Background: The Nazi Party’s speakers needed to be kept up-to-date. To provide the necessary information, the party provided a variety of material. The Speaker Education Material was intended to provide information that could be used over the long term. The Redner-Schnellinformation [Speakers’ Express Information], on the other hand, provided speakers with guidelines for the immediate campaign. This is a translation of an issue of the latter. It is dated September 1943, and addresses what was to be said about the Allied massive bombing raids. The claim is that the only way to rebuild Germany is first to win the war.
The source: “Ohne Sieg kein Wiederaufbau. Zur Luftkriegslage,” Redner-Schnellinformation, Lieferung 67, Anfang September 1943.
It is understandable that the air war, with its tragic consequences for many people’s comrades, has the attention of a wide circle of our population. Since it is also not possible for political reasons to write or speak to the public openly about its effects, rumors run wild. However, it is always true that the rumors are exaggerated and wildly inaccurate. Setting the record straight, however, would only give information to the enemy, which we cannot do under any circumstances.
It is, therefore, necessary for our speakers to deal with the issue in public meetings and mass meetings. The following points should be made.
1. The question of casualties and damage cannot be discussed in public. Any discussion of either theme gives the enemy information that could be very damaging for the affected areas. The sharpest discipline is necessary to see to it that wild rumors do not spread. Up to now, in every case the actual losses were significantly under the numbers spread through rumors.
It is psychologically understandable that the populace of areas under aerial attack, after the general confusion of a terrible night, get an entirely false impression of the damage, which leads to wild and exaggerated rumors about the extent of the casualties and damage.
As soon as the initial shock is over, investigations in the following days prove the first impressions wrong. Thus, the claims of “over 100,000 dead in Hamburg,” or of “tens of thousands” in other cities, are all false [the actual death toll in Hamburg was around 50,000]. The same is true regarding rumors of heavy industrial damage.
Official sources obviously did not reveal which factories were still functioning, despite the rumors, since that would only be an invitation to the enemy to continue his destructive work. However, it is important for general morale that our speakers energetically combat such loose talk that might lead to depression that could undermine rational thinking, confidence in victory, and unshakable trust in our leadership.
2. War against our people’s morale.
Our opponent is making terror attacks against our civilian population in hopes of breaking the German people’s powers of resistance, thereby destroying Germany’s superior morale in this war.
This must be addressed particularly directly and clearly in all that our speakers say. The British always try to persuade the world that their attacks are aimed at German war production, but numerous enemy voices prove that their sole aim is to terrorize the German civilian population. Driven by Jewish hatred and the Jewish spirit, the British and the Americans are attempting to destroy the homes of our working people, their cultural landmarks, and thereby everything that is part of their life and routine.
This is even recognized and condemned in the neutral press. The Swedish military writer Colonel Bratt writes in Stockholms Tidningen:
“The air terror against the civilian population is inexcusable. One simply cannot defend bombing cities, incinerating, suffocating, or blowing up tens of thousands of people, and destroying the homes of hundreds of thousands of others. If the English claim after all that has happened in Hamburg, Milan, and Berlin, that they are not making terror attacks aimed at the civilian population, they are deceiving themselves and others. Only burning hatred or propaganda that has left all reason behind can approve such terror. There is no way to reconcile claims that one is rescuing civilization, fighting for humanity, and resisting violence, while at the same time one is unleashing the inferno of aerial warfare against a civilian population.”
How little the British think of such judgments is proven by a statement by Brendan Bracken, the head of English propaganda and world agitation:
“I decline to support a plan that provides teachers for Germany after the war, to reeducate the German people. The best teachers for the Germans are men like Air Marshall Harris, the head of Bomber Command. Germany must come to know the bitter horrors of a war against its civilian population.”
In the British weekly Sphere, we find a recommendation by English journalist Ferdinand Duchy, who advises that Germany’s destroyed cities never be rebuilt. The ruins should be declared off-limits. That would assure Germany’s total, final, and violent impoverishment. Later in the same article, we read:
“By the way, aerial attacks are the best way to educate the Germans. Can one imagine anything more effective than bombing terror?”
The Sunday Times of 15 August wrote:
“There are two events that, if they happen in Germany, will lead to a repetition of 9 November 1918: A defeat in the East, or increased bombing attacks. Should the latter hit the civilian population particularly hard, taking their homes and food from then, it will soon lead to this by affecting their morale.”
These few statements, selected from many, should be sufficient proof of the enemy’s intentions. Our German people must recognize these facts so that they can face British-American attacks with firm wills, strong hearts, and burning hatred.
Each individual should and must be firmly resolved that there will never be another 9 November 1918 in Germany. Speakers must therefore constantly repeat the countless proofs of brutal Jewish destructive hatred. The plan of the Jew Kaufman, who wants to exterminate the entire German population by sterilization, the proposal of another Jew to deport all German children between the ages of two and six for “reeducation,” and the recent clear intentions of the British to leave all of Europe to the Soviets after victory, show us all what will happen if we do not stay strong and firm.
3. The war situation on all fronts is stable. To give up victory now because of inner weakness, lack of courage, and fear of unavoidable personal suffering and burdens would forever rob our people of its future.
Reich Minister Dr. Goebbels wrote, in his article titled “On Irreplaceable Freedom,” in the weekly Das Reich of Saturday, 28 August:
“He who gives up in the midst of a world struggle of such gigantic scale will sink inevitably and without forgiveness into a life without history.”
That gives one cause to think. Were we to give victory away once more, as we did in 1918, our German people would never again have a chance to determine its own fate. Each individual German people’s comrade knows what is at stake: It is a question of our very existence, of freedom, of the right to life, of social welfare, national order, and the future of our children. That is what our brave soldiers at the front are fighting and dying for. That is why they have been victorious in four years of battles unprecedented in history. Their sacrifice must not have been in vain. Their goal is the goal of all Germans in the homeland. That is why we, too, fight, suffer, and sacrifice. The only thing that matters is victory!
4. Only a victorious Germany will be able to rebuilt its destroyed cities. Those affected by the bombing war ask themselves how everything that has been ruined and destroyed can ever be rebuilt. Each of us must be clear: Only victory will allow us to rebuilt, to repair all the damage, to heal all the economic and social wounds. National Socialist Germany was able to build the West Wall in a short period of time. In the midst of war, it could even construct the Atlantic Wall, the most gigantic fortifications of all time. It built or improved thousands of kilometers of railway lines behind the front in the East. Such a Germany will devote all its organizational and technical strengths to rebuilding ruined and destroyed cities after the war.
The prerequisite is victory. A defeated Germany would forever be the servant of the International Jews, whether under the club of a Bolshevist commissar or held captive by the chains of international economic slavery. Were we to give up, we would face the murderous terror of the Soviets. Thousands may perish under the murderous bombing of the Jewish-plutocratic enemy today; millions would die under the rule of our Jewish-Bolshevist opponent. As the mass graves at Katyn and Winniza prove, it would affect millions of workers and farmers, and millions of civil servants and citizens in the same way. It would affect our children and babies, just as it affected the children and babies in Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. There would be no bunker, no air raid shelter, no place of refuge, neither in Germany nor anywhere else in the world. The German people would be persecuted by wild beasts driven by Jewish hatred and Bolshevist terror.
Nor is it the case that our enemy’s hatred is directed only against the system, against National Socialism, the Führer, or his men. The enemy’s goal is: The destruction of Germany. The destruction of our whole life, of our social achievements and economy, our culture, and our intellectual abilities.
There is but one way to safeguard the future: A German victory. The whole German people, therefore, must affirm the words of Reich Minister Dr. Goebbels:
“Our goal today must be to cheerfully surrender what we can do without, but never to lose what cannot be replaced. In the end, freedom is the only thing that is irreplaceable.”
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