The Political Situation
Politics is the conduct and process of the historical
struggle for the life of nations. The aim of these struggles is survival.
Idealistic struggles over world views ( Weltanschauung ) also have their
ultimate causes, and draw their deepest motivating power from purposes
and aims in life that derive from national (voelklich ) sources. But
religions and world views can give such struggles an especial sharpness
and by this means endow them with a great historic effectiveness. They
can put their mark on the character of centuries. It is then not possible
for nations and states which exist within the sphere of influence of
such conflicts of philosophical or religious nature to stand apart or
exclude themselves from these events....
Since the beginning of the French Revolution the world
has been drifting with increasing speed towards a new conflict, whose
most extreme solution is named Bolshevism, but whose content and aim
is only the removal of those strata of society which gave the leadership
to humanity up to the present, and their replacing by international
Jewry....
It is not the purpose of this memorandum to prophesy
when the intolerable situation in Europe will become an open crisis.
In these lines I wish only to record my conviction that this crisis
cannot and will not fail to arrive, and that Germany has a duty to make
its own existence secure by all possible means in face of this catastrophe
and to protect itself against it; a number of conclusions follow from
this necessity, and these involve the most important tasks that our
nation has ever faced. For a victory of Bolshevism over Germany would
not lead to a Versailles Treaty, but to the final destruction, even
the extermination of the German people....
The extent of such a catastrophe cannot be foreseen.
How, indeed, would the whole of densely populated Western Europe (including
Germany) after a collapse into Bolshevism, live through probably the
most gruesome catastrophe for the peoples which has been visited upon
mankind since the downfall of the States of antiquity.
Faced with the need to fend off this danger, all other
considerations must be relegated to the background as totally without
significance....
Sources: Akten zur deutschen auswaertigen Politik
1918-1945 ("Documents on German Foreign Policy 1918-1945"),
series E (1933-1937), Vol. V, 2. Goettingen, 1977, pp. 793-795; Yad
Vashem