Hitler’s Reichstag speech

On the morning of 1 September 1939, a few hours after German troops had crossed the Polish border, Adolf Hitler addressed an extraordinary session of the Reichstag, convened in the Kroll Opera House in Berlin. The speech, broadcast by radio throughout Germany and listened to abroad, was the only official “declaration” of war that Poland ever heard from the Reich. The German government never delivered a formal declaration of war. Hitler presented the attack as a response to Polish provocations and uttered the sentence that has gone down in history: “Last night Poland for the first time fired on our own territory, using regular soldiers as well. Since 5.45 we have been returning fire.” He announced that “from now on bombs will be answered with bombs”, declared that he was henceforth “the first soldier of the Reich”, and named who would take power should he be killed.

Popular accounts say that Hitler justified the war with alleged Polish attacks on the border, which had in fact been staged by the SS as part of Operation Himmler. That is true, with one qualification: the speech itself mentioned neither Gleiwitz (Gliwice) nor any other place by name. Hitler spoke in general terms of “Polish atrocities” and of border incidents. The specific “evidence”, above all the Gleiwitz incident, was supplied that day by German radio, the news agency and the newspapers.

The road to the Kroll Opera House

Since the Reichstag fire of 1933 the parliament of the Third Reich had sat in the former Kroll Opera House, on the other side of the Königsplatz. It had long ceased to be a place of debate. From 1933 it met only rarely, to listen to Hitler’s speeches and approve by acclamation whatever was put before it. The last time the deputies had heard him before the war was on 28 April 1939, when he renounced the naval agreement with Britain and the declaration of non-aggression with Poland.

This time the order to attack came before the speech. Directive No. 1 for the Conduct of the War, signed on 31 August, set the start of the offensive for 4.45 a.m. At dawn Hitler issued a proclamation to the Wehrmacht: the Polish state had refused a peaceful settlement of relations, Germans in Poland were being persecuted with “bloody terror”, and a series of border violations proved that Poland did not respect the frontiers of the Reich, so “from now on force must be met with force”. Before noon Hitler drove from the Reich Chancellery to the Kroll Opera House. Uniformed party stormtroopers lined the route and barriers had been put up for the crowds, but few Berliners turned out. Foreign correspondents unanimously described a city that was quiet and dejected, without a trace of the enthusiasm of August 1914.

The session was opened by the President of the Reichstag, Hermann Göring. According to most accounts, Hitler began speaking a few minutes after ten. A British document confirms this: at 10.50 a.m. the German chargé d’affaires in London, Theodor Kordt, told Lord Halifax that he had just been listening to the opening of the speech on the wireless. Hitler appeared not in his brown party jacket but in a grey-green tunic in field grey, resembling the army’s field uniform.

“Danzig was and is a German city”

The speech followed a course typical of Hitler: it began calmly, almost hesitantly, and grew louder with each passage. Its first part was an indictment. Hitler spoke of the “Versailles Diktat” that had torn Danzig and the “Corridor” away from Germany, of the more than a million Germans who had been forced to leave those lands in 1919–1920, and of the persecution of the German minority in Poland. He claimed that he had repeatedly proposed a peaceful revision, and that his proposals to Poland had been “the most modest and the most loyal” imaginable. The answer, he said, had been Polish mobilisation, terror against Germans and the “slow strangulation” of the Free City.

He then gave his own version of the last days of peace. He had accepted the British proposal for direct negotiations, prepared a basis for talks and, together with his government, waited “two whole days” for a Polish plenipotentiary who never came. He passed over the fact that the sixteen points had never been communicated to the Polish government, and that the deadline for the plenipotentiary’s arrival had been set so that it could not be met. His final argument was the border incidents: on one of the last nights there had supposedly been twenty-one of them, and fourteen the previous night, “three of them very serious”. That was why, Hitler said, he had decided “to speak to Poland in the same language that Poland has been using towards us for months”.

All these “Polish attacks” were the work of Germans. On the evening of 31 August SS men in civilian clothes raided the radio station at Gleiwitz and left behind the body of the murdered Franciszek Honiok. That same night a “Polish” attack was staged on the customs house at Hochlinden, where several prisoners dressed in Polish uniforms were shot, and on a forester’s lodge near Byczyna. On the Polish side of the border German saboteurs had been active for weeks, as in the bombing at Tarnów railway station.

“Since 5.45 we have been returning fire”

The most famous sentence of the speech contained two falsehoods. The first concerned the culprit: no Polish soldier had attacked Reich territory; it was Germany that had started the war. The second concerned the time. The attack had begun not at 5.45 but at 4.45, as laid down in Directive No. 1. At about that time the battleship Schleswig-Holstein opened fire on Westerplatte, and a few minutes earlier German dive-bombers had attacked Wieluń. It is not known where the time of 5.45 in the text came from. It may have been a mistake, or it may have been meant to make the German action appear later than the alleged Polish attacks. Whatever the reason, no one in Germany corrected Hitler, and the word “zurückgeschossen” (returning fire) suited the whole narrative: the Reich was defending itself, not attacking. That day diplomatic missions were instructed not to call the operations against Poland a war.

Hitler added that “whoever fights with gas will be fought with gas”, and gave his assurance that he had no intention of waging war on women and children. “I have ordered my air force to restrict its attacks to military objectives,” he said, at the very moment the Luftwaffe was bombing open towns, Wieluń first among them. He named three aims of the war: a solution to the question of Danzig, a solution to the question of the “Corridor”, and a change in German-Polish relations that would guarantee “peaceful coexistence”. He announced that he would fight until the present Polish government, or some other one, agreed to that change.

The West, Italy and the USSR

Part of the speech was addressed to the powers. Hitler thanked Italy for its support but added that Germany did not intend to call for foreign help and would accomplish the task alone. This was a deft way of covering up the fact that Benito Mussolini had just refused to join the war. To France and Britain he said that Germany wanted nothing from them, that the border with France was final, and that the West Wall would remain the Reich’s western frontier for ever. He promised to respect the neutrality of states that themselves observed it.

His warmest words were reserved for Moscow. For the first time Hitler discussed before the Reichstag the pact with the USSR of 23 August. He said that Germany and Russia were governed by different doctrines, but neither side intended to export them, so there was no reason for them to remain hostile to each other. The pact “for ever excluded” the use of force between them, and the fact that the two peoples had fought each other in the World War “will not happen a second time”. He declared that he could endorse “word for word” the speech of Vyacheslav Molotov, who had defended the pact before the Supreme Soviet of the USSR on 31 August.

The first soldier of the Reich

The last part of the speech was about Hitler himself. He said that for six years he had been building up the armed forces and had spent more than 90 billion marks on them. Since he was asking sacrifices of the Germans, he himself was ready for any sacrifice: “I now wish to be nothing other than the first soldier of the German Reich. I have once more put on the uniform that was most sacred and dear to me. I shall not take it off again until victory is won, or I shall not live to see the end.”

He then set out the order of succession. Should anything happen to him, his first successor would be “Party Comrade Göring”, and after him Rudolf Hess. Should anything befall Hess as well, a “senate” would choose from among its members the successor, “the most worthy, that is, the bravest”. No such body existed. The party senate, promised for years, was never created, and the Reichsrat, the chamber representing the federal states, had been abolished in 1934. Even so, the naming of successors was one of the main news items of the day for the foreign press.

Finally Hitler said that he did not know the word “capitulation”, invoked King Frederick II of Prussia, who with a small state had survived wars against a powerful coalition, and gave his assurance that “November 1918 will never be repeated in German history”. This was a reference to the November Revolution and the Armistice of Compiègne, which Nazi propaganda portrayed as a “stab in the back” of the fighting army. He also threatened that whoever opposed this “national command” would “fall”, for “we have nothing to do with traitors”.

After the speech Göring read out the Law on the Reunification of the Free City of Danzig with the Reich, which the deputies adopted by acclamation. It confirmed the proclamation issued that morning in Gdańsk (Danzig) by Gauleiter Albert Forster, who had annexed the Free City to Germany.

Echoes

In London, after the speech, Kordt repeated to Halifax only one sentence: since the morning the Polish side had been firing, and Germany was returning fire. The British and French governments were not persuaded. That evening their ambassadors demanded that Germany halt hostilities and withdraw its troops from Poland. In the United States Eleanor Roosevelt listened to the speech on the radio at five in the morning Washington time. She later wrote in her newspaper column that she could not understand how anyone could say they were not making war on women and children while at the same time sending aircraft over cities. That same day Franklin Delano Roosevelt appealed to the belligerents not to bomb civilians.

The American correspondent William L. Shirer, who heard the speech in Berlin, later remarked that Hitler told the truth only once that day: when he announced that he would not survive defeat. According to Shirer, not one of the Germans he spoke to had noticed that their leader was saying outright that he would not bear defeat, should it come.

Significance

The speech of 1 September 1939 became the founding document of German war propaganda. Its thesis that Poland had attacked first and the Reich was merely “returning fire” was repeated in the press, newsreels and textbooks of the Third Reich. The sentence about 5.45 became one of Hitler’s most frequently quoted lines. For historians it is an example of how Hitler constructed an “alibi” for his own people, who did not want war, and for foreign audiences, whom he could no longer convince. Two days later Britain and France declared war on Germany.

Many of the pledges made at the Kroll Opera House proved empty. The promise to spare the civilian population was undone by the bombing of Warsaw in September 1939 and the later air raids on Europe’s cities. The guarantees to the neutrals were undone in 1940 by the attacks on Denmark, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg, and the assurance that Germany and Russia would never fight each other again by the war on the USSR launched on 22 June 1941. The order of succession fell apart too. Hess flew to Scotland in May 1941, and Göring, whose position as successor had been confirmed by a secret decree of 29 June 1941, was stripped of all his offices by Hitler in April 1945 when he tried to invoke that decree. Only one prediction came true. Hitler did not take off his uniform and did not survive defeat: on 30 April 1945 he committed suicide in the bunker beneath the Reich Chancellery, as the Red Army was already fighting in the centre of Berlin.