, my boys, you are the living Germany of the future, not some empty idea, not some faint shadow, but the blood of our blood, the flesh of our flesh, the spirit of our spirit, you are the future of our Volk personified.

It is your duty to ensure that every German, regardless of class and regardless of origins, be put through this weltanschaulich and political school which you represent.

The Party Congress of our Movement has always been a great military parade of its men, its men who are determined and willing to not only uphold the discipline of the community of the Volk in a theoretical sense, but to put it into practice. A community with no respect to origin, class, profession, assets, or education. A community which has come together, united in a single great faith and in a single great will, united not only for one rank, not for parties, not for professions, and not for classes, but united for our Germany.

Fourteen years of want, misery and humiliation lie behind us. In these fourteen years, however, a new, miraculous ideal has also asserted itself in our German Volk. We National Socialists have every right to say: when everyone became disloyal, we remained loyal and became truly loyal-an alliance of unswerving loyalty, unswerving comradeship, and if the Goddess of Fortune turned away from our Volk for fourteen years, we know it was because our Volk had itself to blame. But we also know that she will turn her gaze upon us once more when we have atoned for our guilt. May Heaven be our witness: the guilt of our Volk is extinguished, the crimes punished, the disgrace blotted out! The Men of November have been felled, and their tyranny is over.

Communism is not a higher evolutionary stage, but the most primitive basic forrn of shaping peoples and nations.

In devoting ourselves in this way to caring for our own blood, a blood which Fate has entrusted to us, we are best helping to protect other peoples from diseases which spread from race to race and from Volk to Volk. If a single Volk were to fall prey to Bolshevism in Western or Central Europe, this poison would continue its corrosive work and devastate today’s oldest and most beautiful cultural possession on earth. In taking this fight upon itself, Germany is but fulfilling, as so often in its history, a truly European mission.

[1] Adolf Hitler said about the party congresses in Nuremberg: “I have resolved to order that our Parteitage will take place in this city now and for all time.”