Our
Hitler
by Joseph Goebbels. Every year on April 20th, from 1933 to 1945—only
missing one year, 1934—National Socialist Germany’s Minister
of Information Joseph Goebbels gave a speech on the occasion of Adolf
Hitler’s birthday.
These speeches, all published in the newspaper the Völkischer
Beobachter, and all but the first and last broadcast on German radio,
were originally designed to pay homage to Hitler on a personal level
on his birthday. However, it quickly became a way for Goebbels to
philosophically interpret the events of the previous year in the light
of German loyalty to the Führer.
The first few years’ speeches—taken up with the peaceful
reconstruction of Germany and the acquisition of the Rhineland, Austria
and the Sudetenland—were distinctly different from those of
the war years, as the reader will see.
Goebbels dealt with the initial German victories—and later,
defeats—honestly and objectively in these speeches, and for
large numbers of Germans, they quickly became an annual barometer
of how the country’s top leadership viewed the direction of
the war.
These speeches, here translated into English, annotated and presented
as one volume for the first time, provide a fascinating insight into
the psychology of the Hitler phenomenon, as seen through the eyes
of the Third Reich’s most gifted propagandist. 94p-sc