“Ten Commandments” against Jews will be issued by Joseph Goebbels this Sunday with a view of counteracting the growing sympathy for Jews among certain elements of the German population which disapprove of the deportations of German Jews to Poland and of the yellow Mogen David which the Jews in Germany must wear.
The “ten commandments” will be published in Das Reich, weekly publication of the Ministry of Propaganda and will appear under Goebbels’ signature. They will also be broadcast over the German radio with a warning from Goebbels that any German who displays sympathy to a Jew will be considered an enemy of the Reich.
Goebbels, in the forthcoming issue of Das Reich, explains that Hitler long ago predicted the extermination of all Jews in Europe and that this prediction is now being carried out without any sentimentalities. “The fate of the Jews is indeed hard, but they are suffering no injustice by the treatment we bestow upon them because they more than earned it,” the article of the Nazi Minister of Propaganda states.
“In this historical showdown,” Goebbels writes, “every Jew is our enemy, irrespective of the fact whether he is rotting in a ghetto in Poland, or continues his parasitic existence in Germany, or conducts war propaganda in New York and Washington.” Goebbels then lists his anti-Jewish commandments as follows:
1. The Jews are our ruination. They contrived and brought on this war. With it they want to destroy the German Reich and our people. This plan must be thwarted.
2. There is no difference among Jews. Every Jew is the sworn enemy of the German people.
3. Every German soldier who falls in this war enters a debt in the account of the Jews. They have him on their consciences and therefore must pay for it.
4. If one wears the Jewish Star of David he thereby is marked as the people’s enemy. Any one who, despite that, still cultivates private relations with him belongs to him and must be appraised and treated the same as the Jew.
5. Jews are enjoying the protection of enemy foreign countries. Further proof of their destructive role among our people is unnecessary.
6. Jews are the enemy’s emissaries among us. Whoever stands at their side deserts to the enemy in war.
7. The Jews have no right to pose among us as equals. Wherever they speak up in the street, in the lines before the stores and in transportation vehicles, they are to be silenced not only because they are fundamentally wrong but because they are Jews and have no voice in the community.
8. If Jews come to you in a sentimental manner, then realize that they are attempting to take advantage of your forgetfulness; show them immediately that you see through them and punish them with ostracism.
9. After defeat, the decent enemy deserves our generosity. But the Jew is no decent enemy, he merely acts like one.
10. Jews are to blame for the war. They are suffering no injustice in the treatment we bestow on them. They more than earned it.
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.
