Adolf Hitler – proclamation read by Gauleiter Adolf Wagner

(Excerptions) 

Nuremberg, September 06, 1937

Since then, this city has represented in miniature both how our Movement and Germany have evolved as well as the evolution of this city. A gigantic forum is in the process of emerging. Its parade grounds are the most extensive in the world. As of tomorrow, the cornerstone will be laid for the erection of a stadium the likes of which have never before been seen on earth.

Within a mere two years’ time, the shell of the colossal Congress Hall will have risen to constitute the first granite monument to bear witness to the magnitude of the idea to which it owes its design, and to the magnitude of the entire facility. A parade ground and rally site worthy of the demonstrations- initiated by National Socialism-of the greatest transformation in our German history!

How can the peasant in his village, the laborer in his workshop or factory, the employee in his office-how can they all grasp the extent of the total result of their innumerable personal sacrifices and their struggle? But once a year, on the occasion of the general display of the Party, they will stride forth as one from the modesty of their narrow existence to gaze upon and acknowledge the glory of the fight and the triumph! Then many of them will perhaps experience for the first time the overwhelming certainty that their small-scale troubles and efforts have not been in vain, but that they have been the basis for this tremendous success, and that the many minor setbacks they have experienced were pale in significance when compared to the overall outcome of the fight of the Movement and-today-of their entire Volk.

And when, during these few days, hundreds of thousands march once again to Nuremberg, and hence from all of Germany’s Gaus an endless stream of warm life flows into this city, all of them-looking back and around from this elevated site-will be able to come to the same conclusion: we are truly the witnesses of a transformation more tremendous than any the German nation has ever experienced. Collectively, socially, economically, politically, culturally, and racially, we are living in the midst of a gigantic metamorphosis of time.

[…]

My Party Comrades! We are living at an incredibly great time in history.

Admittedly, every century has had its wars or revolutions, by virtue of which people have risen or fallen and states been built up or torn down.

However, it is only seldom that a people’s life is shaken up by tremors which penetrate as far as the deepest foundations of the structure of the societal order and threaten or even destroy them!

Building up a new leadership elite in our nation without the devastating chaotic destruction of existing conditions is one of the greatest accomplishments in the history of our Volk.

[…]

There is one comforting certainty the German nation can then call its own: even if the whole world around us catches on fire, the National Socialist State will rise forth from the Bolshevist flames like platinum.

It is a fact that Germany has solved its most pressing social problem, and solved it absolutely: there are no longer any real unemployed in our country.

On the contrary: today there are already shortages in countless areas, particularly of skilled workers. I believe this is a greater social accomplishment than what other countries succeed in doing-just as was also done here in the past-to undermine and destroy production until finally the so-called liberated proletariat has been relieved not so much of its troubles, but of its work and thus of its daily bread.

May no one deceive himself: a Volksgemeinschaft that succeeds in building up an enormous army, mobilizing a huge labor service running the mammoth organization of the German Reichsbahn, etc., will also be capable of bringing German steel and iron production up to the requisite level! We have been capable of mastering quite different tasks from those laid down in the Four-Year Plan! And today I would already like to assure you, my Party Comrades, that this work will progress under the direction of Party Comrade Goring at exactly the prescribed speed!

Therefore the demand for colonial possessions belonging to the Reich is a demand grounded in our financial need, and the position of other powers as regards this demand is simply beyond comprehension.

Germany neither robbed nor stole its colonies from these powers in the past. In a world such as ours today, where people are so saturated with moralistic phrases, it would be only appropriate to take this fact into consideration as well!

I would like to cite three facts in closing one chapter of German history today.

First: The Treaty of Versailles is dead! Second: Germany is free! Third: The guarantor of our freedom is our own Wehrmacht! Yet at the same time Germany is not isolated today, but bound in friendship to powerful states. The natural community of interests of National Socialist Germany and Fascist Italy has increasingly grown in the past few months to prove itself a factor in safeguarding Europe from the madness of chaos.

In the future, it will be impossible to ignore this community of will in any particular instance, and to simply carry on as usual. Our agreement with Japan serves the same purpose: to join forces in warding off an attack upon the civilized world that might today take place in Spain, tomorrow in the east or the day after perhaps somewhere else.

However, the greatest revolution Germany has undergone was that of the purification of the Volk and thus of the races which was launched systematically in this country for the first time ever.

The consequences of this German racial policy will be more significant for the future of our Volk than the effects of all the other laws together. For they are what is creating the new man. They will preserve our Volk from doing as so many historically tragic past prototypes of other races have done: lose their earthly existence forever because of their ignorance as regards a single question.

For what is the sense of all our work and all our efforts if they do not serve the putpose of preserving the German being? And what good is any effort on behalf of this being if we omit the most important thing to preserve it pure and unadulterated in its blood? Any other mistake can be rectified, any other error can be corrected, but what one fails to do in this area can often never again be amended. Whether our work in this area of purifying our race and thus our Volk has been fruitful is something you can best judge for yourselves here during these few days. For what you are encountering in this city is the German being. Come and see for yourselves whether he has become worse under National Socialist leadership or whether he has not indeed become better. Do not gauge only the increasing number of children being born-gauge above all the appearance of our youth.

How lovely are our girls and our boys, how bright is their gaze, how healthy and fresh their posture, how splendid are the bodies of the hundreds of thousands and millions who have been trained and cared for by our organizations! Where are there better men to be found today than those who can be seen here? It is truly the rebirth of a nation, brought about by the deliberate breeding of a new being (bewusste Zuchtung eines neuen Menschen).