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Author : Hitler Adolf
Title : Speech before the Reichstag A reply to U.S. president F.D. Roosevelt Berlin, April 28, 1939
Year : 1939

Link download : Hitler_Adolf_-_Speech_before_the_Reichstag_A_reply_to_US_president_FD_Roosevelt.zip

Deputies, Men of the Reichstag! The President of the United States of America has addressed a telegram to me, with the curious contents of which you are already familiar. Before I, the addressee, actually received this document, the rest of the world had already been informed of it by radio and newspaper reports, and numerous commentaries in the organs of the democratic world press had already profusely enlightened us as to the fact that this telegram was a very skillful tactical document, designed to impose upon the states, in which the people govern, the responsibility for the warlike measures adopted by the plutocratic countries. In view of these facts I decided to summon the German Reichstag so that you, Gentlemen, might have an opportunity of hearing my answer first and of either confirming that answer or rejecting it. But in addition, I considered it desirable to keep to the method of procedure initiated by President Roosevelt and, for my part, to inform the rest of the world of my answer in our way. But I should like also to take this opportunity of giving expression to the feelings with which the tremendous historical happenings of the month of March inspire me. I can give vent to my inmost feelings only in the form of humble thanks to Providence which called upon me and vouchsafed it to me, once an unknown soldier of the Great War, to rise to be the Leader of my people, so dear to me. Providence showed me the way to free our people from the depths of its misery without bloodshed and to lead it upward once again. Providence granted that I might fulfill my life's task-to raise my German people out of the depths of defeat and to liberate it from the bonds of the most outrageous dictate of all times. This alone has been my aim. Since the day on which I entered politics I have been moved by no other idea than that of winning back the freedom of the German Nation, restoring the power and strength of the Reich, overcoming the internal disruption of the nation, remedying its isolation from the rest of the world, and safeguarding the maintenance of its independent economic and political existence. I have worked only to restore that which others once broke by force. I have desired only to make good that which satanic malice or human unreason destroyed or demolished. I have, therefore, taken no step which violated the rights of others, but have only restored that justice which was violated twenty years ago. The present Greater German Reich contains no territory which was not from the earliest times a part of this Reich, bound up with it or subject to its sovereignty. Long before an American continent had been discovered-not to say settled-by white people, this Reich existed, not merely with its present boundaries, but with the addition of many regions and provinces which have since been lost. Twenty-one years ago, when the bloodshed of the war came to an end, millions of minds were filled with the ardent hope that a peace of reason and justice would reward and bless the nations which had been visited by the fearful scourge of the Great War. I say "reward", for all those men and women – whatever the conclusions arrived at by the historians – bore no responsibility for these fearful happenings. In some countries there may still be politicians who even at that time were chargeable with the responsibility for this, the most atrocious massacre of all times, but the vast numbers of the combatant soldiers of every country and nation were by no means guilty, but rather deserving of pity. I myself, as you know, had never played a part in politics before the war, and only, like millions of others, performed such duties as I was called upon to fulfill as a decent citizen and soldier. It was therefore with in absolutely clear conscience that I was able to take up the cause of the freedom and future of my people, both during and after the war. And I can therefore speak in the name of millions and millions of others equally blameless when I declare that all those, who had only fought for their nation in the loyal fulfillment of their duty, were entitled to a peace of reason and justice, so that mankind might at last set to work to make good by joint effort the losses which ail had suffered. But the millions were cheated of this peace; for not only did the German people or the other peoples fighting on our side suffer through the peace treaties, but these treaties had a devastating effect on the victor countries as well. That politics should be controlled by men who had not fought in the war was recognized for the first time as a misfortune. Hatred was unknown to the soldiers, but not to those elderly politicians who had carefully preserved their own precious lives from the horrors of war, and who now descended upon humanity in the guise of insane spirits of revenge. Hatred, malice and unreason were the intellectual forbears of the Treaty of Versailles.* Territories and states with a history going back a thousand years were arbitrarily broken up and dissolved. Men who have belonged together since time immemorial have been torn asunder; economic conditions of life have been ignored while the peoples themselves have been converted into victors and vanquished, into masters possessing all rights and slaves possessing none. This document of Versailles has fortunately been set down in black and white for generations to come, for otherwise it would have been regarded in the future as the grotesque product of a wild and corrupt imagination. Nearly 115,000,000 people have been robbed of their right of self-determination, not by victorious soldiers, but by mad politicians, and have been arbitrarily removed from old communities and made part of new ones without any consideration of blood, origin, common sense or the economic conditions of life. The results were appalling. Though at that time the statesmen were able to destroy a great many things, there was one factor which could not be eliminated; the gigantic mass of people living in Central Europe, crowded together in a confined space, can only ensure its daily bread by the maximum of employment and resultant order. But what did these statesmen of the so-called democratic empires know of these problems? ...