Twenty five years earlier Hitler had launched the Nazi movement with a speech in Munich. Now Allied armies were firmly established on German soil in both the east and west, virtually every town and city in Germany lay in ruins, while untrained young boys and old men were being sent to the front lines. There were few defences left against the bombers that came by day and night. On the evening of the 23rd February the RAF had spent just twenty-two minutes destroying 83% of the town of Pforzheim. The only realistic expectation was that hundreds of thousands more Germans would die in the battles ahead.

Now Hitler offered no new strategies, no practical reason to hope that Germany could escape being completely overcome. Instead he returned to the old theme of the “unshakable will” of the German people, which would somehow produce a providential solution. It all amounted to a matter of faith. Alongside this was blame, blame on the “international Jewish criminals” and the “Bolsheviks” :

The consciousness of my duty and my work does not allow me to leave headquarters at the moment when, for the twenty-fifth time, that date is being commemorated on which the fundamental program of our movement was proclaimed and approved in Munich.

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All peoples whose statesmen have made a pact with the Bolshevist devil will sooner or later become its victim. But let there be no doubt that National Socialist Germany will carry on this struggle until the end, and that will be the case this year when the historic turning-point comes. No power in the world will weaken our hearts.

Our enemies have destroyed so much that is beautiful and holy that we can now live for only one task – to create a state that will rebuild what they have destroyed. It is, therefore, our duty to maintain the liberty of the German nation for the future; not to permit German labor to be carried off to Siberia but to mobilize it for reconstruction on behalf of our own people.

It is frightful what the homeland has to endure and the tasks of the front are superhuman, but if a whole people is to show itself equal to such suffering, as our nation does, then Providence will not deny us in the end the right of survival.

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What makes me very happy and proud, however, is the conviction that the German people in its greatest distress shows its hardest character. In these weeks and months may every individual German remember that it is his duty to sacrifice all for the German nation’s preservation for centuries to come.

Whoever suffers must know that many Germans have lost more than he. The life that is left to us should serve only one task – namely, to make up for all the wrongs done by the international Jewish criminals and their henchmen to our nation. It must be our unshakable will to think of Germany alone until our last breath. Man after man, woman after woman, in towns and in the country, we shall live only for the task of liberating our nation from this distress, of reconstructing Germany’s culture as well as her National Socialist life.

It is our firm will never to cease working for the true people’s community, far from any ideology of classes, firmly believing that the eternal values of a nation are its best sons and daughters, who, regardless of birth and rank, just as God gave them to us, must be educated and employed.

Twenty-five years ago I predicted the victory of our movement. Today, filled as always with belief in our nation, I predict the final victory of the German race.