Edouard Daladier, Premier1 of France, delivered this radio address to the people of France on January 29, 1940, after the Nazis3 had conquered Poland and just a few months before Hitler's armies attacked France.
At the end of five months of war one thing has become more and more clear. It is that Germany seeks to establish a domination over the world completely different from any known in history.
The domination at which the Nazis aim is not limited to the displacement4 of the balance of power and the imposition of supremacy5 of one nation. It seeks the systematic6 and total destruction of those conquered by Hitler, and it does not treaty with the nations which he has subdued7. He destroys them. He takes from them their whole political and economic existence and seeks even to deprive them of their history and their culture. He wishes to consider them only as vital space and a vacant territory over which he has every right.
The human beings who constitute these nations are for him only cattle. He orders their massacre8 or their migration9. He compels them to make room for their conquerors10. He does not even take the trouble to impose any war tribute on them. He just takes all their wealth, and, to prevent any revolt, he wipes out their leaders and scientifically seeks the physical and moral degradation11 of those whose independence he has taken away.
Under this domination, in thousands of towns and villages in Europe there are millions of human beings now living in misery12 which, some months ago, they could never have imagined. Austria, Bohemia, Slovakia and Poland are only lands of despair. Their whole peoples have been deprived of the means of moral and material happiness. Subdued by treachery or brutal13 violence, they have no other recourse than to work for their executioners who grant them scarcely enough to assure the most miserable14 existence.
There is being created a world of masters and slaves in the image of Germany herself. For, while Germany is crushing beneath her tyranny the men of every race and language, she is herself being crushed beneath her own servitude and her domination mania15. The German worker and peasant are the slaves of their Nazi2 masters while the worker and peasant of Bohemia and Poland have become in turn slaves of these slaves. Before this first realization16 of a mad dream, the whole world might shudder17.
Nazi propaganda is entirely18 founded on the exploitation of the weakness of the human heart. It does not address itself to the strong or the heroic. It tells the rich they are going to lose their money. It tells the worker this is a rich man's war. It tells the intellectual and the artist that all he cherished is being destroyed by war. It tells the lover of good things that soon he would have none of them. It says to the Christian19 believer: "How can you accept this massacre?" It tells the adventurer - "a man like you should profit by the misfortunes of your country."
It is those who speak this way who have destroyed or confiscated20 all the wealth they could lay their hands on, who have reduced their workers to slavery, who have ruined all intellectual liberty, who have imposed terrible privations on millions of men and women and who have made murder their law. What do contradictions matter to them if they can lower the resistance of those who wish to bar the path of their ambitions to be masters of the world?
For us there is more to do than merely win the war. We shall win it, but we must also win a victory far greater than that of arms. In this world of masters and slaves, which those madmen who rule at Berlin are seeking to forge, we must also save liberty and human dignity.
Edouard Daladier - January 29, 1940
