INTRODUCTION

My German Fellow Countrymen and Women, My Comrades!

At present everybody speaks before the forum which seems to them the most fitting. Some speak before a parliament whose existence, composition and origin are well known.

I believed that I should return again today whence I came, namely to the people! Every person is a representatives of this nation, with the one difference that you do not receive any salaries, and often it is more difficult for you to come to such rallies, more difficult than for the so-called qualified representatives of those democracies.

Before we enter the tenth year of the National Socialist German Reich, it seems appropriate to look into our past, and once again occupy ourselves with the principles of our existence, of our life, and of our victory.

Quite often we hear today the remark that this war is really the second world war. It means that this struggle is identified with the first, which most of us lived through as soldiers. This is not only correct in that this struggle, too, encompasses almost the whole world, it is even more correct when we consider that it is a question of the same aims; that the same powers which brought about the first world war are responsible for the present one, and that these powers and states have the same aims which they had at that time (although they remained hidden at first glance then); they had the same intentions which are the true cause and purpose of this struggle.

They are not only the same causes, but, above all, they are the same individuals. And I can proudly say that the only exceptions are the very nations which today are embodied as allies by the German Reich, by Italy, by Japan, and so on. For certainly no one can deny that Churchill even in 1914 was one of the most rabid war-mongers of his time; that Roosevelt was then the disciple of President Wilson; that the capitalistic countries then also had thrown the weight of their influence into the scales on the side of war; just as no one can deny the reverse, that we were entirely innocent in starting that war. We were all only very ordinary soldiers, just as you are now, my dear wounded men sitting here before me. Unknown and nameless men, whom duty had simply called, nothing else, and who in response had fulfilled their duty as faithfully as they were able.