Adolf Hitler: Proclamation to the German People

At 10:00 on the evening of February 1, 1933, Adolf Hitler delivered a Proclamation to the German People, his first address as the nation’s chancellor. In his Proclamation to the German People, the Volk, Hitler enunciated themes that had obsessed him for more than a decade. His expressed goal was to revive the German nation and lead it back to the stature it had once enjoyed.

Hitler had taken the oath of office at about noon on January 30. The office of chancellor, called Reichskanzler in German, was (and still is) roughly equivalent to that of prime minister. At the time, the chancellor of Germany was appointed by the president and was responsible to the German parliament, the Reichstag. During the Weimar Republic, the name given to the German government from 1919 to 1933, the chancellor had been a weak figure, often functioning as little more than the head of the political party in power. Hitler, however, would use the office to seize absolute power in Germany, and historians generally regard his appointment as chancellor as the start of the Third Reich, which would remain in power as an absolute dictatorship until the end of World War II in 1945. The word Reich is generally translated as “empire” or “state.” The First Reich was the period of the Holy Roman Empire, which united the Germanic lands and others in central Europe from 962 to 1806. The Second Reich refers to the period from 1871 to 1919 and to the polity that encompassed the regions of Prussia and Brandenburg.

In his Proclamation to the German People, Hitler drew the nation’s attention to the social and economic disarray and the humiliation it had suffered as a result of its defeat in World War I and the consequent Treaty of Versailles. He blamed the nation’s ills on Communists and vowed that the government would work to improve the plight of the German farmer and the German industrial worker. He expressed his resolve to recreate a spirit of unity in the German people by sweeping away the political divisions of the Weimar Republic.