Thursday, December 15, 2016

Nazi Christmas Speech for Wounded Soldiers (1944)

The Nazis developed a large array of rituals and ceremonies.  There is a fair amount of material on them on the GPA.

Today I’m adding a model speech used by party leaders all over Germany to give to wounded soldiers for Christmas 1944.  The war situation was grim by then, but party leaders are told to assure soldiers that victory will be theirs.


The speech comes from Die neue Gemeinschaft, a periodical that provided party leaders with material to use on ceremonial occasions.  There were a lot of those.  Besides traditional holidays like Easter and Christmas, there were the party holidays (e.g., Hitler’s birthday, the anniversary of the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch), as well as Nazi rituals of birth, coming of age, marriage, and death.

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