Despite the prominence given to the Jewish question in Chancellor Adolf Hitler’s speech to the Reichstag yesterday, the problem was largely relegated to the background in today’s press, whose voluminous quotations from foreign newspapers did not indicate that the warning of possible annihilation of the Jews had aroused any interest.
Nevertheless, there was no disposition here to under-estimate the importance of the Fuehrer’s insistence that the Jewish problem must be solved, nor was it considered unimportant that the applause greeting the reference was nearly as great as that greeting references to the Greater Reich. There is no question that, whatever the man in the street thinks, the Nazi Party leaders are as thoroughly and as radically anti-Semitic as ever.
Whether further concrete anti-Jewish measures are to be expected immediately is neither affirmed nor denied with certainty. Hitler spoke in even sharper terms against “Jewish agitators” and “war-mongers” in his Reichstag address last February, yet concrete results were not forthcoming until somewhat later.
The feeling here is definitely that should, by some miracle, wholesale possibilities for emigration open soon, then the Jews may escape the suffering of a second November Tenth (the day that anti-Jewish excesses broke out in 1938) or worse. Otherwise, there is no telling what new torments will be inflicted on the great body of Jews who have to remain in the Reich and face eventual starvation.
In this connection, it was announced that the final meeting regarding emigration between George Rublee, director of the Intergovernmental Refugee Bureau, and Dr. Helmuth Wohlthat, ministerial director of the Economics Ministry, will be held tomorrow. The Rublee mission expects to leave for London tomorrow evening. A spokesman for the mission declared that only a few points remained to be clarified.
Hitler’s references to the Jews during his speech of more than two hours, as issued in an official translation, follow:
“In connection with the Jewish question, I have this to say: It is a shameful spectacle to see how the whole democratic world is oozing sympathy for the poor tormented Jewish people, but remains hard-hearted and obdurate when it comes to helping them, which is surely, in view of its attitude, an obvious duty. The arguments that are brought up as an excuse for not helping them actually speak for us Germans and Italians. For this is what they say: ‘We’ – that is, the democracies – ‘are not in a position to take in the Jews.’ Yet in these empires there are not even ten people to the square kilometer. While Germany with her 140 inhabitants to the square kilometer is supposed to have room for them! Second, they assure us: ‘We cannot take them unless Germany is prepared to allow them a certain amount of capital to bring with them as immigrants.’
“For hundreds of years Germany was good enough to receive these elements, although they possessed nothing except infectious political and physical diseases. What they possess today, they have by far the largest extent gained at the cost of the less astute German nation by the most reprehensible manipulations. Today we are merely paying this people what they deserve……
“I think the sooner this problem is solved the better, for Europe cannot settle down until the Jewish question is cleared up. It may very well be possible that sooner or later an agreement on this problem may be reached in Europe, even between those nations that otherwise do not so easily come together. The world has sufficient space for settlement, but we must once and for all get rid of the opinion that the Jewish race was only created by God for the purpose of being in a certain percentage a parasite living on the body and the productive work of other nations. The Jewish race will have to adapt itself to sound constructive activity as other nations do, or sooner or later it will succumb to a crisis of an inconceivable magnitude.
“One thing I should like to say on this day, which may be memorable for others as well as for us Germans: In the course of my life I have very often been a prophet and have usually been ridiculed for it……Today I will once more be a prophet. If the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the bolshevization of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!……..”
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
