Hitler, Adolf

Adolf Hitler (20 April 1889 – 30 April 1945) is the central figure in the Holocaust narrative. Considering the monolithic nature of Hitler’s dictatorship, his decisions, orders and decrees are what should have caused, started and shaped the progress of the Holocaust. Yet when we look at the historical records, all we have are some general threats uttered during polemic speeches which Hitler used to shape public opinion.

In Hitler’s political manifesto Mein Kampf (My Struggle), one notable statement about the Jews is the following:

“In defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.” (Vol. 1, 2.27)

This evidently referred to passages in the New Testament, according to which Jesus made critical remarks about the Jewish political, religious and financial elite of his time. (See Matthew 12:34, 23:33, 27:25; Luke 16:14; John 8:44)

The worst threat Hitler ever uttered in public happened during his address to the German parliament (the Reichstag) on 30 January 1939:

“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 [Vernichtung] of the Jewish race in Europe, for the time when the non-Jewish nations had no propaganda is at an end. National-Socialist Germany and Fascist Italy have institutions which enable them when necessary to enlighten the world about the nature of a question of which many nations are instinctively conscious, but which they have not yet clearly thought out.

[…] If this [Jewish] nation should once more succeed in inciting the millions which compose the nations into a conflict which is utterly senseless and only serves Jewish interests, then there will be revealed the effectiveness of an enlightenment which has completely routed the Jews in Germany in the space of a few years. The nations are no longer willing to die on the battlefield so that this unstable international race may profiteer from a war or satisfy its Old Testament vengeance.”

Hence, Hitler predicted the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe, not by bullets or gas, but by way of enlightening the world with propaganda about the true nature of the Jew. Genocide by propaganda!

On 30 January 1941, during another address to the Reichstag, Hitler explained his prophecy of 1939 as follows:

“And I should like to repeat the warning that I have already once given, on 1 September 1939 [correct: 30 January 1939], in the German Reichstag: namely, the warning that, if Jewry drives the world into a general war, the role Jewry plays in Europe will be over!”

Here we have the annihilation of the Jews by way of ending Jewry’s influential role in economy, politics, and culture.

On 25 October 1941, two days after Himmler had stopped all Jewish emigration, allegedly because Hitler gave the (oral) order for the Holocaust, we have the following statement from Hitler. It was uttered during a private dinner with his closest co-conspirators and top executors of the Holocaust, SS chief Heinrich Himmler and the head of Germany’s Department of Homeland Security (Reichssicherheitshauptamt), Reinhardt Heydrich:

“In parliament [30 January of 1939 and 1941], I prophesied Jewry that the Jew will disappear from Europe if war is not avoided. This criminal race has to account for two million deaths in World War I, and now again hundreds of thousands. Don’t anybody tell me that we cannot send them into the morass! Who cares about our people? It is good if the terror precedes us that we are exterminating Jewry. The attempt to create a Jewish state will be a failure!”

This time, it is extermination by letting Jews disappear from Europe by way of sending them into the morass – which was a reference to the Belorussian swamps, one focus of Germany’s planned resettlement projects.

No trace of a written order by Hitler to start the murder of the Jews has ever been found. (See the next entry on the Hitler Order.) Worse still, not a single hint at an ongoing slaughter of millions can be found in any of Hitler’s utterances made when dining with his closest friends and confidants. These monologues were meticulously recorded for years by his secretaries, but they leave us baffled as to their complete silence about the presumably ongoing Holocaust. Here in short sequence are a few more of Hitler’s statements during his private dinners with his friends (emphases added):

19 November 1941, after Hitler had supposedly issued the oral genocide order, as some orthodox historians claim:

“If today some citizens cried because Jews have to emigrate from Germany, then this throws a light on these types of self-righteous philistines.”

12 January 1942, when mass exterminations had presumably started at the Chełmno Camp:

“The Jews are the chosen dumbest people: they should, for God’s sake, never have instigated this war. They will disappear from Europe. All because of a few fools!”

25 January 1942, hence shortly after the Wannsee Conference:

“If I extract the Jew today, then our bourgeoisie becomes distressed. What happens to him? But did the same people care what happened to those Germans who had to emigrate? […] The Jew must leave Europe. Otherwise we won’t come to a European understanding. […] At the end of it: I don’t know, I’m being so colossally humane. At the time of the papal reign in Rome, Jews were maltreated. […] I simply say: they must go. If he goes phut in the process, I can’t help it. I see only one thing: absolute extermination, if they won’t go voluntarily.”

27 January 1942:

“The Jews must get out of Europe! It is best they go to Russia. I don’t have any pity on the Jews.”

4 April 1942, after mass extermination allegedly started at Auschwitz and Belzec:

“It is therefore indicative that the upper classes, who never cared for the hundreds of thousands of German emigrants and their hardship, now feel pity on the Jews, although the Jews have their accomplices throughout the entire world and are the most climate-resistant species there is. Jews thrive everywhere, even in Lapland and Siberia.”

15 May 1942, after mass extermination allegedly started at the Sobibór Camp:

“Our so-called bourgeoisie laments over the same Jew who stabbed us in the back in the past when he is deported to the East. […]

If a pronounced population parasite is rendered harmless on behalf of the state by slaying him, for instance, then the entire bourgeoisie screams that this is a brutish state. […]

Not a single one of those who shed crocodile tears at the deportation of the Jews to the east considers that the Jew as a parasite is the most climate-resistant individual on the planet who, in contrast to the German, gets accustomed to Lapland as much as to the tropics.”

29 May 1942:

“All of western Europe must be freed of the Jews within a given period. […] It is therefore not recommendable to deport them to Siberia because with their climate-resistance, they would only become even more hardened. It is better – as the Arabs don’t want them in Palestine – to transport them to Africa and thus submit them to a climate which impairs every person of our resilience, thereby eliminating all points of common spheres of interest with the European part of humanity.”

24 July 1942, when mass extermination is said to have just started at the Treblinka Camp:

“After the end of the war he [Hitler] will rigorously take the position that he will destroy one city after another, if the Jews don’t come out and emigrate to Madagascar or some other Jewish homeland.”

Other documents clearly show that Hitler wanted the “solution of the Jewish question” postponed until after the war. For example, a memo of the Reich Chancellery dating from March or April of 1942 states that Hitler had repeatedly informed Lammers, the head of the chancellery, “that he wanted to postpone the solution of the Jewish question until after the war.” Therefore, all wartime measures were to be only temporary in nature.

Here is how German mainstream historian Joachim Fest, in his vast biography on Hitler, summarized Hitler’s baffling Holocaust denial in his many private statements to his alleged main accomplices, but also in other contexts (Fest 1973, p. 931; 1975, p. 681):

“For in the table talk, the speeches, the documents or the recollections of participants from all those years not a single concrete reference of [Hitler] to the practice of annihilation has come down to us. No one can say how Hitler reacted to the reports of the Einsatzgruppen, whether he asked for or saw films or photos of their work, and whether he intervened with suggestions, praise, or blame. When we consider that he ordinarily transformed everything that preoccupied him into rampant speechmaking, that he never concealed his radicalism, his vulgarity, his readiness to go to extremes, this silence about the central concern of his life – involving, as it did in his mind, the salvation of the world – seems all the stranger.”

In his book Hitler’s War, British historian David Irving concluded that Hitler didn’t know what Himmler and Heydrich were doing behind his back – which seems quite unbelievable. It appears more appropriate to conclude that Hitler had to fight a war against the entire world. The skirmish against the Jews, small in comparison, simply wasn’t important enough for him to care too much.

(See also the next entry on the Hitler Order as well as the entry on Extirpation; for more details, see Werner 2019, pp. 25-31; Dalton 2023; Graf/Kues/Mattogno 2020, pp. 209-226.)