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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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