Speeches And Proclamations 1932 1945 Vol 3 The Chronicle Of A Dictatorship

Working With The Nazi Speech Archives

Speeches And Proclamations 1932 1945 Vol 3 The Chronicle Of A Dictatorship is a multi-volume compilation published in the 1970s by the Institute of Historical Research in London. It covers German governmental documents from the Nazi period, and Volume 3 specifically runs from roughly 1938 through 1941. You will find it useful if you are doing primary source work on the Third Reich, and you will find it useless if you are looking for analysis or commentary within the volumes themselves. The books are essentially transcriptions of official documents. Party statements, Reichstag records, ministry decrees. They are organized chronologically within each volume with minimal editorial framing. If you need context for what a particular proclamation meant at the time it was issued, you are on your own, and you will need to supplement with secondary literature.

Where To Find A Copy

The original publisher was the Institute of Historical Research, University of London, distributed by Frank Cass & Co. The ISBNs vary by edition. Most academic libraries in the UK and US have it on the shelves somewhere in the history section. If you are not near a university library, you can order it from used book dealers or through interlibrary loan. Amazon and AbeBooks carry reprints but pricing fluctuates wildly between $30 and $200 depending on condition. There is no legitimate free digital version floating around that I would trust. Scans that do circulate on obscure file-sharing sites are often incomplete, OCR garbage, or mislabeled. If you need high quality, buy or borrow a physical copy. The text layout in these volumes matters more than you might think because some entries span multiple columns and footnotes are embedded in ways that bad OCR will scramble entirely.

How The Volumes Are Actually Organized

Each volume covers a specific time window. Volume 1 runs from Hitler's rise to 1934. Volume 2 covers 1935 to 1937. Volume 3 is 1938 to 1941. Volume 4 picks up afterward. The documents are arranged in rough chronological order but the editors sometimes group related materials together even when they span a few weeks apart. This means you cannot simply flip to a date and expect every single document from that day to appear in one place. The entries themselves are printed in the original German with English translations on facing pages. This is genuinely useful for researchers who do not read German fluently, though the translation quality is uneven. Some documents are rendered cleanly. Others feel like they were translated by committee and then proofread by someone who was not entirely engaged. When you encounter something that reads oddly, check the German text on the left page before making a decision about what the document means. I learned this the hard way when I was cross-referencing a Ministry of Economics directive from mid-1940. The English translation used a term that implied voluntary compliance when the original German wording clearly indicated mandatory enforcement with penalties attached. I almost cited it incorrectly in a paper until I went back to the source text and realized the discrepancy. The footnote on the facing page did not flag this either.

Common Pitfalls When Using These Volumes

Researchers new to this material tend to treat it as comprehensive coverage. It is not. The editors selected documents based on perceived significance at the time of publication in the 1970s. Many routine administrative orders, local government communications, and party internal memoranda simply did not make the cut. If you are looking for evidence of how a specific policy was implemented at the municipal level, you will likely come up short using only these volumes. Another issue is the citation format. The documents do not carry standard archival reference numbers that you can trace back to the original filing location. Each entry has a brief bibliographic note pointing to the source collection, but those notes are not consistently formatted and some point to microfilm collections that have since been reorganized or lost. When I was building a bibliography for a dissertation chapter, I spent three weeks tracking down document references only to find that several of them led to dead ends in British National Archive holdings. Always verify the archival reference against a second source if you plan to publish your findings. The binding on the original editions is sturdy but the paper yellows significantly over time. I have seen copies where the German text is still legible but the English translation page has faded enough that certain words are nearly unreadable. Keep a flashlight handy when working with older physical copies, especially in the later portions of each volume where the ink sits on cheaper paper stock.

What To Use Instead For Certain Research Questions

If you are researching the economic dimension of the war economy, the series edited by the Bundesarchiv and published by Droste Verlag is more comprehensive for that period. For party-level documents, thedocuments from the SAPMO archive in Berlin offer deeper coverage than anything in these volumes. The US Holocaust Memorial Museum also has digitized collections that overlap with some of the same time period and include documents the editors of Speeches And Proclamations chose to omit. These volumes remain a solid starting point for anyone entering this field, but they were never intended to be the final word. Use them as one tool among many rather than treating them as the definitive record. That mistake is more common than I would like to see, and it tends to show up clearly in peer review when reviewers spot the gaps.