Hitler's Speech in Munich

MAY 1, 1923

If the first of May is to be transferred in accordance with its true meaning from the life of Nature to the life of peoples, then it must symbolize the renewal of the body of a people which has fallen into senility. And in the life of peoples senility means internationalism. 

What is born of senility? Nothing, nothing at all. Whatever in human civilization has real value, that arose not out of internationalism; it sprang from the soul of a single people. When peoples have lost their creative vigor, then they become international. Everywhere, wherever intellectual incapacity rules in the life of peoples, there internationalism appears. And it is no chance that the promoter of this cast of thought is a people which itself can boast of no real creative force -- the Jewish people ...

So the first of May can be only a glorification of the national creative will over against the conception of international disintegration, of the liberation of the nation's spirit and of its economic outlook from the infection of internationalism. That is in the last resort the question of the restoration to health of peoples ... and the question arises: Is the German oak ever destined to see another springtime? And that is where the mission of our Movement begins. We have the strength to conquer that which the autumn has brought upon us. Our will is to be National Socialists -- not national in the current sense of the word -- not national by halves. We are National Socialist fanatics, not dancers on the tight-rope of moderation!

There are three words which many use without a thought which for us are no catch-phrases: Love, Faith, and Hope. We National Socialists wish to love our Fatherland, we wish to learn to love it, to learn to love it jealously, to love it alone and to suffer no other idol to stand by its side. We know only one interest and that is the interest of our people. We are fanatical in our love for our people, and we are anxious that so-called 'national governments' should be conscious of that fact. We can go as loyally as a dog with those who share our sincerity, but we will pursue with hatred the man who believes that he can play tricks with this love of ours. We cannot go with governments who look two ways at once, who squint both towards the Right and towards the Left. We are straightforward: it must be either love or hate.

We have faith in the rights of our people, the rights which have existed time out of mind. We protest against the view that every other nation should have rights -- and we have none. We must learn to make our own this blind faith in the rights of our people, in the necessity of devoting ourselves to the service of these rights; we must make our own the faith that gradually victory must be granted us if only we are fanatical enough. And from this love and from this faith there emerges for us the idea of hope. When others doubt and hesitate for the future of Germany -- we have no doubts. We have both the hope and the faith that Germany will and must once more become great and mighty.

We have both the hope and the faith that the day will come on which Germany shall stretch from Koenigsberg to Strassburg, and from Hamburg to Vienna.

We have faith that one day Heaven will bring the Germans back into a Reich over which there shall be no Soviet star, no Jewish star of David, but above that Reich there shall be the symbol of German labor -- the Swastika. And that will mean that the first of May has truly come.


 

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