Adolf Hitler’s New Year’s message to the German people
January 1, 1943
German people, National Socialist men and women, party comrades:
Fate obliges me for the fourth time to issue a New Year’s message to you German people in wartime. During these four years, however, one thing has become clear to the German people – that in this struggle, which, as so often throughout German history has been forced on us by our greedy and inveterate enemies, we are fighting for our very existence.
In past centuries, when dynastic disputes filled the world with the din of war, the consequences resulting from such struggles were often of merely minor importance for both the victors and vanquished. Nonetheless, after the process of decay of the first German Empire, which lasted for centuries, our people fell from its former respected position in Europe on account of its inner disruption and helplessness arising from it and became for a long time nothing better than a seed of civilization, fertilizing the outside world.
To gain their daily bread, countless millions of Germans were forced to leave their country. It was they who unconsciously helped to build up that great continent which now attempts to bring the war to Europe for a second time. For the outside world, it was a nation that in its political impotence and under the pressure of material want had to retreat more and more to a world of thought, and became finally a nation of poets and thinkers, which was convenient to it, as was Italy, filled with romantic ruins, politically disrupted, and as poor as a beggar.
Since the Prussian State ceased to be nothing but a ward of foreign powers, and began, in accordance with her true mission under the leadership of inspired men, to unite the German people, those who had profited from fortune set out to persecute the new Reich with their hatred, and to make war on it with ever shorter intervals. The most mendacious arguments were brought forward, provided they served the purpose.
At one time, feudal France made war on the German Reich, led by the House of Habsburg. Bourgeois France fought a Germany led by Prussia. The France of 1939 again declared war on the German Reich, and this time not on an imperialist, but on a National Socialist state.
England first made war on our parliamentary constitutional monarchy. Today she encourages the hatred of the German peoples’ state. America joined in 1917 in a war against the Germany of Wilhelm II. She provoked a new war against a Germany of socialist reconstruction.
In the old days, Russia plunged monarchical Europe into wars. Now she has prepared her world struggle in the name of socialist states, with the support of capitalist countries against Europe and against socialist Germany.
Whatever pretext our enemies used to start these wars, the fundamental cause was always the same. It was a hatred against a strong German Reich, as the power protecting Europe, the rejection of the vital demands of the German and of the Italian peoples, and, last but not least, their universal capitalist interests in war as such, and because all their statement are at the same time holders of shares of the armament industries of their countries.
The blood of their paid mercenaries, of even their own soldiers, produces their dividends. What could be more national than the fact that the power that is not interested in any human ethics, and considers money the only goal in life, should be the main profiteer in all of these disputes, as well as the greatest organizer of wars?
International Jewry has always been a past master in the art of sowing discord between peoples and nations. In the World War of 1914-1918 this international coalition of business profiteers, with their Jewish wirepullers, succeeded in befogging the German people with their empty words and blinding it by threatening danger. When the German people, weakened at home by revolution, later laid down their arms, simple-minded people, relying on the promises of these faithless enemies, thought they could expect a peace based on justice, reconciliation, and goodwill.
From that day onward, the name of the President of the United States is connected for all time with the biggest fraud in world history which followed. By undermining the morale of the German people, unconquered on the field of battle, he made possible its destruction.
At the same time, Wilson has forever rendered the German nation immune against the repetition of any such attempts. From that time onward, the word of an American President counts for no more, at any rate, to the German people, than in the United States; that is to say, precisely nothing.
Quite apart from that, however, the German people of today are no longer the same as the German people of the years 1914-1918. A people’s state has sprung from the former bourgeois capitalist class state.
By myself, as a soldier of the World War, I took fundamental lessons for my subsequent National Socialist philosophy from my experience at the front in those days, and the vast world struggle raging today. A historical event of unprecedented scope can therefore only strengthen the sum total of these conceptions.
For this reason, the German people, far from being deflected from a National Socialist conception of the nation in the course of this struggle, embraces it more and more closely as the months pass. One layer is the slagheap of an old, outlived order of society followed by the other. There cannot be any doubt that at the end of this struggle, the National Socialist state will continue to exist in Europe as an unshakable and indestructible bloc.
But nobody should deceive himself about the fact that this state will conduct a fight for the existence of our nation with an energy different from what was formerly the case in the Germany of old. I stated on September 1, 1939, before the German Reichstag that whatever might happen, neither time nor force of arms would be able to break the present system of our state, every German knows already that the truth of this prophecy cannot be doubted.
And, if furthermore I gave assurance that the hope of international Jewry to destroy the German and other European nations by means of a new World War will be the gravest error committed by Jewry for thousands of years. That it will, in any case, not destroy the German nation, but will exterminate itself.
There could no longer be any doubt about this matter, even today. This time millions of decent people will not again, with impunity, be driven into the field of battle and sacrificed in vain, in the interest of a race burdened with a curse, so that international Jewry may be able to conduct its business transactions or to indulge in Old Testament rage.
But that this race is the chief originator of this war can best be proved by the fact that what may appear to be the most extreme differences have been united in the fight against European national states. This alliance between the arch-capitalist States of the West, or even of America, with its mendacious sham socialist regime of bolshevism, can only be understood because the leadership in both cases lies in the hands of international Jewry, even if the personalities visible to the outside world appear to contradict each other.
But Roosevelt’s Jewish brain trust, the Jewish press of America, the Jewish broadcasting system of these countries, the Jewish party organization, and so on – they are nothing else but an equally Jewish framework of the leadership of the Soviet Union. As soon as the national interests in these states give only the slightest signs of life, immediately the strongest contrasts in warlike actions, and above all in war aims themselves, can be noticed.
This development will go so far that the art of the political murder, so highly developed by the British Intelligence Service, must serve as a last resort where other ways for the bridging of existing differences can no longer be found. The reaction of the national Socialist State, in this matter, is being determined, in the most gigantic struggle in world history, by two points of view.
Firstly, this was forced upon us. We are determined to fight for a clear and final decision. We have not done the slightest thing to France, England or even America. We did not demand anything from these countries which might have given rise to the outbreak of this war.
Yet, even every peace proposal made during the war was sharply turned down by international war criminals and was only interpreted as German weakness.
In this fashion, just as 25 years ago was inevitable, we are determined to conduct it with all the fanaticism of which we National Socialists are capable. We are above all determined to conduct it until a final and clear decision has been reached, so that we and our future generations will be spared a repetition of this catastrophe.
Had the German nation in the year 1918, instead of putting its faith in Wilson’s lying and hypocritical phrases, continued to conduct the fight with iron determination, the enemy world surrounding us would have collapsed then.
The fact that this has not happened has not only brought untold economic misery to our nation and torn millions of Germans from their homeland, but also, in the last terror, has been responsible for this war. For we know that in England and Paris in 1939 the people were of the opinion that the German nation would, within a short period of time, as once before, again lay down arms on its own initiative.
German nationals, and the rest of the world, however, must know that this occurrence has only happened once in German history. If today the English and American Jews announce that it is the intention of the Allies to deprive the German nation of its children, to butcher millions of young men, to split up the Reich and to make it for all time a defenseless object of the exploitation of its capitalist or Bolshevik environment, then they need not point this out to us at all, for we know that already.
Only the people in this other world do not appear to know that National Socialist Germany is no longer a suitable place for any such experiment. That she will neither be defeated, that she will never contemplate capitulation, but, on the contrary, she is resolved. Filled by the spirit of the greatest epoch in our history to terminate this struggle only with a definite victory.
The surest guarantor for the strength of will necessary for the completion of this task, however, is the National Socialist party; with its organizations and, over and above everything, a nation educated by it. The right to believe in this victory is ours, thanks to our own strength, the courage of our troops, and the loyalty and labors of our homeland, as well as thanks to the actions of the brave nations allied to us in Europe and Asia.
The German Armed Forces and our allies last year succeeded in pressing back still further those fronts against Bolshevism on which Europe was primarily threatened. Men and women in our German homeland also achieved a unique effort under the most difficult conditions. German and allied soldiers, as well as our German national economy, have not only tremendously extended the living space of fighting Europe, but also have already, to a considerable extent, opened it up for their own use.
It has become possible, above all, thanks to the world of German peasants and of women folk, to safeguard our food supplies. Millions of workers active in our industry have not only supplied the armies with necessary equipment but have also created the prerequisites for the launching of a new war industrial effort, planned on a still greater scale.
The fact that America also intends working in this field has been made known to us often enough by the twaddle, rich in phrases, of her chief warmonger.
What America can really achieve, and has already achieved, is not unknown to us. What Germany and Europe will achieve in the end will not remain hidden, even to our enemies, in the coming year.
Last year’s balance of great successes and gigantic struggles is an obligation to the German homeland to turn its thoughts, above all, to its soldiers. Wherever they stand they have added new pages of honor to the annals of German history. The fact that they have fought glorious battles has been made known by special announcements and by High Command communiqués. What they have to suffer and endure, however, the homeland cannot measure.
To this front of fighters belongs also the front of those men and women who are active as helpmates at the front and behind the lines. From them, too, unimaginable demands are exacted and fulfilled, particularly in the East.
By undergoing all these hardships, worries, sacrifices and sufferings, however, they save the Reich from calamity and a thousand times worse. They protect and defend it from the horrors of war, of which the homeland can only have the vaguest idea, despite the most severe air raids.
The beginning of the new year puts me under an obligation to give thanks on behalf of the German people for all the heroism and work done by the homeland and front. For I, myself, am only one of the many members of this nation.
What distinguishes me from the broad mass of our people is only the honor of being their leader. For the rest, however, their sufferings are mine, just as my pride and joy will one day be the pride and joy of the entire people.
The individual must and will always have to disappear. The nation, however, must remain.
Let us swear on January 1, 1943, that we shall exert all of our collective strength. Only if we do this can we beg our Lord to afford us His aid, as He has done hitherto.
Winter may be difficult. Its blows, however, cannot hit us harder than last year. It will be followed by an hour in which we shall again come forward, exerting all our strength, in order to help the cause of freedom, and thus also the future and life of our nation.
The day will come when one of the contending parties in this struggle will collapse. That it will not be Germany, we know. The German people will remain in the field longest, this time. Thus, at last, an enduring peace will come, which we shall use for the great constructive work of our national community, thus giving the only token of gratitude worthy of our dead heroes.
