[September 16, 1919]



























So important for the survival of this race

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 non-Jew. There is scarcely a race whose members
belong exclusively to just one definite religion.

Through thousands of years of the closest kind of inbreeding (5), 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.

      The ultimately tragic consequences

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. An antisemitism based on reason, however, must lead to
systematic legal combatting 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.

A rebirth of the moral and spiritual powers of the nation

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 state-form 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 revolution--the 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 pay-off 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



Twelve years later, Hitler will tell Hermann  Rauschning, President of the Diet
of Leipzig that he  knows perfectly well that " in the scientific sense there is
no such thing as race. But you, as a farmer and cattle breeder, cannot get
your breeding successfully achieved without the conception of race. And I as
a politician need a conception which enables the order which has hitherto
existed on historic bases to be abolished and an entirely and new anti-
historic order enforced and given an intellectual basis…And for this purpose
the conception of race serves me well… With the conception of race,
National Socialism will carry the revolution abroad and re-cast the world."
(1)

It is obvious that  the ideas, prejudices and conceptions expressed in this letter
were inspired to Hitler by the content of a pamphlet  entitled  Antisemitism, its
history and causes that was published in 1894 by French Jewish journalist
Bernard Lazare. This document was an attempt by a man who was a friend
of Theodor Herzl to explain in a moderate way the undeniable success of
antisemitism in the world  since Biblical  times. It was also animated by the
desire to  show that antisemitism was not  justified. The pamphlet was a huge
success but unfortunately Lazare died of a colon cancer at the early age of 38.
However he authorized before his death a republication of his works at the
condition that  it would be specified that he had "changed (his) mind on some
points."

Hitler's duplicity, opportunism and cold-blooded calculation were beyond
limits.


(1) Rauschning, Hermann, Hitler Speaks (London, 1939), pp. 113, 229-30, as
cited in Pipes, Richard, Russia under the Bolshevik Regime (New York, 1993),
p. 280.
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HITLER'S ANTISEMITISM WAS REAL,  HIS RACE'S THEORIES FAKE


If Hitler must be taken verbatim, he started to hate the Jews as soon as his second year
(1909) in Vienna as he explained profusely in Mein Kampf :" I didn't know what to be more
amazed at: their verbal agility or their art in lying."  But the reality is more complex and
Mein Kampf is much more a political springboard than a credible autobiography : in Vienna,
Hitler was far from being violently anti-semitic, if we must believe the testimony of Rudolf
Hannish, his co-lodger at Mannerheim men's hostel in 1909. His views were ambiguous to
say the least : on one hand, he would praise the Jews for their sense of business and their
ability to take risks, and for instance  he would hold in high esteem Jews like the poet Heine,
the conductors-composers Mahler and Mendelssohn or the Rothschild who financed the
Mannerheim hostel. He would also quote Gotthold E. Lessing's (1729-1781) Nathan the
Wiseas a parabole of religious tolerance. On another hand he was influenced by politicians
like Karl Lueger, Vienna's mayor, Schönerer, leader of the Pan-Germans, or Karl H.
Wolf, leader of the German Radicals who were anti-semitic extremists. On the question of
the nationalities, according to Hanish, Hitler always took the most extreme positions,
criticizing the Hapsburgs' federal principle.

Today, people tend to forget what was the political and cultural atmosphere of prewar
Vienna : among other battles between the different nationalities of the Dual Monarchy, it was
a hot bed of constant battles between the Modernists (the Jews) and the Traditionalists (the
pan-Germans). Of course all Modernists were not Jews : Gustav Klimt, Alfred Roller, Oskar
Kokoschka, Alban Berg, Otto Wagner, Adolf Loos were not. But in the spirit of the epoch if
you were a Modernist you were suspected of being a Jewish sympathizer, even a
"Jew-slave". And if you were too successful, the conservative press would run stories
pointing to your Jewish ancestry as the Alldeutsches Tagblatt did for the librettist Hugo von
Hoffmannstahl : "his great-granfather, purported an article, was a Isaak Löw
Hoffmannstahl". And in the same way, not all Traditionnalists were pan-Germanists, some
were good Austrian monarchy supporters but still there was a pro-German coloration.

It is in this context that young Hitler lived like millions of Austrians and thousands of
Vienneses. Doubtless, Hitler was on the side of the Traditionalists : his character, his
mediocre education and his sociological background, in spite of his high artistic aspirations,
pushed him toward Conservative ideas:  he let himself be impregnated by  anti-semitic views,
notably the prejudice  that "Jews were destroying beauty, dirtying everything, exalting sex,
sensuality and pornography in their press and their works."  Der  jüdish geschmack
(Jewish  taste) was violently denounced in the conservative press and some circles as a
threat to moral values and to the Austro-Hungarian fabric which was already torn apart by
bitter ethnic frictions.

Effectively it was in 1905 that Freud published his theory of sexuality, it was in 1906 that
was played the Premiere of The Spring's Awakening by Wedekind, a play considered as
"highly pornographic" by the censorship Bureau in Vienna and as "vices and threat of
infection" by Hitler. It was in 1906 that was published Robert Musil's novel "Young Törless"
which portrayed the link between violence and sexuality in young people and it was at the
same epoch that Sacher-Masoch wrote his "Venus in Furs" that described young men being
whipped by strong fur-clad women. Hitler who arrived in Vienna in 1908 hated that
extravagance of "debaucherie, sexuality and bestiality."

But it was still only the expression of feelings that he was not alone to harbour. His deep
disgust, his basic Conservative leanings were turned into racial hatred by Germany's defeat
in 1918.


         Dr.Forster :"A.Hitler, psychopath, hysterical symptoms"

At the end of WWI, Hitler's social consciousness was more interested in issues like defeat
responsibilities than in Art or Literature. He convinced himself that Reds and Jews were
nothing else than profiteers, responsible for the defeat of his beloved motherland, Germany.
His hatred culminated in the conviction that "when he defended (himself) against the Jew, he
was fighting for the work of the Lord."

Gradually, he began to hate the Jews to the point of longing for their extermination. Just
before the Armistice in 1918, Hitler was gazed and stayed some time in a military hospital
where he was blind and deaf. He was then submitted to psychiatric treatment and his care, a
Dr. Forster, thought he was actually suffering from hysteria and not from real blindness. His
diagnosis was :"A.Hitler, psychopath, hysterical symptoms."

In early 1919, Obergefreiter (Lance Corporal) Adolf Hitler, heavily decorated and a War
hero, was still mobilized and returned to his regiment in Munich. There he underwent a
Reichswehr sponsored course of systematic political education for demobilizing soldiers that
featured Pan- German nationalism, antisemitism, and anti-socialism.

These same themes were prominent in Bavarian politics following the repression of the
Munich revolution of 1918-19. Because antisemitism had not played a notable part in
Bavarian politics prior to the revolutionary disturbances, a certain 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 above-mentioned
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 and was eager
to please his hierarchy. All of a sudden, his prewar feelings could be marshaled into a global
anti-semitic description of the current situation of post-war Germany.

Four days before responding to Gemlich in the letter translated below, he had paid his first
visit to the German Workers' Party (who became later the National Socialist Workers' Party
or NSDAP) as a confidential agent of the Reichswehr.

He was not yet a member of the party but had been approached by Anton Drexler, his
founder, to become one and he had already more or less set his mind as he wrote later in
Mein Kampf.

In the letter to Gemlich he appears anxious to establish his credentials as a knowledgeable
and sober anti-semite. Compared to the inflammatory mass-meeting 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. In 1919, Hitler is nothing else than a traitor to his
ex-comrades at the front, an odious snitch ready to make a stoolpigeon of himself in order to
please his superiors whose anti-semitism was profusely met by the young Corporal. The
"compte-rendu" below demonstrates the extent of his prejudices and the flimsiness of his
ideas.

HITLER'S  ANTI-SEMITISM : A SLOW  PROCESS
THE LETTER TO  HERR  GEMLICH....
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 leaves--almost
always an unfavorable one.
For this reason, antisemitism is too easily characterizedas a
mere emotional phenomenon. And yet this is incorrect.
Antisemitism as a political movement may not and cannot
bedefined 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.