Ernst Reuter's speech to the Reichstag on 9 September 1948

"People of the world, look to Berlin!" Ernst Reuter's famous speech in front of the Reichstag in Berlin on 9 September 1948, translated into English using deepl.com.

Ernst Reuter redet vor dem Reichstag

"Lipschitz formulated the word that has found a vivid echo in all of us; he said: "We'll be back!" We are coming back to the eastern sector of Berlin, we are also coming back to the eastern zone of Germany!

Today is the day when diplomats and generals don't talk and negotiate. Today is the day when the people of Berlin raise their voices. These people of Berlin are calling out to the whole world today. Because we know what is at stake today in the negotiations in the Control Council building in Potsdamer Strasse, which have now come to a standstill, and in the negotiations later in Moscow in the stone palaces of the Kremlin. In all these negotiations, our fate here is being thrown into the dice. When these negotiations began weeks ago, the Russian bear's appetite was greater than just [for] Berlin. He wanted the negotiations to cover the whole of Germany as well, and with the lying slogan that the division of Germany had to be prevented, he was only disguising for others, not for us, his appetite for the other part of Germany, which he also wants to get his hands on.

Now the negotiations have returned to Berlin. The generals have come to a standstill. We are living in a pause. In this pause we believe that it is good for the world to see what the people of Berlin really want. Tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, there will be negotiations about the Italian colonies. I don't know what else will be negotiated then. We just want to make one thing clear: in all this bargaining and negotiating, we Berliners do not want to be a bargaining chip!

We cannot be bartered, we cannot be negotiated and we cannot be sold. It is impossible to reach a lazy compromise on the backs of such a brave, steadfast people. Of course, compromises are the substance of all living politics, but compromises must be genuine and honest compromises. They must not be made in the same way as those telephone agreements of the night between the French general and the Russian general, where the Russian general breaks his word of honour.

Ernst Reuter mit dem "Vater der Luftbrücke" General Lucius D. Clay beim Festessen in New York am 21.3.1953

Before the cock had crowed three times, the word of honour was smoke and mirrors, and decent, good, honest Berliners, friends of ours, were turned into White Guards and Black Guards.

We would like to give the SED just one piece of advice: If they need a new symbol, please, not the pressure of the hands, but the handcuffs they put on the Berliners.

The handcuffs are in fact the symbol of these wretched cowards who want to sell themselves and their people to a foreign power for thirty pieces of silver.

When these people of Berlin stand up here today in their hundreds of thousands, then we know that the whole world is watching this Berlin. Because the generals can no longer negotiate here, the cabinets can no longer negotiate. Behind these political acts stands the will of free peoples who have recognised that a bulwark, an outpost of freedom has been erected here in this city, which no one can abandon with impunity.

Whoever would give up this city, whoever would give up this people of Berlin, would give up a world, and even more, he would give up himself, and he would not only give up this people of Berlin in the western sectors and in the eastern sector of Berlin. No, we also know that if only they could, today the people of Leipzig, Halle, Chemnitz, Dresden, all the cities of the Eastern zone, would be standing in their squares like us and listening to our voice.

And I know it deeply, I think of my old city of Magdeburg, which elected me as a member of the Reichstag. Reichstag deputy and whose mayor I was before Hitler sent us to the concentration camps. This people would rush in their tens of thousands to our flags, to the flags of freedom, just as they did then, and unite with us and the peoples of the world in a great, indestructible alliance.

Therefore, when we call out to the world today in this hour, we do so because we know that the strength of our people is the ground on which we have grown great and will grow greater and stronger until the power of darkness is broken and shattered. And we will celebrate this day in this place. And we will experience this day in this place, in front of our old Reichstag with its proud inscription "To the German people", and we will celebrate it with the proud awareness that we have brought it about in hardship and distress, in toil and misery, but with steadfast perseverance. When this day comes to us, the day of victory, the day of freedom, when the world will recognise that this German people has become new, has changed and grown anew, has become a free, mature, proud people, conscious of its value and its strength, which has the right to have its say in the alliance of equal and free peoples, then our trains will not only travel to Helmstedt again, they will travel to Munich, to Frankfurt, Dresden, Leipzig, they will travel to Breslau and to Stettin.

And they will once again mount the second tracks on our miserable, wretched, shattered, old, ruined railway stations, which will be the symbol of our regained freedom, which we, Berliners, must and will fight for in the struggles that lie behind us and in the hardships that lie ahead.

You peoples of the world, you peoples in America, in England, in France, in Italy! Look at this city and realise that you must not and cannot abandon this city and this people! There is only one possibility for all of us: to stand together until this battle is won, until this battle is finally sealed by victory over the enemies, by victory over the power of darkness.

The people of Berlin have spoken. We have done our duty, and we will continue to do our duty. People of the world! Do your duty and help us in the times that lie ahead, not only with the roar of your aeroplanes, not only with the means of transport that you bring here, but with your steadfast and indestructible commitment to the common ideals that alone can secure our future and that alone can secure yours. People of the world, look to Berlin! And people of Berlin, be sure of this, this fight, this fight we want, this fight we will win!"