Hitler

Heydrich. The conversation again revolved mainly around the connections of Jewry and Christianity. Hitler reminded his guests and his regular entourage of his ‘prophecy’. ‘This criminal race has the two million dead of the World War on its conscience,’ he went on, and ‘now again hundreds of thousands. Don’t anyone tell me we can’t send them into the marshes! Who bothers, then, about our people? It’s good when the horror precedes us that we are exterminating Jewry.’ Though lacking coherence, these notes of Hitler’s rantings point to his knowledge of the attempts – eventually given up – in the summer to drown Jewish women by driving them into the Pripet marshes. Hitler’s allocation of guilt for the dead of the First World War and the current war to the Jews, and the recourse once more to his ‘prophecy’, underline his certainty that the destruction of Jewry was imminent. But the consequences flowing from the deportation order of the previous month had still to merge into the full genocidal programme.
    On the evening of 5 November, remarks about the ‘racial inferiority’ of the English lower class led Hitler once more into a monologue about the Jews. As usual, he linked it to the war. This was the ‘most idiotic war’ that the British had ever begun, he ranted, and would lead in defeat to an outbreak of antisemitism in Britain which would be without parallel. The end of the war, he proclaimed, would bring ‘the fall of the Jew’. He then unleashed an extraordinary verbal assault on the lack of ability and creativity of Jews in every walk of life but one: lying and cheating. The Jew’s ‘entire building will collapse if he is refused a following’, he went on. ‘I’ve always said the Jews are the most stupid devils that exist. They don’t have a true musician, thinker, no art, nothing, absolutely nothing. They are liars, forgers, deceivers. They’ve only got anywhere through the simple-mindedness of those around them. If the Jew were not washed by the aryan, he wouldn’t be able to see out of his eyes for filth. We can live without the Jews. But they can’t live without us.’
    The links, as he saw them, between the Jews and the war that theyhad allegedly inspired, now also, after years in which he had scarcely mentioned the Jews, found a prominent place in his public speeches. But, whatever the rhetorical flourishes, whatever the propaganda motive in appealing to the antisemitic instincts of his hard-core supporters in the party, there cannot be the slightest doubt, on the basis of his private comments, that Hitler believed in what he said.
    In his speech to the party’s ‘Old Guard’ on 8 November (a date of especial significance in the Nazi calendar, linking the anniversaries of the putsch and the allegedly Jewish-inspired Revolution of 1918), Hitler pressed home the theme of Jewish guilt for the war. Despite the victories of the previous year, he stated, he had still worried because of his recognition that behind the war stood ‘the international Jew’. They had poisoned the peoples through their control of the press, radio, film, and theatre; they had made sure that rearmament and war would benefit their business and financial interests; he had come to know the Jews as the instigators of world conflagration. England, under Jewish influence, had been the driving-force of the ‘world-coalition against the German people’. But it had been inevitable that the Soviet Union, ‘the greatest servant of Jewry’, would one day confront the Reich. Since then it had become plain that the Soviet state was dominated by Jewish commissars. Stalin, too, was no more than ‘an instrument in the hand of this almighty Jewry’. Behind him stood ‘all those Jews who in thousandfold ramification lead this powerful empire’. This ‘insight’, Hitler suggested, had weighed heavily upon him, and compelled him to face the danger from the east.
    Hitler returned to the alleged ‘destructive character’ of the Jews when talking again to his usual captive audience in the Wolf ’s Lair in the small hours of 1–2 December. Again, there was a hint, but no more than that, of what Hitler saw as the natural justice being meted out to the Jews: ‘he who destroys life, exposes himself to death. And nothing other than this is happening to them’ – to the Jews. The gas-vans of Chelmno would start killing the Jews of the Warthegau in those very days. In Hitler’s warped mentality, such