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Modest Negotiator. "National Socialism is not a phenomenon which has grown up in Germany with the malicious intent of thwarting League efforts at revision, but a movement which arose because for fifteen years the most natural human and social rights of a great nation had been suppressed and denied redress.
"And I personally take exception at seeing foreign statesmen stand up and call me guilty of having broken my word because I have now put these revisions through.
"On the contrary, I pledged my sacred word to the German people to do away with the Treaty of Versailles and to re-tore to them their natural and vital rights as a great nation.
"The extent to which I am securing these vital rights is modest.
"This I ask: If forty-six million Englishmen claim the right to rule over forty million square kilometers of the earth, it cannot be wrong for eighty-two million Germans to demand the right to live on 800,000 square kilometers, to till their fields and to follow their trades and callings, and if they further demand the restitution of those colonial possessions which formerly were their property, which they had not taken away from anybody by robbery or war but honestly acquired by purchase, exchange and treaties. Moreover, in all my demands, I always first tried to obtain revisions by way of negotiation. . . ."
"Thanks to Mr. Stalin." Next Herr Hitler went on to "point out some facts that cannot be refuted by the scribblings of international press liars." "It has . . . been proved that only as an entity is this central European space capable of existence, and whoever breaks up that entity commits a crime against millions of people," declared Herr Hitler. If people did not like the way a "tolerable order of things was established in Central Europe," then Herr Hitler could only answer that it was not the "method but the useful result that counts"—i.e., that the end justifies the means. But "thanks to Mr. Stalin," Germany and Russia had now restored that entity. They were going to do more. Not only in Central Europe but to the "south and east" the Communazis intended to perform further cooperative works, including "reestablishment and reorganization of economic life," and, in an unspecified manner, shift some ethnographic groups—possibly German Jews to central Poland and "splinters" of "German nationality" back into the Reich. This "south and east" business was the part of the speech that caused apprehensive Italians to grumble: "Our Duce could have said it better" (see p. 43).