Hitler and the Autobahn – these belong together in the collective memory of the Germans. Hitler made sure of this. It is September 23, 1933: the groundbreaking ceremony for the first section of the Autobahn between Frankfurt and Darmstadt. Hitler stages this as a solemn national ceremony. The recording begins seemingly harmlessly with a description of beautiful summer meadows, continues with shouts of Sieg Heil and culminates in an insightful speech by Adolf Hitler.
prehistory
Hitler did not invent the Autobahn; plans for such a highway existed as early as the 1920s: a road from Hamburg to Basel. And Konrad Adenauer, as mayor of Cologne, opened a four-lane, intersection-free road between Cologne and Bonn as early as 1932.
If these plans and advance payments had not been made, Hitler would not have been able to break ground on the first Reichsautobahn just nine months after taking power.
Hitler’s speech
Hitler’s speech is revealing in several ways. It shows a Chancellor who speaks calmly and does not shout, who has only been in office for half a year but is aware of his power. He addresses this power in the context of his origins as a simple worker:
Adolf Hitler
“During my struggle for power in Germany, my workers, I was often attacked by those who claimed to represent workers’ interests, with reference to my origins. At that time, people used to say: What does the former construction worker or painter actually want?”
The “understanding” that he derives from this goes so far as to warn the workers about the harsh winters in which they must not despair, whereupon the audience confirms him with a Sieg Heil greeting. “Then you will ensure that your increased consumer power will give hundreds of thousands of others work in factories and workshops. It is our goal to slowly increase the consumer power of the masses.”
From the beginning, Hitler’s construction of the autobahn was intended to stimulate the economy.
Adolf Hitler
“Today we are at the beginning of a huge task. Its importance not only for the German transport system, but also in the broadest sense for the German economy, will only be fully appreciated in later decades.”
Historians are divided as to whether the project, 6,400 kilometers of these “new major roads,” was primarily intended to prepare for war, as many of Hitler’s economic programs were. He was able to rely on the extreme unemployment at the time he came to power and in this speech on the highway he blames the “most severe hardship and the deepest misfortune” not on the economic crisis, but on the “last 15 years” – i.e. the Weimar Republic.
Adolf Hitler
“I see the most effective way to bring the German people back into the process of work as being to first get the German economy going again through great monumental work somewhere.”
Later in the speech he talks about his “ethnic” ideas, about the “process of forging our people together internally”, but does not resort to any offensive language against population groups that he would exclude from it. He calls for a strong international position for Germany, which the construction of the motorway symbolises, namely as a “milestone […] for the construction of the German national community, a community that will give us as a people and as a state what we are entitled to demand and ask for in this world.”
The first groundbreaking ceremony in 1933 as a postcard or postal stationery (ca. 1935)
IMAGO
IMAGE / Archive
After the end of the speech, the reporter describes how Hitler symbolically gets to work with a spade and cart.
About recording technology
Sound recording technology was so advanced at the time that speeches and reports could be recorded and stored in good quality in the open air. The National Socialists appreciated this technical breakthrough, which gave radio a proximity to reality that it had not previously possessed, and in the summer of 1933 they had already dismantled the main parts of the federal broadcasting system in Germany and placed everything under the control of the Propaganda Ministry. This report and subsequent speech also served as radio propaganda.
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Reporter: Paul Laven
Source: German Broadcasting Archive
