This Day is the Proudest Day of My Life
9 March 1933 in Nuremberg, on the day of the assumption of power in Nuremberg
My German racial comrades! Shame and disgrace ruled here for fourteen years. Today, however, the flags of National Socialist Germany fly from this building as true symbols of German rebirth. In 1924, the police threw us National Socialists out of this building. Today we enter as victors! Once again, German thinking will hold sway. Cowardice has given way and one now speaks again of German justice, which had formerly been banned.
My
racial comrades! Do you hear the church bells ringing for the new Germany? Let
me say and affirm: “Today is the proudest day of my life! Let us all thank God
that it has come! Be thankful that you may experience this hour! Once Hans
Sachs [the Meistersinger of Nuremberg] was hailed by the citizens of
Nuremberg on the festival grounds. Today, all of Nuremberg celebrates Adolf
Hitler. The flags now being raised atop this building will fly there forever.
He who sins against them deserves death. We have borne many sorrows and made
many heavy sacrifices. Daily we met disloyalty and betrayal. We overcame all
these difficulties and emerged victorious from the hard battle. This hour is
therefore holy to us, and will forever remain so! I have longed for the day
when I could tell the Führer that Nuremberg belonged to him. Today is that day!
I am reconciled to my fate. I have forgotten the days that are behind me.
Nuremberg, the proud city of the Meistersingers, has become German and will
forever remain German! Raise high the flags! Adolf Hitler, Führer and Reich
Chancellor of Germany: Sieg Heil!
The Future Knows Only Germans!
27 April 1933 in the City Council Hall in Nuremberg
German racial comrades! In 1918, the
state collapsed in Germany, leading to a complete dissolution of the German
people in all areas of life. Respect for the holy, the inheritance of
centuries, vanished under the mocking laughter of a misled “mass man.” People
did not want to accept that there was a fatherland named Germany. The rootless
spirit, the rootless god of an abstract Internationale ruined the source from
which the German people had always taken its strength in time of need. The
German people lost faith in the strength of its blood, its faith in the
strength of its soul, and thus faith in its very self. Thus it had to come that
the inward and outward strength, the former power, the glory of the past, sank
into shame and misery. But the most terrible aspect of these fourteen years was
not that the economy of the productive German people was ruined. Rather, the
German people’s faith in itself was taken away — the faith in that which once
holy to its fathers. That was the crime against the German people. A people
from whom faith in itself and in its own strength has been taken is open to
exploitation. Today the German people knows the names of those who enriched
themselves in the midst of its need. The German people knows that its misery
was caused by a foreign people, the Jews, above all from those who were the
lackeys of the Jewish race. The miracle of today has happened because the
German people recognized the cause of its misfortune. The German people once
again has a Führer in Chancellor Adolf Hitler.
The
black-red-gold flags of self mutilation and surrender have been removed from
government buildings. The German people have again been given the flags and
cockades they once won on the battlefields. Germany’s tribes are once again
united and marches once more in the ways of its fathers. Once again, Germany is
above all else in the world. The field marshal [Hindenburg] of
the Great War, whose whose career reaches back to Königgrätz [1866], and
the corporal of the World War, who created the brown battalions that destroyed
the Jewish-Marxist Internationale today stand at the head of the people and
extend their hands. That is the great miracle of the German people today. This
great miracle gave the German people back their faith — a new faith that shines
in the eyes of our children and leads us to raise our arms in a Heil for the
fatherland. With this will, we enter this ancient hall. The chosen
representatives of the citizens of Nuremberg have gathered here to begin the
work they have resolved to put in the hands of the chosen leader of the
citizens. This receives its solemnity though the men and women here present,
the representatives of the people of Nuremberg. When the Great War began, the
representatives of the Reichstag promised the Kaiser that the days of discord
and strife were over. They promised the Kaiser that there were no more parties.
Only a Germany so united could be victorious in the great battles that had to
be fought. My city councilors, if you have all come here with this honest and
decent intent, this first Nuremberg city council under the national revolution
must also begin with the promise that there will no longer be parties here,
only representatives of a united citizenry.
Women
and men! After fourteen years of struggle, in which thousands of German men
voluntarily gave their lives in their brown uniforms, National Socialism has
destroyed the crime of November [1918] and laid the foundations for the
new state in Potsdam [a ceremony the month before]. We National
Socialists, on this the first day of the new city council, are ready to extend
our hand to all who are of good will. Just as the representatives in the
provincial parliaments and in the Reichstag must feel obligated as
representatives of the German people, so too the citizens of Nuremberg demand
of their representatives in the city council that they reject all the causes
from which hate sprang in the past. Malice and discord make decent work for the
good of the community impossible. He who does not enter this hall ready to be
an honest, decent man will remain our enemy, and also the enemy of the citizens
of Nuremberg, the city of Albrecht Dürer and Hans Sachs. What happened before
in this city hall is gone and forgotten. But he who dares to injure or insult
honest German work with the spirit of a Jewish-Marxist worldview that brought
Germany to its grave will be judged by the people. At the first meeting of a
new city council in the former Jewish-Marxist Germany, it was customary for
party leaders to speak of their programs. That was then! The time of chattering
and lying is over. It will not return. Those who have created the new Germany
will be sure of that. The citizens of Nuremberg expect of their newly-elected
council not promises, but courage and decisiveness: healing wounds where
necessary; maintaining that which is again healthy; increasing our new wealth.
That we have already begun to eliminate self interest from the offices in the
Nuremberg city hall is no secret. The task of the men who we today elect as
leaders of the citizens is, in the view of the citizens, to tear away the
facade that even today covers a swamp of corruption. The greater the courage
with which the mayors we today elect, the greater will be the confidence of the
citizens whom they serve.
As
Adolf Hitler entered the chancellory in the Reich capital, he asked the German
people for four years. Four years will determine whether he is worthy of the
confidence they gave him in the election of 5 March 1933.
Citizens of Nuremberg! Give your newly elected council four years —
after which the city of your fathers will again be the city it once was: clean
and united. It will be again a German Nuremberg, worthy of the greatness of the
masters who once gave it fame and honor. Women and citizens! The bells of the
Frauenkirche and the bells of St. Sebaldus have today rung in the new
Nuremberg. Get to work, city council members! Get to work, you mayors! Hail to
the field marshal of the Great War! Hail to the blacksmith of the new Reich!
Long live the city of our fathers! Long live our beloved, ancient Nuremberg!