Hitler's address to the commanders-in-chief on August 22, 1939

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The Hitler's speech to the commanders on August 22, 1939 was a speech by the Fuehrer and Chancellor Adolf Hitler some 50 generals and officers - Heeresgruppen- and army leaders of the three armed services  - in Hitler's Berghof on the Obersalzberg in which he announced his intention to the To attack neighboring Poland .

procedure

Hitler began his speech at noon in his study. He stood by and gave a free speech. Those present sat in several rows. The speech was interrupted by an hour-long lunch. At 3 p.m. Hitler continued his speech.

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Before lunch

His original plan had been to unleash the war in the West, but he had now decided to attack Poland first, otherwise Germany would fall in the back. As reasons for the current start of the war, he cited the irreplaceability of his personality and that of Mussolini and Franco , who could be victims of an attack at any time. The other side, however, currently has no personalities.

Germany could make decisions more easily. In addition, the economic situation is forcing action. The other side will risk a lot and gain little. The situation to strike was favorable, since England was bound in Asia by Japan and in the Orient by the rebellious Mohammedans . France is bound by tensions with Italy and weakened by a drop in the birth rate . Since the Italian occupation of Albania, there has been a balance of power in the Balkans . In addition, the attack on Poland offered the opportunity for the Wehrmacht to test out a future conflict with the West.

The attempt to reach an understanding with Poland on the Danzig and Corridor question had been interrupted by England. You have to take the risk and be determined. England's armaments were still weak, and so England didn't want war for two or three years. England had refused Poland a loan for armament.

There are only two options for the Western powers to help Poland. A blockade is ineffective in view of Germany's self-sufficiency , and an attack on the Siegfried Line is psychologically impossible because it will cause enormous losses. A violation of the neutrality of Holland , Belgium and Switzerland by the Western powers is not to be expected. England did not want to wage a long war. The economic power of Germany is now much higher than in the First World War . He had destroyed hopes of an alliance with the Soviet Union through the German-Soviet non-aggression pact . Stalin knew that an Allied victory over Germany would also mean the end of his regime. The replacement of Litvinov was the sign of the turning point in Soviet foreign policy. This clears the way for the attack on Poland.

After lunch

The reactions of the Western powers will likely be something like a trade ban and the severance of diplomatic ties to save face. What is required is ruthless determination. People would be more important than machines. Germany has the qualitatively better person, whose strength of soul is decisive. The goal is the destruction of Poland, its living force. Hard and ruthless action is appropriate. It will be triggered by suitable propaganda.

In the end, Hitler cited the conquest of living space in the east as the reason for the war in the following words :

“We have to close our hearts and make them hard. Anyone who has thought about this world order is clear that its meaning lies in the combative implementation of the best. But the German people are among the best on earth. Providence has made us leaders of this people; we have the task of giving the German people, which are crowded with 140 people on the square kilometer, the necessary living space. The greatest hardship can be the greatest mildness when carrying out such a task. "

In Greiner's note, this passage reads: “Therefore there should be no pity, no human touching. He was obliged to the German people who could not live in the previous area. 80 million people should get their rights, their livelihoods must be secured. "

Lore of Speech

There are essentially two recordings of this speech which, according to the audience, reproduce in full. None, however, is a verbatim record of the speech. One recording comes from Admiral Wilhelm Canaris , the long-time head of the Foreign Office / Defense of the Wehrmacht ; it was found in the files of the OKW ( IMT documents PS-798 and PS-1014). It is the only known direct transcript and has priority over all other versions. The second copy comes from Admiral Hermann Boehm . It was brought in by the defense in the Nuremberg Trial of the major war criminals (IMT Document Rae-27).

When the OKW's war diary was published, a third record was found made by Helmuth Greiner , the leader of the war diary . It is based on the recording by Admiral Canaris and the extensive recapitulation by officer Walter Warlimont the evening after the speech.

In addition to these detailed notes, there is an entry by the Chief of Staff Franz Halder in his war diary, in which the speech was also sketched. There is also a short summary by General Curt Liebmann , a brief private note by General Admiral Conrad Albrecht and the memories of the Abwehr officer Colonel i. G. Helmuth Groscurth .

"Genghis Khan speech"

Another, obviously falsified, version of the speech, the so-called Genghis Khan speech (IMT document L-003), emerged at the Nuremberg Trial . It contains implausible, particularly brutal and bloodthirsty phrases. It was created in German resistance circles to warn the British government about Hitler. At the instigation of Chief of Staff General Colonel Ludwig Beck, this forgery was handed over to the British journalist Louis Lochner , who forwarded it to the British Embassy in Berlin no later than August 25, 1939 . The Military Tribunal rejected this version as evidence.

The forgery is unequivocally established. However, it was printed in a footnote in the publication of the “Files on German Foreign Policy” with the note that it was not presented as evidence, so that the forgery still occasionally circulates in historical literature as a real document.

The historian Andreas Hillgruber opposes the understandable demand to use unchecked quotations that are as stressful as possible, even from dubious sources. With the strong tendency to cite the key documents as literal reproductions of Hitler's utterances, this must discredit historical scholarship.

Transmission of the key document

At the Nuremberg Trial, Prosecution Representative Thomas J. Dodd gave a detailed account of how Document PS-798 / PS-1014 was found. The document was therefore part of a collection of documents that was under the control of General August Winter from the Wehrmacht command staff . In the last days of the war, these documents arrived in three railway trains via detours from Berlin to Saalfelden in the Austrian state of Salzburg , occupied by the US Army in early May 1945 . There they were handed over by General Winter to the Documentation Department of the 3rd US Army in Munich .

In Munich, the documents were sorted by Department G-2 of the SHAEF with the help of officials from the OKW and OKH . On June 16, 1945, they were brought together with others on six trucks to US Group Control Council No. 32, which was located in the former offices of IG Farben in Seckenheim , a district of Mannheim .

There they were placed under guard on shelves on the 3rd floor and between July 16 and August 30, 1945 under the supervision of British Colonel Austin with staff from Supreme AG, the G-2 Document Center of the G-2 Operational Intelligence Section, 6889 Berlin Document Section and the British Enemy Document Unit as well as the British Military Intelligence Research Section.

From July 5 to August 30, 1945, these documents were reviewed by members of the Chief Prosecutor's staff for the United States . Staff member Lieutenant Margolis took document PS-798 / PS-1014 from these documents and brought it to Nuremberg.

See also

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ The speech in Halder's war diary
  2. ↑ Transcript Boehm, quoted here from: Wolfgang Michalka, Gottfried Niedhart (Ed.): Deutsche Geschichte 1933–1945. Documents on domestic and foreign policy (= Fischer-Taschenbuch 11250 Geschichte ), Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1992, ISBN 3-596-11250-8 , p. 169.
  3. ^ A b Andreas Hillgruber : Sources and source criticism on the prehistory of the Second World War . In: Gottfried Niedhart: The beginning of the war in 1939, the unleashing or outbreak of the Second World War? . Darmstadt 1976, p. 384.
  4. ↑ Files on German Foreign Policy 1918–1945, From the Archives of the Foreign Office . Baden-Baden 1950–70, Series D, Volume 7, p. 171 f.
  5. ^ The trial of the main war criminals before the International Court of Justice in Nuremberg , Volume 14: Negotiating records from May 16, 1946 to May 28, 1946 , sn, Nuremberg 1948, pp. 75–95