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

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And above all else, there is one thing that you especially, my dear delegates, men of the Reichstag, must not forget:

In certain democracies it is apparently one of the special prerogatives of political-democratic life to nurse an artificial hatred against so-called totalitarian states. Through a flood of reports – partly distortions, partly utter fabrications – public opinion is turned against nations who have not done anything to other nations and have no intention of doing them any harm, who, at most, were themselves oppressed by severe injustice for decades.

And when we now defend ourselves against such apostles of war like Mr. Duff Cooper, Mr. Eden, Churchill, or Mr. Ickes, and so on, this is presented as an encroachment upon the sacred rights of democracies. As these gentlemen see it, they certainly have the right to attack other nations and their leadership, but no one has the right to defend himself.

I do not need to reassure you that as long as the German Reich is a sovereign state, the state leadership will not let an English or an American politician keep it from responding to such attacks. That we remain a sovereign state will be ensured in the future by the weapons we are forging and by the choice of our friends.

One could simply dismiss the claim that Germany intends to attack America with laughter. And it might be best to pass over in silence the continuing campaign of incitement by certain British war apostles, except that we must not ignore the following:

1. These democracies are states whose political construction makes the following possible: that only a few months down the road, these most horrible of war mongers could hold the leadership of the government in their own hands.

2. We therefore owe it to the security of the Reich to tell the German Volk the truth about these men in a timely fashion. The German Volk feels no hatred toward England, America, or France; it just wants peace and quiet. Those nations, however, are being continuously stirred up against Germany and the German Volk by their Jewish or non-Jewish agitators. Thus, should the intentions of these warmongers succeed, our own Volk would wind up in a situation for which they would be psychologically unprepared and which they would be unable to comprehend.

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