Fellow Students!
Shaken and broken, our nation is confronted with the downfall of the men of Stalingrad. Three hundred and thirty thousand German men have been senselessly and irresponsibly driven to death and destruction by the inspired strategy of our World War I Private First Class. Führer, we thank you!
The German people is in ferment. Will we continue to entrust the fate of our armies to a dilettante? Do we want to sacrifice the rest of German youth to the base ambitions of a Party clique? No, never!
The day of reckoning has come – the reckoning of German youth with the most abominable tyrant our people has ever been forced to endure. In the name of German youth we demand restitution by Adolf Hitler’s state of our personal freedom, the most precious treasure we have, out of which he has swindled us in the meanest possible way.
We have grown up in a state in which all free expression of opinion has been unscrupulously suppressed. The Hitler Youth, the SA, the SS have tried to regiment us, to revolutionize us, to drug us in the most promising young years of our lives. “Philosophical training” was the name given to the despicable method by which our budding individual reflection and evaluation have been suffocated in a fog of empty phrases. A system of selection of leaders, at once unimaginably devilish and narrow-minded, rears its future party bigwigs in the “Castles of the Knightly Order” as godless, shameless, and ruthless exploiters and assassins – blind, stupid hangers-on of the Führer. We “Intellectual Workers” would be the right ones to put obstacles in the path of this caste of overlords. Soldiers at the front are regimented like schoolboys by student leaders and trainees for the post of Gauleiter, and the lewd jokes of the Gauleiters insult the honor of the women students. German women students at the University of Munich have given a dignified reply to the besmirching of their honor, and German students have defended the women in the University and have stood firm. That is a beginning of the struggle for our free self-determination – without which intellectual and spiritual values cannot be created. We thank our brave comrades, both men and women, who have set us shining examples.
For us there is but one slogan: fight against the party! Get out of the party organizations, which want to keep our mouths sealed! Get out of the lecture rooms of the SS corporals and sergeants and the party bootlickers! What we seek is genuine learning and real freedom of opinion. No threat can frighten us, not even the shutting down of our institutions of higher learning. This is the struggle of each and every one of us for our future, our freedom, and our honor under a regime conscious of its moral responsibility.
Freedom and honor! For ten long years Hitler and his accomplices have manhandled, squeezed, twisted, and debased these two splendid German words to the point of nausea, as only dilettantes can, feeding the highest values of a nation to the pigs. They have sufficiently demonstrated, in ten years of destruction of all material and intellectual freedom, of all moral substance among the German people, what they understand by freedom and honor. The frightful bloodbath has opened the eyes of even the stupidest German – it is a slaughter they have carried out in the name of “freedom and honor of the German nation” throughout Europe, and which they continue to perpetrate every day. The name of Germany is dishonored for all time if German youth does not finally rise up, take revenge, and atone, smashing its tormentors, and setting up a new Europe of the spirit.
Students! The German nation is looking to us. As in 1813 the people expected us to shake off the Napoleonic yoke, so in 1943 they are looking to us to break the National Socialist terror through the power of the spirit.
Beresina and Stalingrad are burning in the East. The dead of Stalingrad implore us to take action!
“Rise up, my people, let smoke and flame be our sign!”
Our people stands ready to rebel against the National Socialist enslavement of Europe in a devout new breakthrough of freedom and honor!