About the hour-and-a-half-long speech the Reichsführer gave on the night of October 6 to the assembled Reichsleiters and Gauleiters, I don’t have much to say. This speech is less well known than the one, almost twice as long, he read on October 4 to his Obergruppenführers and HSSPFs; but aside from a few differences due to the nature of the respective audiences, and the less informal, less sardonic, less colloquial tone of the second speech, the Reichsführer said essentially the same thing. Thanks to the chance survival of archives, and the victors’ justice, these speeches have become famous far beyond the closed circles for which they were intended; you won’t find a book on the SS, the Reichsführer, or the destruction of the Jews in which they aren’t cited; if their content interests you, you can easily consult them, in several languages; the October 4 speech was entered as evidence in the Nuremberg trials, under document number 1919-PS (it was obviously in this form that I was finally able to study it in detail, after the war, although I learned its general import in Posen itself); moreover, it was recorded, either on a wax disk or on a red oxide magnetic tape—the historians aren’t in agreement, and on this point I cannot enlighten them, not having been present at that speech, but whatever the case the recording has survived and, if you feel so inclined, you can listen to it, and thus hear for yourself the Reichsführer’s monotone, pedantic, didactic, precise voice, a little more urgent when he waxes ironic; there are even, though rarely, moments of anger, especially obvious, in hindsight, when he comes to subjects over which he must have felt he had little control—the widespread corruption, for instance, which he also spoke about on the sixth to the regime’s dignitaries, but on which he insisted especially, as I heard at the time from Brandt, during his speech to the Gruppenführers given on the fourth. If these speeches have entered history, it’s not of course because of all that, but because in this speech the Reichsführer, with a frankness he has never to my knowledge equaled either before or since, with frankness thus and in a manner that could even be called crude, outlined the program of the destruction of the Jews. Even I, when I heard it on October 6, didn’t at first believe my ears, the hall was full, the sumptuous Golden Hall in the castle at Posen, I was in the very back, behind about fifty Gauleiters and leaders of the Party, not to mention a few industrialists, two service chiefs, and three (or maybe two) ministers of the Reich; and I found it, considering the secrecy rules we were bound to, truly shocking, almost indecent, and at the beginning, it made me very ill at ease, and I was certainly not the only one, I could see Gauleiters sigh and mop their foreheads or necks, it wasn’t that they were learning something new, no, everyone, in that great hall with its subdued lighting must have been in the know, even though some of them, until then, probably hadn’t had to think the thing through to the end, to discern its full extent, to think, for instance, about the women and children, and that’s probably why the Reichsführer insisted on this point, far more, moreover, to the Reichsleiters and Gauleiters than to his Gruppenführers, who couldn’t in any case have had any illusions, which is probably why he insisted that, yes, we were indeed killing the women and the children too, so as not to let any ambiguity linger, and that’s precisely what was so uncomfortable, that total absence, for once, of ambiguity, and it was as if he were violating an unwritten rule, even stronger than his own rules he decreed for his subordinates, his
Sprachregelungen already absolutely strict, the rule of tact perhaps, that tact he spoke of in his first speech, evoking it in the context of the execution of Röhm and his SA comrades, a kind of natural tact that is alive in us, thank God, he said, a consequence of this tact due to which we have never spoken about it among ourselves, but perhaps it was also a matter of something other than the question of that tact and of those rules, and that’s when I began to understand, I think, the profound reason for these declarations, and also why the dignitaries sighed and sweated so much, for they too, like me, were beginning to understand, to understand that it wasn’t by chance that the Reichsführer, in the beginning of the fifth year of the war, was thus openly referring to the destruction of the Jews before them, without euphemisms, without winks, with simple and brutal words like