Evacuation of the Jews
...
I also want to speak to you here, in complete frankness,
of a really grave chapter. Amongst ourselves, for once, it shall be said
quite openly, but all the same we will never speak about it in public. Just
as we did not hesitate on June 30, 1934,* to do our duty as we were
ordered, and to stand comrades who had erred against the wall and shoot
them, and we never spoke about it and we never will speak about it. It was
a matter of natural tact that is alive in us, thank God, that we never
talked about it amongst ourselves, that we never discussed it. Each of us
shuddered and yet each of us knew clearly that the next time he would do it
again if it were an order, and if it were necessary.
I am referring here to the evacuation of the Jews, the
extermination of the Jewish people. This is one of the things that is
easily said: "The Jewish people are going to be exterminated,"
that’s what every Party member says, "sure, it’s in our program,
elimination of the Jews, extermination – it’ll be done." And then
they all come along, the 80 million worthy Germans, and each one has his
one decent Jew. Of course, the others are swine, but this one, he is a
first-rate Jew. Of all those who talk like that, not one has seen it
happen, not one has had to go through with it. Most of you men know what it
is like to see 100 corpses side by side, or 500 or 1,000. To have stood
fast through this and – except for cases of human weakness – to have
stayed decent, that has made us hard. This is an unwritten and
never-to-be-written page of glory in our history, for we know how difficult
it would be for us if today – under bombing raids and the hardships and
deprivations of war – if we were still to have the Jews in every city as
secret saboteurs, agitators, and inciters. If the Jews were still lodged in
the body of the German nation, we would probably by now have reached the
stage of 1916-17.
The wealth they possessed we took from them. I gave a
strict order, which has been carried out by SS Obergruppenfuehrer Pohl, that this wealth will of course be turned over to the Reich in its
entirety. We have taken none of it for ourselves. Individuals who have
erred will be punished in accordance with the order given by me at the
start, threatening that anyone who takes as much as a single Mark of this
money is a dead man. A number of SS men – they are not very many –
committed this offense, and they shall die. There will be no mercy. We had
the moral right, we had the duty towards our people, to destroy this people
that wanted to destroy us. But we do not have the right to enrich ourselves
by so much as a fur, as a watch, by one Mark or a cigarette or anything
else. We do not want, in the end, because we destroyed a bacillus, to be
infected by this bacillus and to die. I will never stand by and watch while
even a small rotten spot develops or takes hold. Wherever it may form we
will together burn it away. All in all, however, we can say that we have
carried out this most difficult of tasks in a spirit of love for our
people. And we have suffered no harm to our inner being, our soul, our
character....
PS-1919.
* The reference is to "the
night of the long knives" – murder of Roehm, SA leaders and
other purges.