ABSTRACT
In September of 1919, Adolf Hitler penned a letter to a certain Herr Gemlich that held great portent for the future. In this communication, Hitler expounded on the great danger represented by the Jews for the people of Germany. AntiSemitism, he wrote, was a logical outcome of this threat, for the Jews "knew only the majesty of money" and, moreover, "destroyed national pride, the strength of the people, through ridicule and the shameless teaching of vice." To satisfy their hunger for power and money, Jews took special pains to control public opinion through the press and to charge exorbitant interest rates in their economic affairs. Drawing from medical terminology, Hitler concluded that a new kind of anti-Semitism was in order to fight this "racial tuberculosis of the people." As a political movement, anti-Semitism could not, Hitler insisted, be determined by "the moments of emotion, but rather through a knowledge of facts." These facts, as Hitler called them, included the assumption that Jews were first and foremost members of a race and not a religion. This implied that Jews were both non-German and foreign in Hitler's perspective on the body politic. In looking ahead, Hitler insisted on the development of a "rational antiSemitism" supported by a "well-planned legal battle" to "eliminate Jewish privileges." The final goal, the future dictator noted, must be the overall removal of the Jews.1 Fourteen years later, in the wake of Hitler's rise to power, the sentiments expressed in this letter would find an even more powerful voice in the form of a racial state.
