Our Hitler

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...
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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.