OBERSALZBERG SPEECH (22 AUGUST 1939)

            On this date, 22 August 1939, Adolf Hitler gave a speech to his Wehrmacht Commanders in Oberslazberg. I will post information about this speech from Wikipedia and other links. 

  

Our strength lies in our intensive attacks and our barbarity...After all, who today remembers the genocide of the Armenians? – Adolf Hitler

[PHOTO SOURCE: http://www.azquotes.com/quote/913179]

The Obersalzberg Speech is a speech given by Adolf Hitler to Wehrmacht commanders at his Obersalzberg home on 22 August 1939, a week before the German invasion of Poland. The speech details, in particular, the pending German invasion of Poland and a planned extermination of Poles. It shows Hitler's knowledge of the extermination and his intention to carry out the said genocide in a planned manner.

Origin of the document

Three documents were grouped together during Nuremberg Trials which contained Hitler's speech on 22 August 1939 (1014-PS, 798-PS, and L-3,) and only the document L-3 contained the Armenian quote. Documents 1014-PS and 798-PS were captured by the United States forces inside the OKW headquarters but these documents did not contain the Armenian quote. On May 16, 1946, during the Nurnberg War Tribunals, a counsel for one of the defendants, Dr. Walter Siemers requested from the president of the trial to strike out the document 1014-PS, but his request was rejected by the president. Document L-3 was brought to the court by an American journalist, Louis P. Lochner.

According to Louis P. Lochner, while stationed in Berlin he received a copy of a speech by Hitler from his "informant", which he published (in English translation) in his book What About Germany? (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1942) as being indicative of Hitler's desire to conquer the world. In 1945, Lochner handed over a transcript of the German document he had received to the prosecution at the Nuremberg trials, where it was labeled L-3. Hence it is known as the L-3 document. The speech is also found in a footnote to notes about a speech Hitler held in Obersalzberg on 22 August 1939 that were published in the German Foreign Policy documents When asked in the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal who his source was, Lochner said this was a German called "Herr Maasz" but gave vague information about him.

The Times of London quoted from Lochner's version in an unsigned article titled The War Route of the Nazi Germany on 24 November 1945. The article stated that it had been brought forward by the prosecutor on 23 November 1945, as evidence. However, according to the Akten zur deutschen auswärtigen Politik (ser. D, vol. 7, 1961), the document was not introduced as evidence before the International Military Tribunal for undisclosed reasons and is not included in the official publication of the documents in evidence. Two other documents containing minutes of Hitler's Obersalzberg speech(es) had been found among the seized German documents and were introduced as evidence, both omitting the Armenian quote.

In Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression (colloquially also known as "the Red Set"), a collection of documents relating to the Nuremberg trials prepared by the prosecutorial team, the editors describe the relation between the documents concerned as follows:

Just one week prior to the launching of the attack on Poland, Hitler made an address to his chief military commanders, at Obersalzberg, on 22 August 1939. [Three reports of this meeting are available: (L-3; 798-PS and 1014-PS). The first of the three documents (L-3) was obtained through an American newspaperman, and purported to be original minutes of the Obersalzberg meeting, transmitted to the newspaperman by some other person. There was no proof of actual delivery to the intermediary by the person who took the notes. That document (L-3) therefore, merely served as an incentive to search for something better. The result was that two other documents (798-PS) and (1014-PS) were discovered in the OKW files at Flensberg [sic]. These two documents indicate that Hitler on that day made two speeches, one apparently in the morning and one in the afternoon. Comparison of those two documents with the first document (L-3) led to the conclusion that the first document was a slightly garbled merger of the two speeches, and therefore was not relied upon.]

German and English wording

The third paragraph of the L-3 document is as follows:

Unsere Stärke ist unsere Schnelligkeit und unsere Brutalität. Dschingis Khan hat Millionen Frauen und Kinder in den Tod gejagt, bewußt und fröhlichen Herzens. Die Geschichte sieht in ihm nur den großen Staatengründer. Was die schwache westeuropäische Zivilisation über mich behauptet, ist gleichgültig. Ich habe den Befehl gegeben – und ich lasse jeden füsilieren, der auch nur ein Wort der Kritik äußert – daß das Kriegsziel nicht im Erreichen von bestimmten Linien, sondern in der physischen Vernichtung des Gegners besteht. So habe ich, einstweilen nur im Osten, meine Totenkopfverbände bereitgestellt mit dem Befehl, unbarmherzig und mitleidslos Mann, Weib und Kind polnischer Abstammung und Sprache in den Tod zu schicken. Nur so gewinnen wir den Lebensraum, den wir brauchen. Wer redet heute noch von der Vernichtung der Armenier?

The above is a verbatim rendering of that paragraph, as included in a footnote in the Akten zur deutschen auswärtigen Politik (ser. D, vol. 7, 1961, p. 193).

In his book What about Germany?, Lochner offered the following English translation of the document then in his possession:

Our strength consists in our speed and in our brutality. Genghis Khan led millions of women and children to slaughter – with premeditation and a happy heart. History sees in him solely the founder of a state. It’s a matter of indifference to me what a weak western European civilization will say about me. I have issued the command – and I’ll have anybody who utters but one word of criticism executed by a firing squad – that our war aim does not consist in reaching certain lines, but in the physical destruction of the enemy. Accordingly, I have placed my death-head formation in readiness – for the present only in the East – with orders to them to send to death mercilessly and without compassion, men, women, and children of Polish derivation and language. Only thus shall we gain the living space (Lebensraum) which we need. Who, after all, speaks to-day of the annihilation of the Armenians?

The Armenian quote

Hitler's so-called Armenian quote ("Who still talks of the extermination of the Armenians nowadays") is a rhetorical question he used to convince hesitant Nazis that if a country is militarily strong and united, it can commit genocide with impunity. The key area of contention regarding the Armenian quote is a reference to the Armenian Genocide, referencing the ethnic extermination of Armenians during World War I in the Ottoman Empire, where an estimated one to one-and-a-half million ethnic Armenians were killed by Turks. The quote is now inscribed on one of the walls of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. In 2009 the International Association of Genocide Scholars used the quote in a letter to Barack Obama related to the Armenian Genocide recognition. When the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal got hold of the first note of the speech, named "L-3", they rejected its use as evidence because the American newspaperman that provided the document refused to disclose the source.

Richard Albrecht (de), a German social researcher and political scientist, published a three-volume study (2006–08) on 20th century genocides that contained the document of the original German version of the Armenian quote (the L-3 text) for the first time. The book is summarized as "When discussing, and applying, all relevant features scholarly accepted as leading principles of classifying documents as authentic, the author not only works out that the L-3-document as translated and brought in a few days later at 25 August 1939, by the US-newspaper man Louis P. Lochner (1887–1975) from Associated Press, and first published in 1942, whenever compared with any other version of Hitler's speech – above all the Nuremberg-documents 798-PS, 1014 PS, and Raeder-27, as produced by a dubious witness after realising the L-3-version, too – this version must be regarded as the one which most likely sums up and expresses what Hitler said – for what Hitler really said in his notorious second speech was only written down simultaneously during his speech by one of his auditors: Wilhelm Canaris (1887–1945), at that time chief of the military secret service within the Third Reich".

Dr. Kevork B. Bardakjian, an expert in Armenian studies, also argues that the L-3 document originates in the notes secretly taken by Wilhelm Canaris during the meeting of 22 August 1939:

To conclude, although its author is unknown, L-3 and its unsigned counterparts 798-PS and 1014-PS originate from the notes Wilhelm Canaris took personally as Hitler spoke on 22 August 1939. ... Although not an “official” record, L-3 is a genuine document and is as sound as the other evidence submitted at Nuremberg.

According to German historian Winfried Baumgart, among the documents of Hitler's speech on 22 August 1938, 1014-PS is the one that contains the original notes taken that day by Wilhelm Canaris, the Head of Military Intelligence during the Third Reich. Therefore, Baumgart argues that he document 1014-PS, which does not contain the Armenian quote, is superior to the other documents of Hitler's speech including L-3 which is the only source of the Armenian quote.

Historian Vahakn N. Dadrian has argued that Winfried Baumgart's suggestion that the reference to the Armenians in Hitler's speech was an editorial coloring up by the editors of the reports is erroneous.^:408 At the same time in 1968, de:Edouard Calic, a Yugloslav-Italian historian published a book called Ohne Maske, which claimed to unveil two newly uncovered confidential interviews with Hitler in 1931 containing the Armenian quote. Historians Hugh Trevor-Roper and Hans Mommsen judged Calic's book to be a forgery.

Abram L. Sachar, an Jewish-American historian, founding president of Brandeis University and former leader of B'nai Brith Hillel Society, wrote: ...the genocide was cited approvingly twenty-five years later by the Fuehrer...who found the Armenian 'solution' an instructive precedent. This is corroborated by David Matas, a Canadian expert on international law and senior legal counsel of B'nai Brith Canada. Richard Lichtheim (ru), one of the German Jews who, as a young leader of the Zionist movement, feverishly negotiated with Ittihadist leaders in wartime Turkey, described the cold-bloodedly planned extermination of over one million Armenians (kaltblutig durchdacht) as an act of perpetration akin to Hitler's crusade of destruction against the Jews in the 1940-1942 period.^:409

It is also mentioned that the German periodical Die Zeit (Hamburg) mentioned in 1984 that Hitler must have known exactly about the Armenian case of Genocide because one of his closest collaborators at the early stages of the National Socialist movement was Dr. Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter, i.e. Germany's former Vice Consul at Erzurum and later Co-Commander of a joint Turko-German Expeditionary guerilla force whose awful reports on the massacre of the Armenians are preserved. The periodical went even one step further asserting that the skills used in the Armenian episode served as an example for Hitler's similar initiative against the Jews. Scheubner, in one of his WWI reports to his ambassador characterized the city-dwelling Armenians as these Jews of the Orient, these wily businessmen (gerissene Handelsleute).^:411-412

According to Heath Lowry, a notorious Genocide denier and former Professor of Ottoman and Modern Turkish Studies at Princeton University, a close examination of the quotation reveals that "there is no historical basis for attributing such a statement to Hitler". German Conservative historian Andreas Hillgruber, once mentioned in 1976 about the L-3 document that the forgery is established beyond doubt (Die Fälschung steht zweifelsfrei fest).

According to Margaret L. Anderson, Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley, "we have no reason to doubt the remark is genuine, both attack and defense obscure an obvious reality" that the Armenian Genocide has achieved "iconic status... as the apex of horrors imaginable in 1939," and that Hitler used it to persuade the German military that committing genocide excited a great deal of "talk" but no serious consequences for a nation that perpetrates genocide.

According to Christopher Browning, American historian of the Holocaust, L-3 document, which contains the Armenian quote, is an "apocalyptic" version of Hitler's speech that day which was purposefully leaked to the British in order to gain their support to Poland.

  

Adolf Hitler on the Obersalzberg Speech (22 August 1939)

INTERNET SOURCE: http://www.armenian-genocide.org/hitler.html

"Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?"

---

[August 22, 1939] 

My decision to attack Poland was arrived at last spring. Originally, I feared that the political constellation would compel me to strike simultaneously at England, Russia, France, and Poland. Even this risk would have had to be taken. 

Ever since the autumn of 1938, and because I realized that Japan would not join us unconditionally and that Mussolini is threatened by that nit-wit of a king and the treasonable scoundrel of a crown prince, I decided to go with Stalin. 

In the last analysis, there are only three great statesmen in the world, Stalin, I, and Mussolini. Mussolini is the weakest, for he has been unable to break the power of either the crown or the church. Stalin and I are the only ones who envisage the future and nothing but the future. Accordingly, I shall in a few weeks stretch out my hand to Stalin at the common German-Russian frontier and undertake the redistribution of the world with him. 

Our strength consists in our speed and in our brutality. Genghis Khan led millions of women and children to slaughter -- with premeditation and a happy heart. History sees in him solely the founder of a state. It's a matter of indifference to me what a weak western European civilization will say about me. 

I have issued the command -- and I'll have anybody who utters but one word of criticism executed by a firing squad -- that our war aim does not consist in reaching certain lines, but in the physical destruction of the enemy. Accordingly, I have placed my death-head formations in readiness -- for the present only in the East -- with orders to them to send to death mercilessly and without compassion, men, women, and children of Polish derivation and language. Only thus shall we gain the living space (Lebensraum) which we need. Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians? 

Kevork B. Bardakjian, Hitler and the Armenian Genocide (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Zoryan Institute, 1985).

The text above is the English version of the German document handed to Louis P. Lochner in Berlin. It first appeared in Lochner's What About Germany? (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1942), pp. 1-4. The Nuremberg Tribunal later identified the document as L-3 or Exhibit USA-28. Two other versions of the same document appear in Appendices II and III. For the German original cf. Akten zur Deutschen Auswartigen Politik 1918-1945, Serie D, Band VII, (Baden-Baden, 1956), pp. 171-172.