Primary Source 13.3

ADOLF HITLER, SPEECH TO THE GREAT GERMAN REICHSTAG (1939) 1

Systematically and carefully, Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) built up Germany's military capacity and gradually tackled ever-bolder geopolitical aims. The annexation of Austria and German- speaking portions of Czechoslovakia in 1938, with the compliance of the Western democratic powers, increased Hitler's popularity at home and inched him closer toward his goal of dramatic military expansion. The second transformative National Socialist (that is, Nazi) goal—anti-Jewish repression—was also underway. In 1935, the Nuremberg Laws stripped Jews all civil and even social rights. On November 9 and 10, 1938—exactly twenty years after the German surrender in World War I—the Nazi leadership coordinated attacks against Jewish businesses, synagogues, and homes in hundreds of communities throughout Germany and Austria. For Hitler, the Jews of Germany and the world were to blame for Germany’s humiliation in World War I. In his mind, he would make them pay for their alleged treachery. On January 30, 1939, the sixth anniversary of the Nazi ascent to power, Hitler verbally linked the two central Nazi goals. Germany's economic troubles, he claimed, stemmed directly from a lack of Lebensraum, that is, from insufficient territory to accommodate the growing German population. Given his country's militaristic buildup and annexation of two foreign countries the previous year, one would assume that he was planning to seize yet more land. Yet, like a child “hiding” a toy in his hand and asking his parent where it has disappeared to, the Nazi leader, claiming prophetic powers, warned that if a new world war should break out it would lead to “the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.” Although Hitler had asserted in 1919 that “The removal of the Jews altogether” should be the “final aim” of any patriotic German government, this was his first public reference to any such diabolical intention since he had assumed power. In the next few years, he referred over and over to his “prophecy”— but as having occurred on September 1—the date when his military forces invaded Poland and precipitated World War II. Clearly the two “operations” were closely intertwined in his worldview. The text below is excerpted from a two-and-a-half-hour-long speech on global and national affairs delivered to 885 Nazi Reichstag deputies on January 30, 1939, and listened to by millions of Germans by radio or public loudspeaker.

. . . The German people don’t want their affairs settled or regulated by an alien people. France to the French, England to the English, America to the Americans, and Germany to the Germans! We are determined to thwart and thrust aside this alien people that knew how to insinuate itself and seize all the leading positions for itself, for we intend to educate our own people for these positions.

1 I am grateful to my colleague, Richard S. Levy, for his kind permission to use this text from Antisemitism in the Modern World: An Anthology of Texts (Lexington, Mass., and Toronto: D. C. Heath and Company, 1991), 222–23. We have hundreds of thousands of the most intelligent sons of peasants and workers. We will have them educated and are already doing so, and we wish them someday to occupy the leading positions of state and society, along with the rest of our educated strata, and not the members of an alien people. Above all, however, German culture, as the name announces, is German and not Jewish, and it therefore ought to repose in the care and administration of our own people. If, however, the rest of the world puts on hypocritical airs and shouts about this barbaric expulsion from Germany of such an irreplaceable, culturally valuable element, then we can only stand amazed before the deductions drawn [from this action]. How thankful we must be that these august bearers of culture can be freed for employment by the rest of the world. On the basis of their own declarations, they can have no excuse to refuse to accept such extremely valuable people into their own lands. Indeed, it is not understandable why so much is demanded just of the German people with regard to the members of this race. But these “splendid people” are suddenly rejected on the flimsiest pretexts by the very states that are so enthusiastic about them.2 I believe that this problem must be solved, and the sooner the better. Europe cannot achieve peace before and unless the Jewish question is cleared away. Sooner or later it may well be that this problem will produce an agreement between the nations of Europe, which otherwise do not find it easy to come together. The world has sufficient space for colonization. First, however, the opinion must be overcome that the dear Lord has destined a certain percentage of Jewish people to be the beneficiaries on the body and productive labor of other peoples. Jewry will have to accommodate itself to solid, constructive activity, just as other peoples do. Or, sooner or later, it will succumb to a crisis of unimaginable scope. And on this memorable day for us Germans, and perhaps for others as well, I would like now to make a pronouncement on one more matter: I have often been a prophet in my life and have been mostly laughed at. In the period of my struggle for power, it was in the first case the Jewish people who only laughed at my prophecies that I would one day take over leadership of the German state and therewith over the entire people and that I would, along with many other problems, bring the Jewish problem to solution. I believe that Jewry’s ringing laughter of those days has most likely already stuck in its throat. Today I want once more to be a prophet: If international finance Jewry in and outside Europe succeeds in plunging the peoples into another world war, then the end result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth and the consequent victory of Jewry but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe. The era of propagandistic defenselessness among the non-Jewish peoples is over. National-socialist Germany and fascist Italy possess those means that can, when necessary, enlighten the world about the essence of a problem that many peoples instinctively recognize but remain scientifically unclear about. For the moment Jewry may, in certain states, conduct its agitation under the protection of the press, film, radio propaganda, theater, and literature which lie in its hands. If this people once more succeeds in agitating the masses among the peoples into a wholly senseless battle which serves the exclusive interests of the Jews, then the effectiveness of a

2 Hitler was referring to the repeated refusals of Western countries in the 1930s to welcome Jewish refugees from Germany. declaration will be revealed—that in Germany alone, and in a few years, Jewry will be laid low altogether. The peoples do not want to die on the battlefields again so that this rootless, international race may profit from the business of war and satisfy its Old Testament thirst for revenge. The Jewish slogan, “Proletarians of all lands, unite,”3 will be vanquished by a higher knowledge—that is, “Productive members of all nations, know your common enemy!”

3 This was the final line in The Communist Manifesto (1848) by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Of the two, only Marx was Jewish, but Hitler believed that Communism and Social Democracy in general were by their nature manifestations of an underlying Jewish culture.