Propaganda and Premonitions of the Future

As was typical of National Socialist propaganda in general, Hitler’s speech at the end of Triumph of the Will said little explicitly about the party’s specific political views or its plans for Germany. There was no party platform laid out as one would expect to see at, for example, an American party convention. The speech is evidence, however, of the sort of material the party presented to appeal to Germans and party members, and contains some ominous clues about Germany’s future.
Germany in 1934 had seen 20 years of world war, civil war, political strife, and economic depression. Even a few relatively stable years in the 1920s had not been so for most Germans. The NSDAP played upon a general longing for stability both in its rise to power and maintenance of it. Hitler tried hard in his speech to give the impression that the Nazi party was there to stay. This was both an appeal to Germans who had seen a multitude of different ruling groups over the past 20 years, as well as a warning against those thinking of challenging the party’s dominance. Hitler told the people that this Reich would last one thousand years, not a dozen years like the Weimar Republic, nor 48 years like the Wilhelmian Reich, but a full 1000. The party would assure its power in perpetuity, and when the older members grew weak, the younger would take over.
Additionally, Hitler’s speech contained a few clues about his plans for Germany, even if he did not state these plans explicitly. In the speech, Hitler proclaimed his views about race. If one had pure blood and led the nation, he said, that power would last forever. More importantly, the movement of the party to power was led by the supposedly racially best of the German nation. Obviously, National Socialist ideology was strictly racist. Since it was Hitler’s plan that all Germans become national socialists, if not party members, then there seems to be no room in Hitler’s ideal Germany for the racially “impure.” Of course, the decision to exterminate Jews and other minorities outright was not made until about 8 years later, but one can see a hint of what was to come in this speech. After all, the exclusion of Jews from membership in the German nation had already begun with the boycott of Jewish businesses.
There was also a hint in Hitler’s speech of war looming on the horizon. If the parades of Nazis in military uniform were not enough to convince people that the party wanted war, Hitler’s assertion that the army and the party would carry the German state and German Reich on their shoulders should have been.