Secret Hitler speech outlining planned WW2 genocide of Poles genuine, say German historian

Records of a secret speech by Hitler ahead of Germany’s invasion of Poland, during which he outlined his genocidal aims for the “physical destruction” of “Polish men, women and children”, are genuine, says a German historian.

Writing for news magazine Der Spiegel, Norman Domeier recounts a speech given by the Nazi leader to military commanders at his mountain residence of Obersalzberg on 22 August 1939 – 10 days before the attack on Poland that began World War Two.

“Our strength consists in our speed and in our brutality,” said Hitler, according to a transcription made by General Wilhelm Canaris, who was sceptical about the invasion plans. “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.”

“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,” continued the Führer.

“Accordingly, I have placed my death’s-head formation in readiness…with orders to send to death mercilessly and without compassion, men, women and children of Polish derivation and language,” he added. “Only thus shall we gain the living space [Lebensraum] we need. Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”

The Death’s Head Units (Totenkopfverbände) were a branch of the SS responsible for administering Nazi concentration – and later death – camps.

After the speech, Canaris made his notes available to Louis Lochner, head of the Associated Press’s Berlin bureau, writes Domeier, an assistant professor at the University of Stuttgart who is researching the relationship between foreign journalists and the Third Reich.

Spiegel notes that postwar German historians were reluctant to accept the idea that the country’s military leadership were aware of Hitler’s plans for a war of annihilation. But Domeier, who has researched the history around the transcript, has concluded that it is genuine.

During the war, Poland suffered the highest relative number of deaths of any country, with six million of its people – 17% of the prewar population – killed due to military activity and crimes against humanity.

The vast majority of those were civilians, and around half were Polish Jews. However, ethnic Poles were also a target for physical annihilation by Nazi Germany. As well as the decimation of the population, Polish cities and the country’s cultural heritage were deliberately destroyed by the occupiers.

Poland’s current government argues that Germany still owes reparations – potentially hundreds of billions of dollars – for the destruction it wrought during the war. But Berlin says that the issue has already been legally settled.

After the war, Lochner made the transcript of Hitler’s Obersalzberg speech available to the Nuremberg Trial, though refused to testify himself as it would conflict with his function as a reporter on the trial, writes Domeier.

Main image credit: German Federal Archives/Wikimedia Commons (under CC BY-SA 3.0 DE)

Daniel Tilles

Daniel Tilles is editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland. He has written on Polish affairs for a wide range of publications, including Foreign Policy, POLITICO Europe, EUobserver and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.