Adolf Hitler - declaration on the Buckeberg

October 4, 1936

I believe that reason is to be the sovereign in our state and that the German Volk has sufficient insight and discipline to grasp the necessities this reason entails. And therefore we perceive: First of all, that we can only prevail if we have social peace, i.e. if not everyone can do what he wants to. The individual must subordinate himself to the whole, to a higher common interest. Hence the worker cannot look after only his own interests, just as the peasant and the urban dweller cannot look after only their own; rather, each is called upon to show mutual consideration to the others! Secondly, that we must keep our wage policy and thus our pricing policy stable and steady. And if anyone believes he can violate that policy, believe me, as long as I live and remain standing at the head of the Reich, I will successfully defend the reason of general, national self-preservation against these few lunatics!

I am thereby doing something which in fact brings great good fortune to millions upon millions of people in Germany. We could make maneuvers like those the others are making: today I grant a worker a fifteen or twenty-percent wage increase; tomorrow I raise prices by fifteen or twenty percent; then I raise wages and then prices again, and two months later we devaluate the German mark and betray the savers, and then we increase wages again, and so on-do you think that would make the German Volk happy? I am directing an appeal to all of you: gauge the good fortune of our inner German economic, social, and political peace! How splendid it is indeed in Germany today!

Take a look into other nations who have lost this power of reason! We must never allow this good fortune and this peace to be taken from us, and I know that this will never come to pass! Where in the world would it be possible that, on a day such as today-on a day so cold that the wind whips the clouds over the mountains and one expects it to rain again any minute-where else would it be possible that hundreds of thousands and hundreds of thousands-nearly a million people-flock together on such a day to profess their unity?

That was the miracle-that the first seven were joined by a further seven and ultimately twenty and fifty and one hundred and then one thousand and ten thousand and one hundred thousand, and that they did not tire of parading their idealism again and again and of obeying it and not the so-called real purpose of life.