When the German people trusting to the promises made by President Wilson in his Fourteen Points, laid down their arms in November 1918, a fateful struggle thereby came to an end for which perhaps individual statesmen, but certainly not the peoples themselves could be held responsible.
The German nation put up such an heroic fight because it was sincere in its conviction that it had been wrongfully attacked and was therefore justified in fighting. the Peace Treaty of Versailles did not seem to be for the purpose of restoring peace to mankind, but rather to perpetuate hatred.
Being daily better informed about their knowledge than my adversaries themselves, I argued till finally one day they applied the one means that wins the easiest victory over reason: terror and force.
The Western democracy of today is the forerunner of Marxism which without it would not be thinkable. It provides this world plague with the culture in which its germs can spread.
Great, truly world-shaking revolutions of a spiritual nature are not even conceivable and realizable except as the titanic struggles of individual formations, never as enterprises of coalitions.
When I go out in the morning and see these men standing in their queues and look into their pinched faces, then I believe I would be no Christian, but a very devil, if I felt no pity for them, if I did not, as did our Lord two thousand years ago, turn against those by whom today this poor people are plundered and exposed.
The wage of a people has meaning only when it arises from production. Every increase in production should benefit the whole people and raise the people's standards of living.
But if out of smugness, or even cowardice, this battle is not fought to its end, then take a look at the peoples five hundred years from now. I think you will find but few images of God, unless you want to profane the Almighty.
A car for the people, an affordable Volkswagen, would bring great joy to the masses and the problems of building such a car must be faced with courage.
In the life of nations, what in the last resort decides questions is a kind of Judgment Court of God... Always before god and the world the stronger has the right to carry through what he wills.
In relation to the political decontamination of our public life, the government will embark upon a systematic campaign to restore the nation's moral and material health. The whole educational system, theater, film, literature, the press and broadcasting - all these will be used as a means to this end.
The German people in its whole character is not warlike, but rather soldierly, that is, while they do not want war, they are not frightened by the thoughts of it.
No more than a famous master can be replaced and another take over the completion of the half-finished painting he has left behind can the great poet and thinker, the great statesman and the great soldier, be replaced. For their activity lies always in the province of art. It is not mechanically trained but inborn by God's grace.
The National Government will regard it as its first and foremost duty to revive in the nation the spirit of unity and cooperation. It will preserve and defend those basic principles on which our nation has been built. It regards Christianity as the foundation of our national morality, and the family as the basis of national life.