Chancellor Adolf Hitler, in a ringing three-hour speech before the Reichstag here today, offered Germany’s cooperation in world affairs, but only on his own terms, recommitted himself to a war on “the Bolshevist incendiaries” in Spain and elsewhere, and reiterated his policies of Pan-Germanism and an unabating campaign to recover the Reich’s pre-war colonies. (He did not discuss the Jewish question.)
Before his 741 Reichstag deputies, gathered in the elaborately festooned Kroll Opera House, the Fuehrer hurled a general “no” at every recent major project or hope for international appeasement in the form proposed by Britain and the other democratic powers. He rededicated Germany to an enduring fight, at Premier Benito Mussolini’s side, to “assure a Nationalist Spain.”
The three-hour address, about a third of it devoted to foreign policy, rang through Germany and the world. The Reich’s 66,000,000 subjects were grouped as one man around the nation’s radio loudspeakers, by Government order, while either the text or an abstract of the speech was broadcast in nearly every other country.
Salient: points of the address follow:
1– Germany will recognize Manchukuo; will continue to work with Japan in the Italian-German-Japanese anti-Comintern pact; and favors a Japanese victory in China.
2– The Reich will never reenter the League of Nations.
3– The Fuehrer will demand the return of Germany’s pre-war colonies “each year with increasing vigor,” and will refuse to accept credits as a substitute.
4– The Reich “has no litigious questions of any sort” with Great Britain, “unless it be our colonial demands.” Hitler roundly flayed the British press, however.
5– The Berlin government has “in Europe no territorial demands with regard to France.”
6– “Goodwill” can solve the problem of the “10,000,000 Germans (who) live in two states neighboring us (Austria and Czechoslovakia),” but “whoever tried forcibly to prevent such an improvement on the basis of European conciliation must call necessarily, on one day or another, for a recourse to violence between peoples.” Hitler warned in this connection that Germany was no longer the weak country of the past, and will defend the minorities of German blood living along the Reichs frontiers.
7– Austro-German relations, as a result of last week’s developments, “henceforth will be closer in the various fields of political, personal and objectively economic collaboration.”
8– Soviet Russia is the only country “with which we have not sought relations and with which we do not desire to have dealings.” The Nazi Reich is the “irreconcilable enemy of the leaders of “Judaeo-International Bolshevism.”
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
