Adolf Hitler's First Antisemitic Writing(September 16, 1919)Hitler returned from a military hospital to Munich in early 1919. There he underwent a Reichswehr sponsored course of systematic political education for demobilizing soldiers that featured PanGerman nationalism, antisemitism, and antisocialism. These same themes were prominent in Bavarian politics following the repression of the Munich revolution of 191819. Because antisemitism had not played a notable part in Bavarian politics prior to the revolutionary disturbances, a Herr Adolf Gemlich was prompted to send an inquiry about the importance of the "Jewish question" to Captain Karl Mayr, the officer in charge of the Reichswehr News and Enlightenment Department in Munich. Mayr referred him to Hitler, who had distinguished himself in the abovementioned course by the vehemence of his radical nationalist and antisemitic views, and by his oratorical talents. Hitler was already feeling his way toward a political career; four days before responding to Gemlich in the letter translated below, he had paid his first visit to the German Workers' Party (eventually renamed, the National Socialist Workers' Party) as a confidential agent of the Reichswehr. In the letter to Gemlich he appears anxious to establish his credentials as a knowledgeable and sober anti-Semite. Compared to the inflammatory massmeeting oratory that he was soon to make his specialty, Hitler's rhetoric here is quite tame, stressing the need for a "rational" and "scientific" antisemitism. Some historians have interpreted the letter's call for the "irrevocable removal [Entfernung]" of the Jews from German life as a prefiguring of the Holocaust. But it is clear from the context and from later statements that, at this point, Hitler meant segregation or expulsion rather than systematic liquidation. The letter, Hitler's first explicitly political writing, impressed his Reichswehr superiors and he soon gained a reputation among radical rightist and socially respectable nationalist conservative groups as a man who could help inoculate the masses against revolution and whose antisemitic rhetoric could help discredit the democratic Weimar Republic. The letter may thus be seen as the launching of his political career. Source: Eberhard Jäckel (ed.), Hitler. Sämtliche Aufzeichnungen 19051924. (Stuttgart, 1980), pp. 8890. Translated by Richard S. Levy. TEXT [September 16, 1919] Dear Herr Gemlich, The danger posed by Jewry for our people today finds expression
in the undeniable aversion of wide sections of our people. The cause of
this aversion is not to be found in a clear recognition of the consciously
or unconsciously systematic and pernicious effect of the Jews as a totality
upon our nation. Rather, it arises mostly from personal contact and from
the personal impression which the individual Jew leavesalmost
always an unfavorable one. For this reason, antisemitism is too easily
characterized as a mere emotional phenomenon. And yet this is incorrect.
Antisemitism as a political movement may not and cannot be defined by
emotional impulses, but by recognition of the facts. The facts are these:
First, Jewry is absolutely a race and not a religious association. Even
the Jews never designate themselves as Jewish Germans, Jewish Poles, or
Jewish Americans but always as German, Polish, or American Jews. Jews
have never yet adopted much more than the language of the foreign nations
among whom they live. A German who is forced to make use of the French
language in France, Italian in Italy, Chinese in China does not thereby
become a Frenchman, Italian, or Chinaman. It's the same with the Jew who
lives among us and is forced to make use of the German language. He does
not thereby become a German. Neither does the Mosaic faith, so important
for the survival of this race, settle the question of whether someone
is a Jew or nonJew. There is scarcely a race whose members belong
exclusively to just one definite religion. Through thousands of years of the closest kind of inbreeding,
Jews in general have maintained their race and their peculiarities far
more distinctly than many of the peoples among whom they have lived. And
thus comes the fact that there lives amongst us a non German, alien
race which neither wishes nor is able to sacrifice its racial character
or to deny its feeling, thinking, and striving. Nevertheless, it possesses
all the political rights we do. If the ethos of the Jews is revealed in
the purely material realm, it is even clearer in their thinking and striving.
Their dance around the golden calf is becoming a merciless struggle for
all those possessions we prize most highly on earth. The value of the individual is no longer decided by his character
or by the significance of his achievements for the totality but exclusively
by the size of his fortune, by his money. The loftiness of a nation is no longer to be measured by the
sum of its moral and spiritual powers, but rather by the wealth of its
material possessions. This thinking and striving after money and power, and the feelings
that go along with it, serve the purposes of the Jew who is unscrupulous
in the choice of methods and pitiless in their employment. In autocratically
ruled states he whines for the favor of "His Majesty" and misuses it like
a leech fastened upon the nations. In democracies he vies for the favor
of the masses, cringes before the "majesty of the people," and recognizes
only the majesty of money. He destroys the character of princes with byzantine flattery,
national pride (the strength of a people), with ridicule and shameless
breeding to depravity. His method of battle is that public opinion which
is never expressed in the press but which is nonetheless managed and falsified
by it. His power is the power of money, which multiplies in his hands
effortlessly and endlessly through interest, and which forces peoples
under the most dangerous of yokes. Its golden glitter, so attractive in
the beginning, conceals the ultimately tragic consequences. Everything
men strive after as a higher goal, be it religion, socialism, democracy,
is to the Jew only means to an end, the way to satisfy his lust for gold
and domination. In his effects and consequences he is like a racial tuberculosis
of the nations. The deduction from all this is the following: an antisemitism
based on purely emotional grounds will find its ultimate expression in
the form of the pogrom.[1] An antisemitism based on reason, however, must
lead to systematic legal combating and elimination of the privileges of
the Jews, that which distinguishes the Jews from the other aliens who
live among us (an Aliens Law). The ultimate objective [of such legislation]
must, however, be the irrevocable removal of the Jews in general. For both these ends a government of national strength, not of
national weakness, is necessary. The Republic in Germany owes its birth not to the uniform national
will of our people but the sly exploitation of a series of circumstances
which found general expression in a deep, universal dissatisfaction. These
circumstances however were independent of the form of the state and are
still operative today. Indeed, more so now than before. Thus, a great
portion of our people recognizes that a changed stateform cannot
in itself change our situation. For that it will take a rebirth of the
moral and spiritual powers of the nation. And this rebirth cannot be initiated by a state leadership of
irresponsible majorities, influenced by certain party dogmas, an irresponsible
press, or internationalist phrases and slogans. [It requires] instead
the ruthless installation of nationally minded leadership personalities
with an inner sense of responsibility. But these facts deny to the Republic the essential inner support
of the nation's spiritual forces. And thus today's state leaders are compelled
to seek support among those who draw the exclusive benefits of the new
formation of German conditions, and who for this reason were the driving
force behind the revolutionthe Jews. Even though (as various
statements of the leading personalities reveal) today's leaders fully
realized the danger of Jewry, they (seeking their own advantage) accepted
the readily proffered support of the Jews and also returned the favor.
And this payoff consisted not only in every possible favoring of
Jewry, but above all in the hindrance of the struggle of the betrayed
people against its defrauders, that is in the repression of the antisemitic
movement. Respectfully, Adolf Hitler
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