Background: The Nazi Party depended heavily on speakers to get its message across. Those speakers needed to be informed. The following is a translation of instructions to speakers issued in late October 1942. At the time, things were beginning to look grim at Stalingrad, although the German public did not know how serious things were. A second winter campaign was approaching. Speakers were to persuade Germans that the war was going well, that victory was sure, that the Allies were almost finished.
The source: Redner-Schnellinformation, Lieferung 43, 26 October 1942.
1.The situation regarding “propaganda”
Recently, the Führer, the Reich Marshall, and Reichsleiter and Reich Minister Dr. Goebbels have spoken to the German people and the whole world. There are reports from all parts of the Reich that these speeches, which gave clear direction, resulted in the greatest confidence in the war situation, enthusiastic agreement with the needs of our battle with fate, and general pleasure at our proud achievements thus far. The material persuaded people that our Wehrmacht continues to have the initiative as it did before, and that it will achieve the tasks given it by the leadership with a strong hand. They further prove that the victories of the past year have increased our military potential, that we are freed from pressing worries about restricted territory, and that in the future the newly-won territories will provide us with everything necessary for battle and for our lives. They testify further that the whole political situation with regards to the common battle of the Three-Power-Alliance and its allies has developed fully in accord with our wishes.
To a great degree the world public has also come to realize this. That necessarily means that our enemy has lost prestige. It is, therefore, understandable why the enemy side is using every method to change world opinion. Currently, British agitation is attempting a new campaign of illusions that minimizes our successes, denies our achievements, and attempts to destroy the confidence the world has in our victory.
2. The British campaign of illusions
Their newest thesis is: Germany has turned away from its offensive strategy. They attempt to prove that “progress in the East has stopped” and have attempted to twist the Führer’s speech in their familiar way.
We have enough examples of such behavior. At the beginning of the war, they claimed that our victories were “Pyrrhic victories” because they demanded so much human sacrifice from us that we would not be able to carry on the war long enough. Jews and plutocrats throughout the world spread the slogan: “The Germans are winning themselves to death.”
When at the end of each campaign the Supreme Command of the Wehrmacht released the actual casualty figures that rendered such enemy agitation ineffective, they found a new theme: “Germany cannot carry on the war long enough because it lacks the necessary military potential.”
They said that sooner or later our restricted territory would have to strangle us because it would be impossible to secure enough raw materials for weapons and munitions and sufficient food to feed the front and homeland. To support this theme they boasted to the world about their huge territory and the treasures of the earth that were available to them there.
Now this situation, too, is entirely different. The enemy has less territory. A large part of the former inexhaustible treasures of the earth were lost to us and our allies. We have mobilized the strength of all of Europe, and rich resources are now at our disposal in the vast realms of the East that have been captured by our brave Wehrmacht. No one on earth doubts that we will be able to make good use of them, since everyone knows our abilities to exploit resources and organize.
Last spring the British and North Americans spread another kind of agitation, telling the world that 1942 would go well for them. Six months ago they said: “Germany’s full strength was broken by the hard winter in the East. They met Napoleon’s fate in Russia’s winter. Stalin’s decisive summer offensive will drive Hitler’s armies west. We will open a second front in the west and Allied armies from the east and west will together grind Germany up.”
This illusion, too, popped like a soap bubble. After the hard winter German armies were again an irresistable storm. They proved that they were not weakened or broken. And in this summer storm of German offensives, the Bolshevists lost their last significant resources.
The big-mouthed heroes in the West made only one attempt at a “second front.” The result was as it had to be. Today Stalin is demanding with increasing urgency this second front, but the British and Americans seem to have lost their courage.
To build their own courage and to influence the world, they are now saying that we have “voluntarily given up offensive warfare.” They include the “encouraging” observation that this means that the “great turning point of the war has arrived.” They claim that just as in the First World War when the change in German strategy from offensive campaigns to a defensive war of position marked the turning of a page, so it is today.
3. German propaganda’s counterattack
To counter this stupid chatter from the British and their Jewish-plutocratic opinion leaders, our loud reply is: “All the war’s initiatives remain in our hands!” The first commandment for each speaker is not to discuss in any way the question of offensive or defensive. We may not use the word “defensive” in our meetings. Instead, we will always say only that all our actions at the front and in the conquered territories, in the homeland and in our never-tiring work for the war effort, are continuing offensives.
In the past summer, as the Führer said in his speech of 30 September, our “offensive” ... “destroyed the right arm of the international conspiracy of capitalism, plutocracy and Bolshevism.” ... And this offensive is still ongoing in the Caucasus, Terek, by Taupse and above all at Stalingrad.
Offensively, we have captured around three-quarters of the whole Bolshevist agricultural territory and are now using it for ourselves and the rest of Europe to help toward victory.
Offensively, we captured the most essential resources Bolshevism needed for its military, its coal, its iron, its smelting and production facilities.
Offensively, we have already captured significant oil-producing regions in the foreland of the Caucasus.
Offensively, we have gained control of the major rivers in the Soviet Union, the Dnieper, the Don, and now the Volga.
Offensively, we control the Baltic sea and the Black Sea. The Soviets no longer have ports for their naval and commercial fleets.
Offensively, we have broken the strength of the Bolshevist armies. No one today can say that after the decisive annihilating blows Bolshevism has received, it has any way left to carry out its intent to attack and destroy Europe.
Offensively, we have above all continually attacked and destroyed the English and their American allies at sea, and will do so in increasing measure whenever they cross our path. Each U-boat, whether in the Atlantic, the English Channel, in the North Sea, on the coast of North America, in the Caribbean, the St. Laurence River, on the west and south coasts of Africa, in the Mediterranean, and also in the Arctic Sea, is a continuing attack that we will not cease until the Jewish-plutocratic conspiracy is destroyed.
More than that, total war is also an offensive if we assume that the conquered territory and its economic resources are now available for victory.
Tilling fields, sowing, and reaping in the endless reaches of the East is also a major offensive. This offensive breaks the terrible English hunger blockade under which we once collapsed. It even enables us to repay in the same coin. It is only just that they experience themselves what the “humane warfare of pious British Puritans” actually means. As long as only those the British oppressed suffered, the Indians and Arabs, Boer women and children, and finally we Germans, the British found it all very good. We will see if in the future they still find these methods so “gentlemanlike.”
Each advance in exploiting and organizing new territories is an offensive that strikes the enemy hard and pitilessly. Each kilometer of new or rebuilt railway line is an attack on the enemy. Each new and useful road to the front that we build is an attack. Each factory restored to production in the East is an attack, and at the end of Germany’s offensive attacks stands victory!
4. A continent was conquered in the East
Speakers should also always tell our people’s comrades that the result of our 18-month battle in the East is unique in world history. It cannot even be compared with the campaign in the West.
The territory we have conquered can probably be called a continent. The area exceeds the combined territory of Germany, France, and England. And this territory was defended by the ancient stubbornness of the Russians, some driven by fanaticism, others by boundless agitation and terror. The battles were hard. The strains that our brave soldiers had to endure, the infantry above all, have no equal in all of history.
Today we controlvast territory in the East that assures us and all Europe that in the future no Jewish stock exchange and no plutocratic extortion will be able to determine whether or not we have enough to eat. This territory was captured in a year-and-a-half only because our Wehrmacht and its allies were filled with an irresistible spirit that finds expression in the song: “From Finland to the Black Sea, Forward, Forward!”
The British should not act as if that were insignificant. The territory has wealth that now belongs to us. That is what is decisive. It is not only that the enemy has lost this wealth, no, we also have gained it for ourselves and we can and will use it. That is doubly hard for the enemy.
5. Winter has lost its terror
Another of the enemy”s favorite hopes is the coming winter. Numerous articles contain fantastic expectations for winter’s consequences.
They can no long terrify us. We have studied winter in the field and learned from our experiences. We are prepared for the coming winter in ways that will be discussed at the appropriate time. The decisive factor is that the past summer took from the Soviets the strength they needed to recover during the coming winter. They will certainly attempt to use it, but the prerequisites for that are in the territory that we now control, and that is what is important.
Our speakers should, by the way, address this theme only when circumstances require. As long as the current battles are progressing and we are reaching our goals, a discussion of the coming winter is inopportune.
During the past winter our soldiers at the front learned that, whatever the need, whatever unforeseen and difficult conditions they encountered, they had in the Führer a strong, energetic, and unshakable helper and rescuer. They all know from the experiences of these past months that everything is being done today to guard against similar surprises. Many of them already have proof of that today, since they have been supplied with new equipment for winter.
In the same way, the homeland must look to the Führer with complete confidence. He lives for but one purpose, to lead our people to victory and our Reich to final freedom. That is the desire of us all, and our unshakable resolve is to be loyal to him in all things so that we achieve that goal.
6. The enemy wants to break our people’s resolve
Searching for ways and means through which they might still win the war, our enemy once again falls back on an “encouraging” plan to wear down the German people. Developments have shown them that there is ho hope in the military or economic spheres. The psychological disruption of our people is their last hope.
The first voices came from the USA. They called for a new way to betray the German people along the lines of the enormous swindle in 1918 of “Wilson’s 14 Points.” Remembering the rapid collapse of our people then, the Jews and plutocrats are looking hard for a similar method. Back then, our people could not imagine that an offer for peace, friendship, equality, freedom, and prosperity for all Germans was only a perfidious and filthy lie, intended to persuade the undefeated and gullible Germans to lay down their weapons, then to brutally rape and enslave the now defenseless people.
They should not waste their efforts. We are no longer the people of 1918. We have a leadership that has taught us to see and to judge. We are today so politically mature that no crude Jewish swindle will work any longer.
Besides, other representatives of the Jewish-plutocratic conspiracy have all too often and all too clearly explained what our enemies’ real war aims are. We have not forgotten the Jew Th. Kaufman’ (sic) plan for the total sterilization of our people. Nor have we forgotten other statements, according to which all German children between the ages of two and six will be sent abroad to enemy countries where they can be poisoned in body and soul, losing any sense of being German. And our enemies’ serious political plans for the total territorial dismemberment of Germany, inflicting on us a “super Versailles,” remain warnings in our memories.
When, for example, the Manchester Guardian of 18 October of this year writes that the military and political prospects of the war for the Allies are extremely bleak, noting that “the U-boat danger is the greatest threat to the Allies, a danger that is on the way to becoming a catastrophe,” we believe that English newspaper, for we know that it is so. We know that as a result of the U-boat danger, England today is forced to implement new rationing measures, while we are now able to increase our rations.
The Manchester Guardian goes on to say: “One must now do everything to break the moral strength and the war willingness of the German people using ruthless bombing attacks.” We can only tell the English that they will never break our people that way. Each of us is filled with a fanatic will to finally end our centuries-old poverty as a people and nation. We tried through peaceful means to organize our German life and build a worthy and satisfying existence for our German people’s comrades. The envy and boundless hatred of those powers than saw in us a threat to their wild lust for power and wealth wanted to destroy such peaceful development and reduce us to a level of total enslavement. Now we have the war that we did not want. Its end should and must be the annihilation of those eternally destructive powers that see peoples only as the object of their drive for wealth and governments merely as tools of their unlimited power.
We are on the path to this result in the war. It is the path to German freedom, to justice and prosperity for us and Europe. Nothing will divert us from this path, no malicious deceit, no flattering promises, no brutal threats, no wild enemy bombing terror.
Recently a National Socialist poet had this to say:
God Help You ....!
by Robert Rick
You will not defeat us! Despite the night and its terrors:
We mock your murderous hand!
When with cowardice you throw fire
At our cities, our fields —
We are steeled with iron confidence
In the Führer, front, and fatherland!You will not defeat us! — Despite misery and suffering!
Even if death separates us
From the dearest that we have:
The world will one day envy us —
For we were loyal!You will not defeat us, despite your crimes,
Which fell upon us with devilish force!
Soon we will speak once more
And revenge the victims a thousand-fold!And then:
God help you, England!
In these words are the will and spiritual force that fills our whole German people today. No British malice, no Jewish chatter can defeat it. Nor can bombing terror. German revenge will come in the end. All our people’s comrades in the heavily attacked areas know that.
The whole German people looks with quiet confidence to the future: It accepts grimly and with determination everything that the battle for its final freedom and its future demands. It knows that this future under the leadership of Adolf Hitler and with the strenth of his National Socialist idea is continuing to build what the Führer began after the takeover of power in 1933. We know his goals for a political order, for economic freedom, and social prosperity, and we know from his own mouth that this war has strengthened his convictions, for that — and exactly that — it what the Führer meant when he said that he would return from this wars an even more fanatic National Socialist.
Because we are Germans, we have in us the soldierly strength to bear all the toil and burdens, all the privations and sacrifices. The Lord God himself gave us this soldierly strength in our very blood. Our service to God is to prove ourselves in these fateful months that will decide our battle for freedom. That is the fulfilment of our German nature, to which creation has called us.
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