The speech contained an admonition that all shirkers from the work measures necessary for total war would be subject to the death penalty.[14] One of the reasons the speech had such potency and resonated with the German people was it played on their fears of another military defeat like that of 1918, which they assumed would mean social and political collapse, the "bolshevization" of German society, and it represented the struggle for existence that the regime had so religiously promulgated.[15] The entire text was printed in the newspapers the morning after the speech.