German foreign policy memorandum (1939)

This German foreign policy memorandum from early 1939 outlines the Nazi regime’s position with regard to its Jewish population, “the emigration of all Jews living in German territory”:

German Foreign Policy Memorandum, January 1939
Subject: The Jewish Question as a Factor in Foreign Policy in 1938.

“It is probably no coincidence that the fateful year of 1938 brought not only the realization of the concept of a Greater Germany but at the same time has brought the Jewish question close to solution…

The ultimate aim of Germany’s Jewish policy is the emigration of all Jews living in German territory… The Jew has been eliminated from politics and culture, but until 1938 his powerful economic position in Germany and his tenacious determination to hold out until the return of “better times” remained unbroken…

As long as the Jew could still make money in the German economy there was, in the eyes of world Jewry, no need to give up the Jewish bastion in Germany. But the Jew had underestimated the consistency and strength of the National-Socialist idea. Together with the complex of states in central Europe, created at Versailles for the purpose of holding Germany down, the Jewish position of strength in Vienna and Prague also collapsed. With its race legislation, Italy took its place by the side of Germany in the struggle against Jewry…

It is understandable that world Jewry, which “has chosen America as its headquarters,” recognizes as its own defeat the Munich agreement, which in the American view signifies the collapse of the democratic front in Europe. Experience has shown that the system of parliamentary democracy has always aided the Jews to obtain wealth and political power at the expense of the host nation. It is probably for the first time in modern history that Jewry must now retreat from a previously secure position.

This is the program of German foreign policy as regards the Jewish question. Germany has an important interest in seeing the splintering of Jewry maintained. Those who argue that this will cause the creation of sources of boycott and anti-German centres all over the world disregard a development already evident, that the influx of Jews arouses the resistance of the native population in all parts of the world and thus provides the best propaganda for Germany’s policy towards the Jews.

In North America, in South America, in France, in Holland, Scandinavia and Greece wherever the stream of Jewish migrants has poured in, a clear increase in anti-Semitism has already been recorded. It must be an aim of German foreign policy to strengthen this wave of anti-Semitism…

The poorer the Jewish immigrant is and the greater the burden he constitutes for the country into which he has immigrated, the stronger the reaction will be in the host country, and the more desirable the effect in support of German propaganda. The aim of this German policy is a future international solution of the Jewish question, dictated not by false pity for a “Jewish religious minority that has been driven out” but by the mature realization by all nations of the nature of the danger that Jewry spells for the national character of the nations.”