The Holocaust:
Nazi Officers on the "Jewish Question

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Adolf Hitler

Today I will once more be a prophet: If the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the bolshevization of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!

Hitler speaking to a crowd at the Sports Palace in Berlin, January 30 1942 (Quoted in The Holocaust, by Martin Gilbert, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, NY, 1985, p. 285. Text as monitored by the Foreign Broadcast Monitoring Service, Federal Communications Commission).

And we say that the war will not end as the Jews imagine it will, namely with the uprooting of the Aryans, but the result of this war will be the complete annihilation of the Jews.

Excerpts from the meeting between Hitler and the Mufti, Haj Amin Husseini, on 28 November 1941. The notes were taken by Dr. Paul Otto Schmidt and are quoted in Gerald Fleming's Hitler and the Final Solution, p. 101-104. Also geheime Reichssache 57 a/41, Records Dept. Foreign and Commonwealth Office Pa/2:

The Führer then made the following declaration, requesting the Mufti to lock it deep in his heart:

1) He (the Führer) would carry on the fight until the last traces of the Jewish-Communist European hegemony had been obliterated.

2) In the course of this fight, the German army would - at a time that could not yet be specified, but in any case in the clearly foreseeable future - gain the southern exit of Caucasus.

3) As soon as this breakthrough was made, the Führer would offer the Arab world his personal assurance that the hour of liberation had struck. Thereafter, Germany's only remaining objective in the region would be limited to the annihilation of the Jews living under British protection in Arab lands.

Hitler, quoted in Hitler, by Joachim Fest, Vintage Books Edition, 1974, p. 679-680:

Nature is cruel; therefore we are also entitled to be cruel. When I send the flower of German youth into the steel hail of the next war without feeling the slightest regret over the precious German blood that is being spilled, should I not also have the right to eliminate millions of an inferior race that multiplies like vermin?

Reichsfuehrer-SS Himmler

Speech by Reichsfuehrer-SS Himmler before senior SS officers in Poznan, October 4 and 6, 1943 (Trials of War Criminals Before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals - Washington, U.S Govt. Print. Off., 1949-1953, Vol. XIII, p. 323, and Himmler, Reichsfuehrer-SS - P. Padfield, Henry Holt and Co, NY, 1990, p. 469):

I mean the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish race. It's one of those things it is easy to talk about, "the Jewish race is being exterminated", says one party member, "that's quite clear, it's in our program, elimination of the Jews, and we're doing it, exterminating them". And then they come, 80 million worthy Germans, and each one has his decent Jew. Of course the others are vermin, but this one is an A-1 Jew. Not one of those who talk this way has watched it, not one of them has gone through it. Most of you know what it means when 100 corpses are lying side by side, or 500, or 1,000. To have stuck it out and at the same time - apart from exceptions caused by human weakness - to have remained decent fellows, that is what has made us hard. This is a page of glory in our history which has never been written and is never to be written.

I ask of you that what I say in this circle you really only hear and never speak of. We come to the question: how is it with the women and the children? I have resolved even here on a completely clear solution. That is to say I do not consider myself justified in eradicating the men - so to speak killing or ordering them killed - and allowing the avengers in the shape of the children to grow up for our sons and grandsons. The difficult decision has to be taken, to cause this Volk [people] to disappear from the earth.

[This speech was recorded; the magnetic tapes are in the National Archives in Washington, DC]

Speech by Himmler at Kharkow, April 1943 (Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression - Washington, U.S Govt. Print. Off., 1946, Vol. IV, p. 572-574):

We have - I would say, as very consistent National Socialists, taken the question of blood as our starting point. We were the first really to solve the problem of blood by action, and in this connection, by problem of blood, we of course do not mean antisemitism. Antisemitism is exactly the same as delousing. Getting rid of lice is not a question of ideology. It is a matter of cleanliness.

Joseph Goebbels

The Goebbels [Reich Propaganda Minister] Diaries, February 14, 1942 (The Goebbels Diaries 1942-1943 - L.P. Lochner, Doubleday & Co., 1948, p. 86):

World Jewry will suffer a great catastrophe at the same time as Bolshevism. The Führer once more expressed his determination to clean up the Jews in Europe pitilessly. There must be no squeamish sentimentalism about it. The Jews have deserved the catastrophe that has now overtaken them. Their destruction will now go hand in hand with the destruction of our enemies. We must hasten this process with cold ruthlessness.

The Goebbels [Reich Propaganda Minister] diaries, March 27, 1942 (The Goebbels Diaries 1942-1943- L.P. Lochner, Doubleday & Co., 1948, p. 147-148):

Beginning with Lublin, the Jews in the General Government [Nazi occupied Poland] are now being evacuated eastward. The procedure is a pretty barbaric one and not to be described here more definitely. Not much will remain of the Jews. On the whole it can be said that about 60 per cent of them will have to be liquidated whereas only 40 per cent can be used for forced labor.

Hans Frank

Speech by Hans Frank [Governor of occupied Poland], to German soldiers in Poland, urging them to write home (Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression - Washington, U.S Govt. Print. Off., 1946, Vol. II, p. 633-634):

In all these weeks, they [i.e., your families] will be thinking of you, saying to themselves: my God, there he sits in Poland where there are so many lice and Jews, perhaps he is hungry and cold, perhaps he is afraid to write. It would not be a bad idea to send our dear ones back home a picture, and tell them: well now, there are not so many lice and Jews any more, and conditions here in the General Government have changed and improved somewhat already. Of course, I could not eliminate all lice and Jews in only one year's time. But in the course of time, and above all, if you help me, this end will be attained. After all, it is not necessary for us to accomplish everything within a year and right away, for what would otherwise be left for those who follow us to do?

Speech by Hans Frank [Governor of occupied Poland], December 16, 1941 (Documents on the Holocaust - Edited by Y. Arad, Y. Gutman, A. Margaliot, NY, Ktav Pub. House in Association with Yad-Vashem, 1981, p. 247, Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression - Washington, U.S Govt. Print. Off., 1946 Vol. II p. 634):

One way or another -- I will tell you quite openly -- we must finish off the Jews. The Führer put it into words once: should united Jewry again succeed in setting off a world war, then the blood sacrifice shall not be made only by the peoples driven into war, but then the Jew of Europe will have met his end....

But what should be done with the Jews? Can you believe that they will be accommodated in settlements in the Ostland? In Berlin we were told: why are you making all this trouble? We don't want them either, not in Ostland nor in the Reichskommissariat; liquidate them yourselves! Gentlemen, I must ask you to steel yourselves against all considerations of compassion. We must destroy the Jews wherever we find them, and wherever it is at all possible, in order to maintain the whole structure of the Reich...

The Jews represent for us also extraordinary malignant gluttons. We have now approximately 2,500,000 of them in the General Government [Nazi occupied Poland], perhaps with the Jewish mixtures and everything that goes with it, 3,500,000 Jews. We cannot shoot or poison those 3,500,000 Jews, but we shall nevertheless be able to take measures which will lead somehow to their annihilation, and this in connection with the gigantic measures to be determined in discussions with the Reich.

Hugo H�ppenerner

Enclosed is a memorandum on the results of various discussions held locally in the office of the Reich Governor...

Subject: Solution of the Jewish question

4) This winter there is a danger that not all of the Jews can be fed anymore. One might weigh honestly, if the most humane solution might not be to finish off those of the Jews who are not employable by means of some quick-working device. At any rate, that would be more pleasant than to let them starve to death.

5) For the rest, the proposal was made that in this camp all the Jewish women, from whom one could still expect children, should be sterilized so that the Jewish problem may actually be solved completely with this generation.

Dr. Erhard Wetzel

Excerpted from a memorandum dated 27 April, 1942 by Dr. Erhard Wetzel (attorney), who was serving as desk officer in the Reich Ministry for the Eastern Territories (Nazism: A History in Documents and Eyewitness Accounts, 1919-1945, Volume II, J.Noakes and G. Pridham, editors. Schocken Books, New York, (c)1988 by the Dept. of History and Archeology, University of Exeter. ISBN 0-8053-0973-5 (vol. 1), 0-8052-0972-7 (vol. 2). Document #690 on p.979):

Re: the Solution of the Polish Question

...It should be obvious that one cannot solve the Polish problem by liquidating the Poles in the same way as the Jews. Such a solution to the Polish problem would burden the German people with guilt for years to come and lose us the sympathies of people everywhere, particularly since our neighbors would be bound to reckon that they would be treated in the same way when the time came.

Wilhelm Kube

A letter to Rosenberg enclosing reports from Generalkommisar for White Russia, Wilhelm Kube, about the extermination of Jews in the east, June 18, 1943 (Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression - Washington, U.S Govt. Print. Off., 1946, Vol I, p. 1001):