Hitler’s Speech on the 25th Anniversary of the Announcement of the National Socialist Party’s Programme (1945)
by Adolf Hitler
24 February 1945
The consciousness of my duty and my work does not allow me to leave headquarters at the moment when, for the twenty-fifth time, that date is being commemorated on which the fundamental program of our movement was proclaimed and approved in Munich.
The evening of the twenty-fourth of February was, under the auspices of prudence, a development the significance of which probably only today becomes clear to us in its terrible meaning. An irreconcilable enemy was already at that time united in a common struggle against the German people, in the same manner as it is today.
The unnatural alliance between exploiting capitalism and destructive bolshevism that threatens to strangle the entire world today has been the enemy to which we threw down the gauntlet on Feb. 24, 1920, in order to safeguard the existence of our nation. The same as in these years, the apparently contradictory factor in the cooperation of such extreme forces was only the expression of a unique desire of a common instigator and profiteer. International Jewry has long used both forms for the annihilation of the liberty and social welfare of nations.
However, there is an enormous difference between the Germany of 1920 and the Germany of 1945. The Germany of 1920 had been completely paralyzed, the Germany of today is defending herself with the utmost fanaticism. The social order of 1920 had been antiquated and was bound to collapse. Today there exists an unshakable community of the people.
If the former Germany had possessed only a small fraction of the power of resistance inspiring the Germany of today, she would not have capitulated. If the German-people today possessed only a part of the former weakness, it would have ceased to exist long ago. Feb. 24, 1920, will later be regarded as a great milestone in the history of mankind. Without German National Socialist reconstruction, there would be neither a German Empire nor a German people today.
Providence shows no mercy to weak nations, but recognizes the right of existence-only of sound and strong nations. The fact that the National Socialist movement in 1933 succeeded after roughly thirteen years in gaining power by legal means was the result of a stubborn and hard struggle that often seemed to be hopeless.
Who dares to deny that even the strongest will power would not have sufficed to defy this devilish coalition threatening us today without Germany’s successful material rearmament after the National Socialist revolution? Nobody but the foolish bourgeois can believe that the flood from the east would not have come if Germany had met it with theoretical international laws instead of guns, tanks and planes.
Just as the Hun assault could not be beaten back by pious wishes or fair warnings, just as the invasion of our country from the southeast in the course of centuries was not warded off by diplomatic tricks, and the Mongolian onslaught did not spare old monuments of culture, this danger also will not be overcome by right in itself but only by strength supporting this right.
Right itself is nothing but the duty to defend the life entrusted to us by the Creator of the world. It is the sacred right of self-preservation. Whether this self-preservation will be successful depends solely on the greatness of our efforts and on willingness to make any sacrifice to preserve this life for the future.
Attila’s power was broken not at a meeting of the League of Nations but in battle on the Catalaunian Plains. Not at a talking shop in Geneva nor by any other convention will bolshevism be beaten, but solely by our determination to win victory and by the strength of our arms.
We all know how difficult this struggle is. No matter what we shall lose, it is by far not what it would be if this struggle was not successfully concluded.
Several areas in the eastern part of Germany now experience bolshevism. The crimes committed against our women and children and men by this Jewish plague are the most terrible fate ever conceived by human beings.
This Jewish bolshevist annihilation of nations and its western European and American procurers can be met only in one way: by using every ounce of strength with the extreme fanaticism and stubborn steadfastness that merciful God gives to men in hard times for the defense of their own lives.
All those who weaken will be crushed and left to decay. In the same manner as once the coward bourgeois compromise parties had been first driven into a corner by the bolshevist wave and then swept away, all those bourgeois states will disappear today whose stupid representatives think that they can conclude a treaty with the devil, cherishing the hope that they will be more cunning than he is satanic.
It is a gruesome repetition of the former inner German process that is now going on in a gigantic world political field of the present war. But just as we formerly overcame the narrow-minded party particularism and knocked down the bolshevist opponent in order to create a National Socialist people’s state, we shall today win a victory over the medley of bourgeois democratic state conceptions and we will crown this victory by the annihilation of bolshevism.
Just as once all the compromising bourgeois parties were swept away by the Bolshevist flood, so today all bourgeois States are disappearing. Their misguided representatives believe that they can come to terms with the devil in the hope of outwitting him. It is a horrid repetition of what once happened in Germany, but on a global scale. Just as we then smashed the Bolshevist enemy despite petty-bourgeois particularism and set up a National Socialist state, so victory shall be ours today despite bourgeois democratic States.
The greatest King of our history, Frederick II, was threatened with succumbing to the superiority of a world coalition and it was only because of his heroic soul that a nucleus of the coming Reich was created and remained victor in the end.
All peoples whose statesmen have made a pact with the Bolshevist devil will sooner or later become its victim. But let there be no doubt that National Socialist Germany will carry on this struggle until the end, and that will be the case this year when the historic turning-point comes. No power in the world will weaken our hearts.
Our enemies have destroyed so much that is beautiful and holy that we can now live for only one task-to create a state that will rebuild what they have destroyed. It is, therefore, our duty to maintain the liberty of the German nation for the future; not to permit German labor to be carried off to Siberia but to mobilize it for reconstruction on behalf of our own people. It is frightful what the homeland has to endure and the tasks of the front are superhuman, but if a whole people is to show itself equal to such suffering, as our nation does, then Providence will not deny us in the end the right of survival.
We have suffered so much that it only steels us to fanatical resolve to hate Our enemies a thousand times more and to regard them for what they are destroyers of an eternal culture and annihilators of humanity. Out of this bate a holy will is born to oppose these destroyers of our existence with all the strength that God has given us and to crush them in the end. During its 2,000-year history our people has survived so many terrible times that we have no doubt that we will also master our present plight.
If the homeland continues to do its duty and even does still more; if the soldier at the front takes the valiant homeland as an example and stakes his life for his native land, then the whole world will be shattered in its assault against us. If the front and the homeland are jointly determined to destroy those who renounce the law of self-preservation, those who act like cowards or those who sabotage the fight, then they will save the nation. Then, at the end of this struggle, a German victory must come and we will enjoy our proud good fortune.
When this war comes to an end, we shall put victory into the hands of a young generation. This youth is the most precious thing that Germany possesses. It will be an example for all generations to come. This, too, is the work of National Socialist education and the result of a challenge that went out from Munich twenty-five years ago.
My own life has only the value that it possesses for the nation’s work unswervingly to re-establish and strengthen our fronts for revenge and attack, to create weapons of proved as well as of novel design, to put them into action to stiffen the spirit of our resistance and, if necessary, also, as in the past, to eliminate all those pests who do not want to participate in the preservation of our nationhood or even oppose it.
I recently read in the British papers that the Allies intend to destroy my Berghof [evidently speaking of the American attack on his mountain home near Berchtesgaden last week]. I almost regret that this did not happen thus far, since my personal property is of no greater value than that of other Germans.
I shall be happy-as far as this is possible to anybody-to bear all that the others have to bear. The only thing that I should not be able to bear would be the weakness of my nation.
What makes me very happy and proud, however, is the conviction that the German people in its greatest distress shows its hardest character. In these weeks and months may every individual German remember that it is his duty to sacrifice all for the German nation’s preservation for centuries to come.
Whoever suffers must know that many Germans have lost more than he. The life that is left to us should serve only one task-namely, to make up for all the wrongs done by the international Jewish criminals and their henchmen to our nation. It must be our unshakable will to think of Germany alone until our last breath. Man after man, woman after woman, in towns and in the country, we shall live only for the task of liberating our nation from this distress, of reconstructing Germany’s culture as well as her National Socialist life.
It is our firm will never to cease working for the true people’s community, far from any ideology of classes, firmly believing that the eternal values of a nation are its best sons and daughters, who, regardless of birth and rank, just as God gave them to us, must be educated and employed.
Twenty-five years ago I predicted the victory of our movement. Today, filled as always with belief in our nation, I predict the final victory of the German race.