Hitler on the Jews (1922)

Adolf Hitler on the Jews, taken from the transcript of a speech given to NSDAP members in July 1922:

“It is a battle which began nearly 120 years ago, at the moment when the Jew was granted citizen rights in the European States. The political emancipation of the Jews was the beginning of an attack of delirium. For thereby they were given full citizen rights and equality to a people which was much more clearly and definitely a race apart than all others.

The Jew will always be the born champion of private capital in its worst form, that of unchecked exploitation… Voltaire, as well as Rousseau, together with our German Fichte and many another – they are all without exception united in their recognition that the Jew is not only a foreign element differing in his essential character, which is utterly harmful to the nature of the Aryan, but that the Jewish people in itself stands against us as our deadly foe and so will stand against us always and for all time.

The master-stroke of the Jew was to claim the leadership of the fourth estate [press]. He founded the Movement both of the Social Democrats and the Communists. His policy was twofold: he had his ‘apostles’ in both political camps. Amongst the parties of the Right, he encouraged those features which were most repugnant to the people – the passion for money, unscrupulous methods in trade which were employed so ruthlessly as to give rise to the proverb ‘Business, too, marches over corpses.’ And the Jew attacked the parties of the Right. Jews wormed their way into the families of the upper classes: it was from the Jews that the latter took their wives. The result was that in a short time it was precisely the ruling class which became in its character completely estranged from its own people.

That is the lurking danger, and the Jew can meet it in one way only – by destroying the hostile national intelligentsia. That is the inevitable ultimate goal of the Jew in his revolution. And this aim he must pursue; he knows well enough his economics brings no blessing: his is no master people: he is an exploiter: the Jews are a people of robbers. He has never founded any civilisation, though he has destroyed civilisations by the hundred. He possesses nothing of his own creation to which he can point.

Everything that he has is stolen. Foreign peoples, foreign workmen build him his temples, it is foreigners who create and work for him: it is foreigners who shed their blood for him. He knows no ‘people’s army’: he has only hired mercenaries who are ready to go to death on his behalf. He has no art of his own: bit by bit he has stolen it all from the other peoples or has watched them at work and then made his copy. He does not even know how merely to preserve the precious things which others have created: as he turns the treasures over in his hand they are transformed into dirt and dung. He knows that he cannot maintain any State for long. That is one of the differences between him and the Aryan.

True, the Aryan also has dominated other peoples. But how? He entered on the land, he cleared the forests; out of wildernesses he has created civilisations, and he has not used the others for his own interests, he has, so far as their capacities permitted, incorporated them into his State and through him art and science were brought to flower. In the last resort, it was the Aryan and the Aryan alone who could form States and could set them on their path to future greatness.

All that the Jew cannot do. And because he cannot do it, therefore all his revolutions must be ‘international.’ They must spread as a pestilence spreads. He can build no State and say ‘See here, Here stands the State, a model for all. Now copy us!’ He must take care that the plague does not die, that it is not limited to one place, or else in a short time this plague-hearth would burn itself out. So he is forced to bring every mortal thing to an international expansion. For how long? Until the whole world sinks in ruins and brings him down with it in the midst of the ruins.”