[Pages 86-87]

I declared at that time before thousands of fellow Germans, each bullet which leaves the barrel of a police pistol now, is my bullet. If one calls this murder, then I have murdered; I ordered all this, I back it up; I assume the responsibility, and I am not afraid to do so.

Through a network of outer offices converging into the headquarters in Berlin, I am daily, one could almost say hourly, informed about everything that happens in widespread Prussia.

[Page 89]

We had to deal ruthlessly with these enemies of the state. It must not be forgotten that at the moment of our seizure of power over 6 million people officially voted for communism and about 8 million for Marxism in the Reichstag elections in March.

Thus the concentration camps were created, to which we had to send first all the thousands of functionaries of the Communist and Social Democratic parties.

[Page 92]

The Gestapo deserves a great deal of credit for the success of the revolution and for the consolidation of its achievements. Right in the middle of this constructive work, occurred the blaze that destroyed the high cupola and the auditorium of the Reichstag. Criminal hands had set this fire, had put the German Reichstag in flames, in order to give a last beacon to dying Communism, so that it could make one last desperate thrust before the Hitler government was consolidated. The blaze was to be the signal for the Communist party for general terror, for a general uprising and for civil war. That it did not have these consequences, Germany and the world owe not to the noble motives of Communism, but solely to the iron resolution and the hard fist of Adolf Hitler and his closest collaborators, who struck more quickly than the enemy had expected, and harder than he could imagine, and with the first blow suppressed Communism once and for all.

That night, when I ordered the arrest of 4,000 Communist functionaries, I knew that by dawn Communism had lost a great battle.