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Excerpts from Hitler’s Speech before the first "Greater German Reichstag" (January 30, 1939)

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However, a final solution to this problem, and a reasonable one at that, will only occur when common human reason triumphs over the greed of individual nations; that is, when people have learned that insisting upon an injustice is not only politically but also economically useless, indeed, insane.

[ . . . ]

Under the present circumstances, however, we are left with no other option but to continue our economic policy, which must try to wrest the most from the living space at our disposal. This requires an ever greater increase in our efforts and an increase in production. This forces us to implement our Four Year Plan more vigorously. But it also leads to the mobilization of ever increasing manpower. And here we are now approaching a new phase in German economic policy.

During the first six years after our assumption of power, the goal of our economic leadership was to channel all idle manpower into some kind of useful employment. The task in the coming years, however, is to carefully review our workforce, the deployment of which must be regulated according to plan in order to achieve higher productivity through the application of the same amount of effort by means of rationalization and, in particular, through better technical organization of working conditions, and in that way, also free up workers for new additional production.

That in turn forces us to make the capital market freer so that our enterprises may expand, and to thereby relieve it of demands placed on it by the state. All of this, however, necessitates a close unification of the economy and the monetary system.

I am determined to complete the path – already embarked upon on January 30, 1937 – that is leading to the reorganization of the German Reichsbank from a banking institution under international influence into the bank of issue of the German Reich. If the rest of the world complains about this in part by saying that yet another German enterprise would thus lose its international character, let me just say to the world that it is our inexorable determination to impart to all of the institutions of our life a primarily German, that is to say, National Socialist, character.

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