CHALLENGER'S RAP

• My German fellow-countrymen and women! Party Comrades! It is, I think, something very extraordinary when a man after about 20 years can stand before his old followers, and when in doing so he has not had to make any revisions of his program during these 20 years.
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• Today's gathering, however, reminds us most of all of the evening which we were able to celebrate in the former hall 10 years ago. It reminds us of this because at that time too we were in the midst of a very hard fight. Our fight to take over power in, Germany was just as decisive for our fate as the fight which we are waging today. It was only during the past year that this became known to us in all its meaning, and if victory had not been achieved in 1933, then Germany would have remained what it was then, that is, a powerless nation with an Army of 100,000 men, which would necessarily have (had to submit) to destruction.
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• And at the same time, a colossus had arisen in the East with only a single thought in mind, to fall upon this weak, lazy, defeatist and internally-torn Europe. And if at that time this challenge had not been successfully taken up, then the power which alone was capable of opposing this danger would not have entered world history.
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• Today we know that there would probably not be any Europe left. Therefore the battle which we fought then was only apparently an internal struggle for power. In reality, even then it was a struggle for the preservation of Germany and, in the broadest sense of the word, for the preservation of Europe. At that time, we were close to victory. And yet when, 10 years ago, we met in the former hall, no one knew exactly how close it was. Only one thing went without saying as far as we were concerned, namely the conviction that this victory, no matter what happens, must come and will come.
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• It is with the same conviction that I now stand before you, and it has never left me, either, since the day on which, as an unknown man in this city, I began the struggle, first for the soul of the German people, and then, on beyond this city, forever more and more followers. And in the beginning I did not have much more to give than faith, the faith that if anyone pursues a just aim I with unchanging and undisturbed loyalty and never lets himself be diverted from it, but puts everything into it, then others will be found who are determined to be his followers, and that from this host an ever stronger faith must gradually radiate to the whole people, and that out of this host the worthiest part of the whole people must one day finally find themselves together, and that finally this worthiest part must acquire the power in the state.
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• And today I stand by this same view. Fate, or Providence, will give the victory to those who most deserve it. We could have had it before, in the year 1918. The German people did not deserve it at that time. They had grown confused and untrue to themselves. And that was the reason that I, an unknown, a nobody, at that time resolved to build up this movement in the midst of utter ruin and complete collapse, the reason why I also had faith that it would have to succeed, because I saw before me, not the defeatist phenomena of a crumbling bourgeois-Marxist world, but the millions of brave men who had done their utmost and who faltered only because the homeland was no longer worthy of them in the critical hour-because it had failed. I then had the conviction that if only the effort to bring back internal order to the German people and to get hold of the soundest kernel in them proved successful, that then another 1918 could never be repeated
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• Since I made this resolve, many more than 20 years have gone by. Ten years
• ago we were about to have a dress rehearsal, after the movement had already encountered the greatest difficulties-in a preceding ten-year period, many had lost their faith, and our opponents already were saying that we were dead. We need only recall that time. It was no wonder, either. A movement which was just getting ready to seize power collapsed completely. Its leaders were either dead or wounded, or in prison or in flight because of their activities.
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• HEIL DENN ADOLF HITLER HEIL DENN DEUSTCHEN REICH
• WIR WERDEN DIE JUDEN JAGEN WIR WERDEN DIE WELT WIEDER FÜR UNS MACHEN
• MIT UNSEREM FÜRHER DAS SIEGE IST UNSERER DIE WELT IST UNSERER
• DIE JUDEN WERDEN STERBEN! IM AUSCHWITZ! ALLE DIE INS UNSERER WEG KOMMSN WERDEN
• DIREKT ABGESCHOSEN! HEIL DAS SIEG HEIL DEUSTCHLAND HEIL DENN ADOLF HITLER!