ABSTRACT
In a frequently quoted speech in the Reichstag on 30 January 1939 Hitler announced: ‘Today I shall once again be a prophet: if international finance Jewry, in Europe and abroad, again succeeds in plunging the peoples into a world war, the result will not be the Bolshevising of the earth and thus the victory of Jewry, but the destruction of the Jewish race in Europe.’ This threat was repeated in at least seven further speeches in the Reichstag between September 1939 and November 1943. Innumerable other examples of threats that the Jews would not only be deported from Germany but also murdered could be given from speeches and articles in the years before the war. On 16 November 1941 Goebbels wrote a lengthy article in ‘Das Reich’, the leading quality weekly in Nazi Germany, in which he claimed that Hitler’s prophecy of 30 January 1939 had been realised. ‘World Jewry has made a complete miscalculation in starting this war and of the means at their disposal, and they are now suffering a gradual process of destruction which they had planned for us, and which they would have carried out had they had the power to do so.’
