Background: These two speeches by Julius Streicher celebrate Hitler’s takeover. The first brief speech was delivered on the day that the Nazi banners were raised over the Nuremberg city government. The second was on the occasion of the first meeting of the Nazified city council. They are examples of Nazi jubilation at the beginning of Hitler’s rule.
The source: Julius Streicher, Kampf dem Weltfeind. Reden aus der Kampfzeit (Nuremberg: Verlag Der Stürmer, 1938), pp. 143-148.
This Day is the Proudest Day of My Life
9 March 1933 in Nuremberg, on the day of the assumption of power in Nuremberg
My German racial comrades! Shame and disgrace ruled here for fourteen years. Today, however, the flags of National Socialist Germany fly from this building as true symbols of German rebirth. In 1924, the police threw us National Socialists out of this building. Today we enter as victors! Once again, German thinking will hold sway. Cowardice has given way and one now speaks again of German justice, which had formerly been banned.
My racial comrades! Do you hear the church bells ringing for the new Germany? Let me say and affirm: “Today is the proudest day of my life! Let us all thank God that it has come! Be thankful that you may experience this hour! Once Hans Sachs [the Meistersinger of Nuremberg] was hailed by the citizens of Nuremberg on the festival grounds. Today, all of Nuremberg celebrates Adolf Hitler. The flags now being raised atop this building will fly there forever. He who sins against them deserves death. We have borne many sorrows and made many heavy sacrifices. Daily we met disloyalty and betrayal. We overcame all these difficulties and emerged victorious from the hard battle. This hour is therefore holy to us, and will forever remain so! I have longed for the day when I could tell the Führer that Nuremberg belonged to him. Today is that day! I am reconciled to my fate. I have forgotten the days that are behind me. Nuremberg, the proud city of the Meistersingers, has become German and will forever remain German! Raise high the flags! Adolf Hitler, Führer and Reich Chancellor of Germany: Sieg Heil!
The Future Knows Only Germans!
27 April 1933 in the City Council Hall in Nuremberg
German racial comrades! In 1918, the state collapsed in Germany, leading to a complete dissolution of the German people in all areas of life. Respect for the holy, the inheritance of centuries, vanished under the mocking laughter of a misled “mass man.” People did not want to accept that there was a fatherland named Germany. The rootless spirit, the rootless god of an abstract Internationale ruined the source from which the German people had always taken its strength in time of need. The German people lost faith in the strength of its blood, its faith in the strength of its soul, and thus faith in its very self. Thus it had to come that the inward and outward strength, the former power, the glory of the past, sank into shame and misery. But the most terrible aspect of these fourteen years was not that the economy of the productive German people was ruined. Rather, the German people’s faith in itself was taken away the faith in that which once holy to its fathers. That was the crime against the German people. A people from whom faith in itself and in its own strength has been taken is open to exploitation. Today the German people knows the names of those who enriched themselves in the midst of its need. The German people knows that its misery was caused by a foreign people, the Jews, above all from those who were the lackeys of the Jewish race. The miracle of today has happened because the German people recognized the cause of its misfortune. The German people once again has a Führer in Chancellor Adolf Hitler.
The black-red-gold flags of self mutilation and surrender have been removed from government buildings. The German people have again been given the flags and cockades they once won on the battlefields. Germany’s tribes are once again united and marches once more in the ways of its fathers. Once again, Germany is above all else in the world. The field marshal [Hindenburg] of the Great War, whose whose career reaches back to Königgrätz , and the corporal of the World War, who created the brown battalions that destroyed the Jewish-Marxist Internationale today stand at the head of the people and extend their hands. That is the great miracle of the German people today. This great miracle gave the German people back their faith a new faith that shines in the eyes of our children and leads us to raise our arms in a Heil for the fatherland. With this will, we enter this ancient hall. The chosen representatives of the citizens of Nuremberg have gathered here to begin the work they have resolved to put in the hands of the chosen leader of the citizens. This receives its solemnity though the men and women here present, the representatives of the people of Nuremberg. When the Great War began, the representatives of the Reichstag promised the Kaiser that the days of discord and strife were over. They promised the Kaiser that there were no more parties. Only a Germany so united could be victorious in the great battles that had to be fought. My city councilors, if you have all come here with this honest and decent intent, this first Nuremberg city council under the national revolution must also begin with the promise that there will no longer be parties here, only representatives of a united citizenry.
Women and men! After fourteen years of struggle, in which thousands of German men voluntarily gave their lives in their brown uniforms, National Socialism has destroyed the crime of November  and laid the foundations for the new state in Potsdam [a ceremony the month before]. We National Socialists, on this the first day of the new city council, are ready to extend our hand to all who are of good will. Just as the representatives in the provincial parliaments and in the Reichstag must feel obligated as representatives of the German people, so too the citizens of Nuremberg demand of their representatives in the city council that they reject all the causes from which hate sprang in the past. Malice and discord make decent work for the good of the community impossible. He who does not enter this hall ready to be an honest, decent man will remain our enemy, and also the enemy of the citizens of Nuremberg, the city of Albrecht Dürer and Hans Sachs. What happened before in this city hall is gone and forgotten. But he who dares to injure or insult honest German work with the spirit of a Jewish-Marxist worldview that brought Germany to its grave will be judged by the people. At the first meeting of a new city council in the former Jewish-Marxist Germany, it was customary for party leaders to speak of their programs. That was then! The time of chattering and lying is over. It will not return. Those who have created the new Germany will be sure of that. The citizens of Nuremberg expect of their newly-elected council not promises, but courage and decisiveness: healing wounds where necessary; maintaining that which is again healthy; increasing our new wealth. That we have already begun to eliminate self interest from the offices in the Nuremberg city hall is no secret. The task of the men who we today elect as leaders of the citizens is, in the view of the citizens, to tear away the facade that even today covers a swamp of corruption. The greater the courage with which the mayors we today elect, the greater will be the confidence of the citizens whom they serve.
As Adolf Hitler entered the chancellory in the Reich capital, he asked the German people for four years. Four years will determine whether he is worthy of the confidence they gave him in the election of 5 March 1933.
Citizens of Nuremberg! Give your newly elected council four years after which the city of your fathers will again be the city it once was: clean and united. It will be again a German Nuremberg, worthy of the greatness of the masters who once gave it fame and honor. Women and citizens! The bells of the Frauenkirche and the bells of St. Sebaldus have today rung in the new Nuremberg. Get to work, city council members! Get to work, you mayors! Hail to the field marshal of the Great War! Hail to the blacksmith of the new Reich! Long live the city of our fathers! Long live our beloved, ancient Nuremberg!
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