Hitler's speech of 30 January 1942

On 30 January 1942, the ninth anniversary of his appointment as Chancellor, Adolf Hitler spoke in Berlin’s Sportpalast, a large arena that had for years served the NSDAP and the Gauleiter of Berlin, Joseph Goebbels, as a platform for rallies. It was his first major public appearance since December 1941, when Germany had declared war on the United States and the Soviet counter-offensive had begun outside Moscow. The speech was broadcast on the radio and printed in the press the following day. Hitler spoke about the history of the movement and the First World War, mocked the leaders of the enemy powers, explained the winter crisis on the Eastern Front and promised that 1942 would bring “great victories”. In the middle of the speech he repeated the threat against the Jews that he presented as his “prophecy”.

Popular summaries describe the speech accurately: Hitler threatened the Jews of the world with annihilation and blamed the weather for the failure of the offensive in the Soviet Union. It need only be added that by then the threat was no longer a forecast of the future. As Hitler spoke, the Germans had for months been murdering Jews on a massive scale in the East, since December they had been killing them with gas at Chełmno on the Ner, and ten days earlier Reich officials had agreed at the Wannsee Conference on the organisation of the “Final Solution” throughout Europe.

The “prophecy”

On 30 January 1939, the sixth anniversary of his taking power, Hitler had declared in the Reichstag that if international Jewish financiers in Europe and beyond succeeded once more in plunging the nations into a world war, the result would not be the Bolshevisation of the earth and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe. From then on he returned to these words many times, both in public and among his closest associates. According to Goebbels’s notes, he recalled them to the party leaders on 12 December 1941, saying that the world war had come and that the annihilation of the Jews must be its “inevitable consequence”.

In the Sportpalast he said that the Germans were aware that this war could end only with either the Aryan peoples being exterminated or Jewry disappearing from Europe. He claimed that as early as 1 September 1939 he had told the German Reichstag that the war would not end as the Jews imagined, with the extermination of the European Aryan peoples, but that its result would be the annihilation of Jewry. For the first time, he went on, it would not only be others who bled, but for the first time the genuine old Jewish law would be applied: “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth!” He added that the further the war spread, the further antisemitism would spread too, that it would “find nourishment in every prisoner-of-war camp and in every family”, and that the hour would come when “the most evil world enemy of all time” would have played out its role “for at least a thousand years”.

The date in this passage is wrong. He had uttered the threat on 30 January 1939, not on 1 September, when in the Kroll Opera House he announced the war with Poland and did not repeat it. Hitler consistently shifted this date in all his later speeches. Historians believe he did so deliberately: in this way he tied the fate of the Jews to the outbreak of the war and presented their murder as a response to a war they had supposedly started.

The frost, not the Russians

The second part of the speech, which listeners followed far more closely, concerned the Eastern Front. Since 19 December Hitler had personally commanded the Army, and the Soviet counter-offensive outside Moscow had thrown Army Group Centre back hundreds of kilometres; in January the Red Army pressed on west of the capital. In the Sportpalast Hitler said that it was not the Russians who had forced the Germans onto the defensive, but “38, 40, 42 and in places 45 degrees of frost”, in which an army unused to it could fight as poorly as in the worst heat of the desert. He assured his audience that “the worst is behind us”, that the Russians were gaining only “ruins” and a few kilometres at the cost of enormous losses, and that in spring, when the ground hardened and new weapons arrived, the hour would come to avenge those who had fallen as “lonely victims of the cold”. He took upon himself responsibility for the switch “from offensive war to defence” and presented it as proof of his closeness to the soldiers.

He also thanked the Germans for the collection of warm clothing announced by Goebbels on 20 December, calling it a “plebiscite” and “true democracy”: people had given up furs, gloves and pullovers because “the humblest infantryman is more important than the most costly fur”. He did not mention that in the General Government furs for the front were being taken from Jews on pain of death. His admission that the winter equipment prepared in advance had “not been sufficient” was one of the few points at which he spoke of mistakes, though even here he blamed the weather rather than the decisions of the command.

Among the good news was a fresh gain in Africa: Hitler announced with satisfaction that “since yesterday” it had been known that Colonel General Erwin Rommel, at the very moment the British believed him beaten, had turned and struck again; the day before, Rommel had retaken Benghazi. Hitler also praised Japan, which, “instead of dallying for long with this mendacious nation” – the Americans – “had gone straight into battle”, and declared that now that war had been declared on the United States, German U-boats could at last operate “on all the oceans of the world”.

Churchill and Roosevelt

Hitler devoted a large part of the speech to the leaders of the states he was fighting. He called Winston Churchill a “chatterbox and drunkard”, a “mendacious character” and a “first-class idler”, who unlike himself had created nothing and would go down in history only as the “destroyer of an empire”. He claimed that he had repeatedly offered Britain peace, but that Churchill had “wanted war”, backed by the “paying forces of international Jewry”. He portrayed Franklin Delano Roosevelt as an “old Freemason” trying to save his bankrupt economy through war, and mocked his announcement of a new world economic order. The same motifs had already appeared in the speech of 11 December in which Hitler declared war on the United States: in this picture the war was the work of Jewish conspirators and their Anglo-Saxon tools, while Germany, Italy and Japan, “the three great have-not nations”, were defending themselves against their world domination.

Reception

The words about the Jews were repeated by the entire press of the Reich. According to the reports of the SS Security Service (SD) on the public mood, they were understood to mean that “the Führer’s struggle against the Jews will be waged mercilessly to the end” and that soon the last Jews would be driven from European soil. The same reports indicate, however, that listeners responded more keenly to the passages about the Eastern Front, the frost and supplies for the soldiers than to the threats against the Jews. In the Warsaw Ghetto the diarist Chaim Aron Kaplan wrote on 2 February 1942 that Hitler had boasted of fulfilling his prophecy, and added: “This process has already begun and will continue until it reaches its end.”

Historians point out that from the autumn of 1941 Nazi propaganda avoided describing specific measures against the Jews, such as deportations, and substituted for them precisely this vague “prophecy”. For the initiated it confirmed that Hitler stood behind what was happening in the East; for the rest of society it was a threat phrased so that everyone could decide for themselves how much of it they wished to understand. Peter Longerich stresses that Hitler wanted in this way to bind the fate of the Jews inseparably to the course of the war.

Place in the war

In 1942 Hitler invoked the “prophecy” in public several more times: in a proclamation read out on 24 February, in a speech in the Sportpalast on 30 September, when he declared that the Jews in Germany who had once laughed at him would “stop laughing”, and on 8 November in Munich. His words went hand in hand with deeds. In the spring of 1942 the extermination camps at Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka began operating; from the summer, transports from all over Europe went to Auschwitz-Birkenau; and in the course of 1942 more Jews were murdered than in any other year of the war. On 17 December 1942 the Allied governments, in a joint declaration, condemned “Hitler’s oft-repeated intention to exterminate the Jewish people in Europe”. The winter crisis that Hitler had blamed on the frost in the Sportpalast passed, but the spring victories he had promised did not bring the war to an end: in the summer of 1942 the Wehrmacht set off for the Caucasus and Stalingrad, where in the winter of 1942–1943 it suffered defeat.