Excerpts From Several Speeches by Adolf Hitler
Munich - Speech of April 24, 1923
I REJECT the word 'Proletariat.' The Jew who coined the word meant by 'Proletariat,' not the oppressed,
but those who work with their hands. And those who work with their intellects are stigmatized bluntly as
'Bourgeois.' It is not the character of a man's life which forms the basis of this classification, it is simply
the occupation - whether a man works with his brain or with his body. And in this turbulent mass of the
hand-workers the Jew recognized a new power which might perhaps be his instrument for the gaining of
that which is his ultimate goal: World supremacy, the destruction of the national States.
And while the Jew 'organizes' these masses, he organizes business, too, at the same time. Business was
depersonalized, i.e., Judaized. Business lost the Aryan character of work: it became an object of
speculation. Master and man were torn asunder . . . and he who created this class division was the same
person who led the masses in their opposition to this class division, led them not against his Jewish
brethren, but against the last remnants of independent national economic life.
And these remnants, the bourgeoisie which also was already Judaized, resisted the great masses who
were knocking at the door and demanding better conditions of life. And so the Jewish leaders succeeded
in hammering into the minds of the masses the Marxist propaganda: 'Your deadly foe is the bourgeoisie;
if he were not there, you would be free.' If it had not been for the boundless blindness and stupidity of
our bourgeoisie the Jew would never have become the leader of the German working-classes. And the
ally of this stupidity was the pride of the 'better stratum' of society which thought it would degrade itself
if it condescended to stoop to the level of the 'Plebe.' The millions of our German fellow countrymen
would never have been alienated from their people if the leading strata of society had shown any care for
their welfare.
You must say farewell to the hope that you can expect any action from the parties of the Right on behalf
of the freedom of the German people. The most elementary factor is lacking: the will, the courage, the
energy. Where then can any strength still be found within the German people? It is to be found, as
always, in the great masses: THERE ENERGY IS SLUMBERING AND IT ONLY AWAITS THE
MAN WHO WILL SUMMON IT FROM ITS PRESENT SLUMBER AND WILL HURL IT INTO
THE GREAT BATTLE FOR THE DESTINY OF THE GERMAN RACE.
The battle which alone can liberate Germany will be fought out with the forces which well up from the
great masses. Without the help of the German workingman you will never regain a German Reich. Not
in our political salons lies the strength of the nation, but in the hand, in the brain, and in the will of the
great masses. Now as ever: Liberation does not come down from above, it will spring up from below....
If we today make the highest demands upon everyone, that is only in order that we may give back to him
and to his child the highest gift: Freedom and the respect of the rest of the world....
The parties of the Right have lost all energy: they see the flood coming, but their one longing is just for
once in their lives to form a Government. Unspeakably incapable, utterly lacking in energy, cowards all
- such are all these bourgeois parties and that at the moment when the nation needs heroes -not
chatterers.
In the Left there is somewhat more energy, but it is used for the ruin of Germany. The Communists on
principle reject the discipline imposed by the State: in its stead they preach party discipline: they reject
the administration of the State as a bureaucracy, while they fall on their knees before the bureaucracy of
their own Movement. There is arising a State within the State which stands in deadly enmity against the
State which we know, the State of the community of the people. This new State ultimately produces men
who reject with fanaticism their own people so that in the end Foreign Powers find in them their allies.
Such is the result of Marxist teaching....
What we want is not a State of drones but a State which gives to everyone that to which on the basis of
his own activity he has a right. He who refuses to do honest work shall not be a citizen of the State. The
State is not a plantation where the interests of foreign capital are supreme. Capital is not the master of
the State, but its servant. Therefore the State must not be brought into dependence on international loan
capital. And if anyone believes that that cannot be avoided, then do not let him be surprised that no one
is ready to give his life for this State. Further, that greatest injustice must be corrected which today still
weighs heavily upon our people and upon almost all peoples. If in a State only he who does honest work
is a citizen, then everyone has the right to demand that in his old age he shall be kept free from care and
want. That would mean the realization of the greatest social achievement.
Munich — Speech of September 16, 1930
THIS election means that the circle is now complete. And the question at this time is: what are the aims
of this opposition and its leaders?
It is a fight for an idea - a Weltanschhauung: and in the forefront stands a fundamental principle: Men do
not exist for the State, the State exists for men. First and far above all else stands the idea of the people:
the State is a form of organization of this people, and the meaning and the purpose of the State are
through this form of organization to assure the life of the people. And from this there arises a new mode
of thought and thus necessarily a new political method.
We say: a new mode of thought. Today our whole official political outlook is rooted in the view that the
State must be maintained because the State in itself is the essential thing; we, on the other hand,
maintain that the State in its form has a definite purpose to fulfill and the moment that it fails to fulfill its
purpose the form stands condemned. Above everything stands the purpose to maintain the nation's life -
that is the essential thing and one should not speak of a law for the protection of the State but for the
protection of the nation: it is of this protection that one must think.... In the place of this rigid formal
organization - the State - must be set the living organism - the people. Then all action is given a new
untrammelled freedom: all the formal fetters which can today be imposed on men become immoral
directly they fail to maintain the people, because that is the highest purpose in life and the aim of all
reasonable thought and action.
If today our action employs among its different weapons that of Parliament, that is not to say that
parliamentary parties exist only for parliamentary ends. For us Parliament is not an end in itself, but
merely a means to an end ... we are not on principle a parliamentary party - that would be a
contradiction of our whole outlook - WE ARE A PARLIAMENTARY PARTY BY COMPULSION,
UNDER CONSTRAINT, AND THAT COMPULSION IS THE CONSTITUTION. The Constitution
compels us to use this means. It does not compel us to wish for a particular goal, it only prescribes a way
- a method, and, I repeat, we follow this way legally, in accordance with the Constitution: by the way
laid down through the Constitution we advance towards the purposes which we have set before us.
Never can Constitutions determine for all time the content of a purpose, especially when this content is
not identical with the vital rights of a people. If today the Constitution admits for its protection laws
which are headed, 'Laws for the Protection of the Republic,' then it is demonstrated that the most which
our present Constitution can prescribe is nothing but the protection and the maintenance of a form, and
that does not touch the maintenance of the nation, of a people. This purpose is therefore free: this is the
goal which we proclaim and to which we shall attain. . .
From blood, authority of personality, and a fighting spirit springs that value which alone entitles a
people to look around with glad hope, and that alone is also the condition for the life which men then
desire. And when that is realized, then that too is realized for which today the political parties strive:
prosperity, happiness of the individual, family-life, etc. First will come honor and then freedom, and
from both of these happiness, prosperity, life: in a word, that state of things will return which we
Germans perhaps dimly saw before the War, when individuals can once more live with joy in their
hearts because life has a meaning and a purpose, because the close of life is then not in itself the end,
since there will be an endless chain of generations to follow: man will know that what we create will not
sink into Orcus but will pass to his children and to his children's children. And so this victory which we
have just won is nothing else than the winning of a new weapon for our fight.... IT IS NOT FOR SEATS
IN PARLIAMENT THAT WE FIGHT, BUT WE WIN SEATS IN PARLIAMENT IN ORDER THAT
ONE DAY WE MAY BE ABLE TO LIBERATE THE GERMAN PEOPLE....
Do not write on your banners the word 'Victory': today that word shall be uttered for the last time. Strike
through the word 'Victory' and write once more in its place the word which suits us better - the word
'Fight.'
Dusseldorf, Industry Club — Speech of January 27, 1932
....Three factors, I hold, essentially determine a people's political life:
First, the inner value of a people which as an inherited sum and possession is transmitted again and
again through the generations, a value which suffers any change when the people, the custodian of this
inherited possession, changes itself in its inner blood-conditioned composition. It is beyond question that
certain traits of character, certain virtues, and certain vices always recur in peoples so long as their inner
nature - their blood-conditioned composition - has not essentially altered. I can already trace the virtues
and the vices of our German people in the writers of Rome just as clearly as I see them today. This inner
value which determines the life of a people can be destroyed by nothing save only through a change in
the blood causing a change in substance. Temporarily an illogical form of organization of life or
unintelligent education may prejudice it. But in that case, though its effective action may be hindered,
the fundamental value in itself is still present as it was before. And it is this value which is the great
source of all hopes for a people's revival, it is this which justifies the belief that a people which in the
course of thousands of years has furnished countless examples of the highest inner value cannot
suddenly have lost overnight this inborn inherited value, but that one day this people will once again
bring this value into action. If this were not the case, then the faith of millions of men in a better future -
the mystic hope for a new Germany - would be incomprehensible. It would be incomprehensible how it
was that this German people, at the end of the Thirty Years War, when its population had shrunk from
eighteen to thirteen and one-half millions, could ever have once more formed the hope through work,
through industry, and capacity to rise again, how in this completely crushed people hundreds of
thousands and finally millions should have been seized with the longing for a re-formation of their State.
I said that this value can be destroyed. There are indeed in especial two other closely related factors
which we can time and again trace in periods of national decline: the one is that for the conception of the
value of personality there is substituted a levelling idea of the supremacy of mere numbers - democracy
- and the other is the negation of the value of a people, the denial of any difference in the inborn
capacity, the achievement, etc., of individual peoples. Thus both factors condition one another or at least
influence each other in the course of their development. Internationalism and democracy are inseparable
conceptions. It is but logical that democracy, which within a people denies the special value of the
individual and puts in its place a value which represents the sum of all individualities - a purely
numerical value - should proceed in precisely the same way in the life of peoples and should in that
sphere result in internationalism. Broadly it is maintained: peoples have no inborn values, but, at the
most, there can be admitted perhaps temporary differences in education. Between Negroes, Aryans,
Mongolians, and Redskins there is no essential difference in value. This view which forms the basis of
the whole of the international thought- world of today and in its effects is carried to such lengths that in
the end a Negro can sit as president in the sessions of the League of Nations leads necessarily as a
further consequence to the point that in a similar way within a people differences in value between the
individual members of this people are denied. And thus naturally every special capacity, every
fundamental value of a people, can practically be made of no effect. For the greatness of a people is the
result not of the sum of all its achievements but in the last resort of the sum of its outstanding
achievements. Let no one say that the picture produced as a first impression of human civilization is the
impression of its achievement as a whole. This whole edifice of civilization is in its foundations and in
all its stones nothing else than the result of the creative capacity, the achievement, the intelligence, the
industry, of individuals: in its greatest triumphs it represents the great crowning achievement of
individual God-favored geniuses, in its average accomplishment the achievement of men of average
capacity, and in its sum doubtless the result of the use of human labor-force in order to turn to account
the creations of genius and of talent. So it is only natural that when the capable intelligences of a nation,
which are always in a minority, are regarded only as of the same value as all the rest, then genius,
capacity, the value of personality are slowly subjected to the majority and this process is then falsely
named the rule of the people. For this is not rule of the people, but in reality the rule of stupidity, of
mediocrity, of half-heartedness, of cowardice, of weakness, and of inadequacy....
Thus democracy will in practice lead to the destruction of a people's true values. And this also serves to
explain how It is that peoples with a great past from the time when they surrender themselves to the
unlimited, democratic rule of the masses slowly lose their former position; for the outstanding-
achievements of individuals which they still possess or which could be produced in all spheres of life are
now rendered practically ineffective through the oppression of mere numbers. And thus in these
conditions a people will gradually lose its importance not merely in the cultural and economic spheres
but altogether, in a comparatively short time it will no longer, within the setting of the other peoples of
the world, maintain its former value. . . .
And to this there must be added a third factor: namely, the view that life in this world, after the denial of
the value of personality and of the special value of a people, is not to be maintained through conflict.
That is a conception which could perhaps be disregarded if it fixed itself only in the heads of
individuals, but yet has appalling consequences because it slowly poisons an entire people. And it is not
as if such general changes in men's outlook on the world remained only on the surface or were confined
to their effects on men's minds. No, in course of time they exercise a profound influence and affect all
expressions of a people's life.
I may cite an example: you maintain, gentlemen, that German business life must be constructed on a
basis of private property. Now such a conception as that of private property you can defend only if in
some way or another it appears to have a logical foundation. This conception must deduce its ethical
justification from an insight into the necessity which Nature dictates. It cannot simply be upheld by
saying: 'It has always been so and therefore it must continue to be so.' For in periods of great upheavals
within States, of movements of peoples and changes in thought, institutions and systems cannot remain
untouched because they have previously been preserved without change. It is the characteristic feature
of all really great revolutionary epochs in the history of mankind that they pay astonishingly little regard
for forms which are hallowed only by age or which are apparently only so consecrated. It is thus
necessary to give such foundations to traditional forms which are to be preserved that they can be
regarded as absolutely essential, as logical and right. And then I am bound to say that private property
can be morally and ethically justified only if I admit that men's achievements are different. Only on that
basis can I assert: since men's achievements are different, the results of those achievements are also
different. But if the results of those achievements are different, then it is reasonable to leave to men the
administration of those results to a corresponding degree. It would not be logical to entrust the
administration of the result of an achievement which was bound up with a personality either to the next
best but less capable person or to a community which, through the mere fact that it had not performed
the achievement, has proved that it is not capable of administering the result of that achievement. Thus it
must be admitted that in the economic sphere, from the start, in all branches men are not of equal value
or of equal importance. And once this is admitted it is madness to say: in the economic sphere there are
undoubtedly differences in value, but that is not true in the political sphere. IT IS ABSURD TO BUILD
UP ECONOMIC LIFE ON THE CONCEPTIONS OF ACHIEVEMENT, OF THE VALUE OF
PERSONALITY, AND THEREFORE IN PRACTICE ON THE AUTHORITY OF PERSONALITY,
BUT IN THE POLITICAL SPHERE TO DENY THE AUTHORITY OF PERSONALITY AND TO
THRUST INTO ITS PLACE THE LAW OF THE GREATER NUMBER - DEMOCRACY. In that case
there must slowly arise a cleavage between the economic and the political point of view, and to bridge
that cleavage an attempt will be made to assimilate the former to the latter - indeed the attempt has been
made, for this cleavage has not remained bare, pale theory. The conception of the equality of values has
already, not only in politics but in economics also, been raised to a system, and that not merely in
abstract theory: no! this economic system is alive in gigantic organizations and it has already today
inspired a State which rules over immense areas.
But I cannot regard it as possible that the life of a people should in the long run be based upon two
fundamental conceptions. If the view is right that there are differences in human achievement, then it
must also be true that the value of men in respect of the production of certain achievements is different It
is then absurd to allow this principle to hold good only In one sphere - the sphere of economic life and
its leadership - and to refuse to acknowledge its validity in the sphere of the whole life-struggle of a
people - the sphere of politics. Rather the logical course is that if I recognize without qualification in the
economic sphere the fact of special achievements as forming the condition of all higher culture, then in
the same way I should recognize special achievement in the sphere of politics, and that means that I am
bound to put in the forefront the authority of personality. If, on the contrary, it is asserted - and that, too,
by those engaged in business - that in the political sphere special capacities are not necessary but that
here an absolute equality in achievement reigns, then one day this same theory will be transferred from
politics and applied to economic life. But in the economic sphere communism is analogous to
democracy in the political sphere. We find ourselves today in a period in which these two fundamental
principles are at grips in all spheres which come into contact with each other; already they are invading
economics.
To take an example: Life in practical activity is founded on the importance of personality: but now
gradually it is threatened by the supremacy of mere numbers. But in the State there is an organization -
the army - which cannot in any way be democratized without surrendering its very existence. But if a
Weltanschauung cannot be applied to every sphere of a people's life, that fact in itself is sufficient proof
of its weakness. In other words: the army can exist only if it maintains the absolutely undemocratic
principle of unconditional authority proceeding downwards and absolute responsibility proceeding
upwards, while, in contradistinction to this, democracy means in practice complete dependence
proceeding downwards and authority proceeding upwards. But the result is that in a State in which the
whole political life - beginning with the parish and ending with the Reichstag - is built up on the
conception of democracy, the army is bound gradually to become an alien body and an alien body which
must necessarily be felt to be such. It is for democracy an alien world of ideas, an alien Weltanschauung
which inspires the life of this body. An internal conflict between the representatives of the democratic
principle and the representatives of the principle of authority must be the inevitable consequence, and
this conflict we are actually experiencing in Germany....
So in the same way the education to pacifism must of necessity have its effect right through life until it
reaches the humblest individual lives. The conception of pacifism is logical if I once admit a general
equality amongst peoples and human beings. For in that case what sense is there in conflict? The
conception of pacifism translated into practice and applied to all spheres must gradually lead to the
destruction of the competitive instinct, to the destruction of the ambition for outstanding achievement. I
cannot say: in politics we will be pacifists, we reject the idea of the necessity for life to safeguard itself
through conflict - but in economics we want to remain keenly competitive. If I reject the idea of conflict
as such, it is of no importance that for the time being that idea is still applied in some single spheres. In
the last resort political decisions are decisive and determine achievement in the single sphere....
To sum up the argument: I see two diametrically opposed principles: the principle of democracy which,
wherever it is allowed practical effect is the principle of destruction: and the principle of the authority of
personality which I would call the principle of achievement, because whatever man in the past has
achieved - all human civilizations - is conceivable only if the supremacy of this principle is admitted.
The worth of a people, the character of its internal organization through which this worth of a people
may produce its effect, and the character of a people's education - these are the starting-points for
political action: these are the foundations for the success of that action....
That the evidences of a crisis should today spread over almost the entire world is comprehensible when
one considers that the world has been opened up and mutual relations have been strengthened to an
extent which fifty, eighty, or a hundred years ago appeared scarcely possible. And yet, despite this fact,
one must not believe that such a state of affairs is conceivable only now, in the year 1932. No, similar
conditions have been experienced more than once in the history of the world. Always when relations
between peoples produced conditions such as these, the malady affecting these peoples was bound to
spread and to influence the position of all.
It is, of course, easy to say: we prefer to wait until there is a change in the general position, but that is
impossible. For the position which faces you today is not the consequence of a revelation of God's will,
but the result of human weaknesses, of human mistakes, of men's false judgments. It is but natural that
there must first be a change in these causes, that men must first be inwardly transformed, before one can
count on any alteration in the position.
That conclusion is forced upon us if we look at the world today: we have a number of nations which
through their inborn outstanding worth have fashioned for themselves a mode of life which stands in no
relation to the life-space - the Lebensraum - which in their thickly populated settlements they inhabit.
We have the so-called white race which, since the collapse of ancient civilization, in the course of some
thousand years has created for itself a privileged position in the world. But I am quite unable to
understand this privileged position, this economic supremacy, of the white race over the rest of the
world if I do not bring it into close connection with a political conception of supremacy which has been
peculiar to the white race for many centuries and has been regarded as in the nature of things: this
conception it has maintained in its dealings with other peoples. Take any single area you like, take for
example India. England did not conquer India by the way of justice and of law: she conquered India
without regard to the wishes, to the views of the natives, or to their formulations of justice, and, when
necessary, she has upheld this supremacy with the most brutal ruthlessness. Just in the same way Cortez
or Pizarro annexed Central America and the northern states of South America, not on the basis of any
claim of right, but from the absolute inborn feeling of the superiority of the white race. The settlement of
the North American continent is just as little the consequence of any claim of superior right in any
democratic or international sense; it was the consequence of a consciousness of right which was rooted
solely in the conviction of the superiority and therefore of the right of the white race. If I think away this
attitude of mind which in the course of the last three or four centuries has won the world for the white
race, then the destiny of this race would in fact have been no different from that, say, of the Chinese: an
immensely congested mass of human beings crowded upon an extraordinarily narrow territory, an over-
population with all its unavoidable consequences. If Fate allowed the white race to take a different path,
that is only because this white race was convinced that it had the right to organize the rest of the world.
It matters not what superficial disguises in individual cases this right may have assumed, in practice it
was the exercise.
Source: https://archive.org/details/TheSpeechesOfAdolfHitler19211941