Thomas Mann, radio address on BBC, March 1941
GERMAN LISTENERS: What I had to tell you from afar, until now was brought to you by other voices. This time you hear my own voice. It is the voice of a friend, a German voice; the voice of a Germany which showed, and will again show, a different face to the world from the horrible Medusa mask which Hitlerism has pressed upon it. It is a warning voice - to warn you is the only service which a German like myself is able to render you today; and I do this serious and heartfelt duty although I know that no warning can be issued to you which is not long familiar to you, which has not long been alive in your own fundamentally uncheatable knowledge and conscience. To warn you means to confirm you in your own dark premonitions ; it means to assure you that these sinister premonitions are true, that they are only too justified, and this assurance must be given to you; for only upon the awakening of your feeling to the fact that you walk along terribly wrong ways rests the hope that you may still leave these ways, after all.
The bad men who lead you - in the ultimate and deepest sense of the word “bad” - know well that you are ill at ease despite all your victories, and that you dread the impossible, unfeasible slave-driver's part which they force upon you. They know that you long for freedom, for decent relations with the other peoples on earth, for the end of the horribly immeasurable adventure of the Hitler war, and therefore they try with all their strength to increase your morale with the successes which their crimes still bring them, and which are nothing else than new and hopeless crimes - as, right now, the subjugation of Bulgaria. “The might of the idea and of the weapons,” your press must boast, “is about to sweep away the last resistance against the New Order.”
The weapons principally; for what is the idea? The idea is violence and vileness, and the last resistance against it and against the unbearable degradation of humanity by its universal triumph is far from broken. The resistance is alive, is upright, is powerful, tenacious, and inflexible. Its name is England; and England is a world. America is another world; and America's tremendous resources will be at England's disposal in ever growing measure in the struggle for freedom - simply because this country now sees with perfect clearness that it is its struggle, its struggle as well, which England is leading.
Have you heard that the so-called Lend-Lease Bill, the law which authorizes the most all-embracing help for England, has now been approved by the Senate of the United States by a great majority? Doubt it as little as your tyrants do, who know well that time is short and that their only hope is to force England to its knees before the Anglo-Saxon world can develop its full defensive and offensive power! You are at war not only with the British Empire, but indeed, and in reality, with America too, even today, and one doesn't have to tell you, you feel it yourselves, that your situation grows more oppressive and impossible from day to day.
What shall become of you? If you are defeated, the vindictiveness of the whole world will break loose against you for all that you have inflicted upon the people and nations. If you win, if England falls, even if you win the war of the continents and defeat the West and the East - does any one of you believe that that would be a tenable victory which would create order and be bearable for you and the others, a victory with which life is possible? Can a nation live as bailiff of all the others, with policing armies all over the subjugated globe, while all nations do slave labour for the master race? Is that a moral possibility for any people, and especially for you Germans? One may think about history and mankind as sordidly and sceptically as one wants to, but that the world will recognize the ultimate victory of evil, that it would tolerate being turned into a single Gestapo cellar, a single concentration camp where you Germans would function as S.A. guards, not even the greatest unbeliever can believe.
The resistance of England, the help it receives from America, are denounced by your leaders as “prolongation of the war”. They demand “peace”. They who drip with the blood of their own people and that of other peoples dare to utter this word. Peace - by that they mean subjugation, the legalization of their crimes, the acceptance of the humanly unendurable. But that is not possible. With a Hitler there can be no peace, because he is thoroughly incapable of peace, and because this word in his mouth is nothing but a dirty, pathological lie - like every other word which he ever gave or spoke. As long as Hitler and his regime of arsonists remain, you Germans will not have peace, ever, under any circumstances. Always you will have to go on and on, as now, with the miserable acts of violence, be it only to prevent revenge, be it only to keep a gigantic and constantly growing hatred from devouring you. To warn you, Germans, means to confirm you in your own dark premonitions. I can do no more.
From Thomas Mann, Listen, Germany!: Twenty-five radio messages to the German people over BBC (Alfred A Knopf, 1943).