Speech by Heinrich Himmler, 21 June 1934

On 21 June 1944 Reichsführer SS and Minister of Interior Heinrich Himmler delivered a speech at Obersalzburg before his SS officers on the occasion of the summer solstice. Explicitly mentioning earlier Nazi celebrations of this day, Himmler openly talked about the "Final Solution" and the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto in 1943 to his select SS audience of the already initiated. Nearly nine months earlier in October 1943, Himmler had given a similar speech in his famous Posen address to SS-Gruppenführer about the German annihilation of European Jews. Himmler generally spoke from notes and "usually recorded his talks on red oxide tape wider than what is used today." The historian Richard Breitman described Himmler's speaking style: “His voice was of middle range-neither deep nor high-pitched. He spoke clearly, deliberately, and emphatically, but for the most part dispassionately, much like a schoolmaster reviewing a long and somewhat complicated lesson." (Richard Breitman, The Architect of Genocide: Himmler and the Final Solution [New York: Knopf, 1991], 242.)

The official version of Himmler's speech was transcribed for possible use at the Nuremberg trials as Document NG-4977, and excerpts from the twenty-eight phonograph records were typed in German and translated into English. The text of the speech is not complete, and the end of this speech is missing. The speech was found in Alfred Rosenberg's files. The partial transcript of these records is located in the microfilm collections of captured German records in Washington, D.C., National Archives, T-1139, Roll 50, frames 550-560. The following excerpts from Himmler's text were transcribed from records 1 and 11–13.

Translation of Extracts of Document NG-4977 Office of Chief of Counsel for War Crimes Himmler Speech of 21 June 1944

[Record No. 1]

Gentlemen, on this very day, 21 June, in peacetime all over Germany the fires of the sun festival were burning.

Everywhere the sun festival was celebrated by the youth, the entire Movement, the SS, and the SA. If one flew across Germany in 1933 and 1934, at the time we started that custom, one could see actual traces of fire extending from North to South, and East to West. In wartime we cannot celebrate the sun festival. We can only remember that day. Our ancestors always considered this an important festival. And I am very pleased, gentlemen, that you will be able to celebrate this very festival today and tomorrow, the 21st and 22nd, on top of a mountain, the Obersalzburg, where you are guests of your supreme warlord. Let me transmit some of my thoughts to you, and tell you something about my field of work....

[Record No. 11]

It became necessary to solve another important question. It was the most terrible task and the most terrible order which could have been given to any organization: the order to solve the Jewish question. Let me again say the following in our circle, in all frankness, and in a few sentences: it is a good time that we had the toughness to exterminate the Jews in our sphere. Don't ask how difficult it was. But try as soldiers, try, I might almost say, to understand how difficult it is to execute such an order. If you investigate the problem carefully, only as soldiers thinking for Germany, you must also draw the logical conclusion that the order was necessary! Even the bombing attacks could not have been withstood, if we had to cope with the Jewish population in the cities. It is my firm conviction that the front near Lemberg [Lvov], in the Government General, could not have been held, if the big ghettos had still existed at Lemberg, Krakow, Lublin, and Warsaw.

The final date was the summer of 1943, when, after five weeks of street fighting, we cleared the last big ghetto at Warsaw consisting of—I don't mind giving the figures— 500,000 Jews. However sealed to the outside these ghettos may have been, they were the center of all gangs and partisan movements. Moreover, they contaminated the moral of the rear echelons. I am using the word "rear echelon"

(Etappe) although it has not been mentioned during the war. I think it should be used more often. . . .

[Record No. 12]

All rear units may well be called "Etappe," although they don't like to hear that term. After all, these units are necessary, but the moment they settle down, they start overfeeding and are suffocated by their own abundance, and during retreats or replacement movements they behave like pigs. Unfortunately, I have been able to observe so many examples, where good men-only speaking of my own ranks, my own men, the SS and Police-who guarded ghettos, sooner or later let themselves be bribed, accepted money, fell victim to the natural seduction and blackmail of these attractive Jewish women, unless they had a very strong character. I said before, I was merciless in every case of such men, and had them tried.—I told them: Firstly to carry on ruthlessly with this cleansing process. For if we find it hard, then let us think of the children who are dying as a result of the bombing terror-which anyway is organized by the Jews-before they even have a chance to live. We are justified in doing that, and we must do that, and if anyone comes along and says—and that thought is often expressed "Well, you know, I understand very well that you are killing grown-up Jews, but how can you kill women and children!" Then I say this: "These children will grow up one day. Do we want to be such cads as to say: No, no, no-we are too weak to do that, but let our children deal with them, let them fight it out? So that this Jewish hatred which has started in children but will grow when they grow up in revenge will become violent against our children and grandchildren, so that our children have to solve the problem again—but at a time when Adolf Hitler no

longer lives?" No, we cannot justify that. That would have been cowardly, and that is why we preferred reverting to the thought I stated before. I explained how the Jew contaminates others wholesale from his centers, how I experiencd such examples in my own ranks here and there. I told my men: "Taking only one mark and enriching yourselves is inexcusable, it is unclean."...

[Record No. 13]

"Whether it's one mark or a piece of jewelry it will cost you your life." We are not concerned with the values, it's cleanliness and the principle, and let me tell you this. You just cannot imagine the amount of gold heaped together, I never saw anything like it in my life. All these things are incomprehensible, unless one saw them. Heaps of gold, American gold coins, Austrian Kronen coins, German twenty and ten mark coins, Russian Roubles, huge, huge heaps over which one cannot see, when the gold was collected from the people of only one ghetto. It is incomprehensible. As I said, we had house to house fighting in Warsaw for five weeks, and we cleared out 700 bunkers. These were bunkers, which were often constructed in two rows on top of each other, cellar bunkers. No sooner had we finished with one block of houses, they again suddenly appeared from behind. The Jew always has catacombs, passages, and canals. This is his age-old system, as an [sic] ancient nomads. As I said, it was high time and the last moment. With a million Jews in our rear don't think it would have been so easy to hold the front in the Government General. Let me now conclude this question of internal security, about the development of which I told you a few things. In spite of seven million foreigners and in spite of the bombing terror we can speak of absolute internal security of the Reich....