AI
Sunday, June 12, 2011 3:50:50 AM
The Seeds of Hitler's Hatred: Infamous 1919 Genocide Letter Unveiled to the Public
Adolf Hitler, pictured in 1930, is believed to have first documented his anti-Semitic beliefs in the Gemlich letter, written in 1919
Getty Images
By Nate Rawlings
Wednesday, June 08, 2011
In September 1919, the year after the end of World War I, a German captain named Karl Mayr, who ran a propaganda unit in charge of educating demobilized soldiers in nationalism and scapegoating, received an inquiry from a soldier named Adolf Gemlich about the army's position on "the Jewish question." Mayr tasked a young subordinate named Adolf Hitler to answer. The resulting Gemlich letter, as it is known to historians, is believed to be the first record of Hitler's anti-Semitic beliefs and has been an important document in Holocaust studies for decades.
This week, Rabbi Marvin Hier, the founder and dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, announced that the center has obtained the original, signed letter, which had never been publicly displayed. At the letter's public unveiling in New York City, Hier explained its tortuous journey from Hitler's own hand to its eventual home at the center's Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles.
In April 1945, an American GI named William Ziegler found the letter scattered among other documents in Nuremberg, Germany. Ziegler took the letter home and sold it to a private collector. In 1988, the Wiesenthal Center had the opportunity to buy the letter but was skeptical about whether Hitler could have afforded a typewriter. "He was a nobody; he couldn't afford anything," Hier said at the letter's unveiling. "A typewriter is like today having somebody who can't afford his meals and he's waving the latest Apple computer in front of you."
By the time the center could verify that Hitler had used a German army typewriter, the letter had been sold to another private collector. In 1990, handwriting expert Charles Hamilton Jr., who gained fame for exposing fake Hitler diaries in 1983, authenticated Hitler's signature on the Gemlich letter.
When the Wiesenthal Center again had an opportunity to purchase the letter this year, it paid $150,000 to make the letter part of its collection. "We do not want to make a market for memorabilia, but this document does not belong in private hands," Hier said. "It has too much to say to history. It belongs in public hands, and it has found its home at the Museum of Tolerance."
Few have questioned the importance of the Gemlich letter in understanding Hitler and the Holocaust. It not only provides a look into his beliefs, but reveals early ideas of how he would attempt the systematic extermination of the Jews. "Anti-Semitism — born of purely emotional grounds — will find an expression in the form of pogroms," Hitler wrote, according to a translation provided by the Wiesenthal Center. "The final goal must be the removal of the Jews. To accomplish these goals, only a government of national power is capable and never a government of national weakness." Hier highlighted these sentences as being the most important in the letter.
Yet the purchase of such a document, especially at such a high price, has raised questions among historians. "This is not the Magna Carta," says Michael Marrus, the Chancellor Rose and Ray Wolfe Professor Emeritus of Holocaust Studies at the University of Toronto. "I doubt very strongly that, given everything else we know, the Gemlich letter will change historians' views about Hitler, or that it will be seen as pushing back Hitler's genocidal ambitions to a very early date."
"If this is, indeed, the original of the letter, it's a curatorial coup for the Wiesenthal Center, but not likely to produce an advance in historical understanding," Peter Hayes, the Theodore Zev Weiss Holocaust Educational Foundation Professor of Holocaust studies at Northwestern University, adds in an e-mail. "Though the origins of Hitler's anti-Semitism and the moment of its onset remain matters of dispute among historians, the predominant view is that his hatred of Jews crystallized in the 10 months between Germany's defeat in November 1918 and the date of this letter, and its appearance in original form isn't going to make any difference to that view."
Another concern with the purchase is that such transactions, not by private collectors but by a human-rights organization like the Wiesenthal Center, could have unintended consequences. "What you don't want to happen is for a mystique to grow around these documents," Marrus says.
In presenting the document to the media, Hier explained that operational funds were not used in its purchase and that the center's trustees donated the money to buy the letter. "This is the first document of its kind that deals with the Jews exclusively and postulates the solution," Hier said. "We have 50,000 archives, and this is the most important archive I've ever seen."
The letter will be on permanent display at the entrance to the Museum of Tolerance's Holocaust section, where visitors can view translations and see Hitler's signature on the document for themselves. "Five million people have visited the Museum of Tolerance," Hier said. "Ninety-five percent of the visitors are non-Jews. So we don't only educate the Jewish community that knows about the Holocaust, but we educate the larger world. That's where the document belongs."
© 2011 Time Inc.
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2076346,00.html [with comments]
===
Adolf Hitler's First Antisemitic Writing
(September 16, 1919)
Hitler returned from a military hospital to Munich in early 1919. There he underwent a Reichswehr sponsored course of systematic political education for demobilizing soldiers that featured PanGerman nationalism, antisemitism, and antisocialism. These same themes were prominent in Bavarian politics following the repression of the Munich revolution of 191819. Because antisemitism had not played a notable part in Bavarian politics prior to the revolutionary disturbances, a Herr Adolf Gemlich was prompted to send an inquiry about the importance of the "Jewish question" to Captain Karl Mayr, the officer in charge of the Reichswehr News and Enlightenment Department in Munich. Mayr referred him to Hitler, who had distinguished himself in the abovementioned course by the vehemence of his radical nationalist and antisemitic views, and by his oratorical talents. Hitler was already feeling his way toward a political career; four days before responding to Gemlich in the letter translated below, he had paid his first visit to the German Workers' Party (eventually renamed, the National Socialist Workers' Party) as a confidential agent of the Reichswehr.
In the letter to Gemlich he appears anxious to establish his credentials as a knowledgeable and sober anti-Semite. Compared to the inflammatory massmeeting oratory that he was soon to make his specialty, Hitler's rhetoric here is quite tame, stressing the need for a "rational" and "scientific" antisemitism. Some historians have interpreted the letter's call for the "irrevocable removal [Entfernung]" of the Jews from German life as a prefiguring of the Holocaust. But it is clear from the context and from later statements that, at this point, Hitler meant segregation or expulsion rather than systematic liquidation.
The letter, Hitler's first explicitly political writing, impressed his Reichswehr superiors and he soon gained a reputation among radical rightist and socially respectable nationalist conservative groups as a man who could help inoculate the masses against revolution and whose antisemitic rhetoric could help discredit the democratic Weimar Republic. The letter may thus be seen as the launching of his political career. Source: Eberhard Jäckel (ed.), Hitler. Sämtliche Aufzeichnungen 19051924. (Stuttgart, 1980), pp. 8890. Translated by Richard S. Levy.
TEXT:
*
[September 16, 1919]
Dear Herr Gemlich,
The danger posed by Jewry for our people today finds expression in the undeniable aversion of wide sections of our people. The cause of this aversion is not to be found in a clear recognition of the consciously or unconsciously systematic and pernicious effect of the Jews as a totality upon our nation. Rather, it arises mostly from personal contact and from the personal impression which the individual Jew leaves almost always an unfavorable one. For this reason, antisemitism is too easily characterized as a mere emotional phenomenon. And yet this is incorrect. Antisemitism as a political movement may not and cannot be defined by emotional impulses, but by recognition of the facts. The facts are these: First, Jewry is absolutely a race and not a religious association. Even the Jews never designate themselves as Jewish Germans, Jewish Poles, or Jewish Americans but always as German, Polish, or American Jews. Jews have never yet adopted much more than the language of the foreign nations among whom they live. A German who is forced to make use of the French language in France, Italian in Italy, Chinese in China does not thereby become a Frenchman, Italian, or Chinaman. It's the same with the Jew who lives among us and is forced to make use of the German language. He does not thereby become a German. Neither does the Mosaic faith, so important for the survival of this race, settle the question of whether someone is a Jew or nonJew. There is scarcely a race whose members belong exclusively to just one definite religion.
Through thousands of years of the closest kind of inbreeding, Jews in general have maintained their race and their peculiarities far more distinctly than many of the peoples among whom they have lived. And thus comes the fact that there lives amongst us a non German, alien race which neither wishes nor is able to sacrifice its racial character or to deny its feeling, thinking, and striving. Nevertheless, it possesses all the political rights we do. If the ethos of the Jews is revealed in the purely material realm, it is even clearer in their thinking and striving. Their dance around the golden calf is becoming a merciless struggle for all those possessions we prize most highly on earth.
The value of the individual is no longer decided by his character or by the significance of his achievements for the totality but exclusively by the size of his fortune, by his money.
The loftiness of a nation is no longer to be measured by the sum of its moral and spiritual powers, but rather by the wealth of its material possessions.
This thinking and striving after money and power, and the feelings that go along with it, serve the purposes of the Jew who is unscrupulous in the choice of methods and pitiless in their employment. In autocratically ruled states he whines for the favor of "His Majesty" and misuses it like a leech fastened upon the nations. In democracies he vies for the favor of the masses, cringes before the "majesty of the people," and recognizes only the majesty of money.
He destroys the character of princes with byzantine flattery, national pride (the strength of a people), with ridicule and shameless breeding to depravity. His method of battle is that public opinion which is never expressed in the press but which is nonetheless managed and falsified by it. His power is the power of money, which multiplies in his hands effortlessly and endlessly through interest, and which forces peoples under the most dangerous of yokes. Its golden glitter, so attractive in the beginning, conceals the ultimately tragic consequences. Everything men strive after as a higher goal, be it religion, socialism, democracy, is to the Jew only means to an end, the way to satisfy his lust for gold and domination.
In his effects and consequences he is like a racial tuberculosis of the nations.
The deduction from all this is the following: an antisemitism based on purely emotional grounds will find its ultimate expression in the form of the pogrom.[1] An antisemitism based on reason, however, must lead to systematic legal combating and elimination of the privileges of the Jews, that which distinguishes the Jews from the other aliens who live among us (an Aliens Law). The ultimate objective [of such legislation] must, however, be the irrevocable removal of the Jews in general.
For both these ends a government of national strength, not of national weakness, is necessary.
The Republic in Germany owes its birth not to the uniform national will of our people but the sly exploitation of a series of circumstances which found general expression in a deep, universal dissatisfaction. These circumstances however were independent of the form of the state and are still operative today. Indeed, more so now than before. Thus, a great portion of our people recognizes that a changed stateform cannot in itself change our situation. For that it will take a rebirth of the moral and spiritual powers of the nation.
And this rebirth cannot be initiated by a state leadership of irresponsible majorities, influenced by certain party dogmas, an irresponsible press, or internationalist phrases and slogans. [It requires] instead the ruthless installation of nationally minded leadership personalities with an inner sense of responsibility.
But these facts deny to the Republic the essential inner support of the nation's spiritual forces. And thus today's state leaders are compelled to seek support among those who draw the exclusive benefits of the new formation of German conditions, and who for this reason were the driving force behind the revolutionthe Jews. Even though (as various statements of the leading personalities reveal) today's leaders fully realized the danger of Jewry, they (seeking their own advantage) accepted the readily proffered support of the Jews and also returned the favor. And this payoff consisted not only in every possible favoring of Jewry, but above all in the hindrance of the struggle of the betrayed people against its defrauders, that is in the repression of the antisemitic movement.
Respectfully,
Adolf Hitler
NOTE
[1] Pogrom in Russian means devastation. Until recently, the term described exclusively the organized or spontaneous massacres of Jews. In Russia the worst pogroms occurred in 1881, 1903, 1905, and during the civil war following the Revolution of 1917 in areas controlled by the antiBolshevik White armies, especially the Ukraine.
*
Source: H-German Web Site
Copyright 2010 The American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/Adolf_Hitler's_First_Antisemitic_Writing.html
Adolf Hitler, pictured in 1930, is believed to have first documented his anti-Semitic beliefs in the Gemlich letter, written in 1919
Getty Images
By Nate Rawlings
Wednesday, June 08, 2011
In September 1919, the year after the end of World War I, a German captain named Karl Mayr, who ran a propaganda unit in charge of educating demobilized soldiers in nationalism and scapegoating, received an inquiry from a soldier named Adolf Gemlich about the army's position on "the Jewish question." Mayr tasked a young subordinate named Adolf Hitler to answer. The resulting Gemlich letter, as it is known to historians, is believed to be the first record of Hitler's anti-Semitic beliefs and has been an important document in Holocaust studies for decades.
This week, Rabbi Marvin Hier, the founder and dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, announced that the center has obtained the original, signed letter, which had never been publicly displayed. At the letter's public unveiling in New York City, Hier explained its tortuous journey from Hitler's own hand to its eventual home at the center's Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles.
In April 1945, an American GI named William Ziegler found the letter scattered among other documents in Nuremberg, Germany. Ziegler took the letter home and sold it to a private collector. In 1988, the Wiesenthal Center had the opportunity to buy the letter but was skeptical about whether Hitler could have afforded a typewriter. "He was a nobody; he couldn't afford anything," Hier said at the letter's unveiling. "A typewriter is like today having somebody who can't afford his meals and he's waving the latest Apple computer in front of you."
By the time the center could verify that Hitler had used a German army typewriter, the letter had been sold to another private collector. In 1990, handwriting expert Charles Hamilton Jr., who gained fame for exposing fake Hitler diaries in 1983, authenticated Hitler's signature on the Gemlich letter.
When the Wiesenthal Center again had an opportunity to purchase the letter this year, it paid $150,000 to make the letter part of its collection. "We do not want to make a market for memorabilia, but this document does not belong in private hands," Hier said. "It has too much to say to history. It belongs in public hands, and it has found its home at the Museum of Tolerance."
Few have questioned the importance of the Gemlich letter in understanding Hitler and the Holocaust. It not only provides a look into his beliefs, but reveals early ideas of how he would attempt the systematic extermination of the Jews. "Anti-Semitism — born of purely emotional grounds — will find an expression in the form of pogroms," Hitler wrote, according to a translation provided by the Wiesenthal Center. "The final goal must be the removal of the Jews. To accomplish these goals, only a government of national power is capable and never a government of national weakness." Hier highlighted these sentences as being the most important in the letter.
Yet the purchase of such a document, especially at such a high price, has raised questions among historians. "This is not the Magna Carta," says Michael Marrus, the Chancellor Rose and Ray Wolfe Professor Emeritus of Holocaust Studies at the University of Toronto. "I doubt very strongly that, given everything else we know, the Gemlich letter will change historians' views about Hitler, or that it will be seen as pushing back Hitler's genocidal ambitions to a very early date."
"If this is, indeed, the original of the letter, it's a curatorial coup for the Wiesenthal Center, but not likely to produce an advance in historical understanding," Peter Hayes, the Theodore Zev Weiss Holocaust Educational Foundation Professor of Holocaust studies at Northwestern University, adds in an e-mail. "Though the origins of Hitler's anti-Semitism and the moment of its onset remain matters of dispute among historians, the predominant view is that his hatred of Jews crystallized in the 10 months between Germany's defeat in November 1918 and the date of this letter, and its appearance in original form isn't going to make any difference to that view."
Another concern with the purchase is that such transactions, not by private collectors but by a human-rights organization like the Wiesenthal Center, could have unintended consequences. "What you don't want to happen is for a mystique to grow around these documents," Marrus says.
In presenting the document to the media, Hier explained that operational funds were not used in its purchase and that the center's trustees donated the money to buy the letter. "This is the first document of its kind that deals with the Jews exclusively and postulates the solution," Hier said. "We have 50,000 archives, and this is the most important archive I've ever seen."
The letter will be on permanent display at the entrance to the Museum of Tolerance's Holocaust section, where visitors can view translations and see Hitler's signature on the document for themselves. "Five million people have visited the Museum of Tolerance," Hier said. "Ninety-five percent of the visitors are non-Jews. So we don't only educate the Jewish community that knows about the Holocaust, but we educate the larger world. That's where the document belongs."
© 2011 Time Inc.
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2076346,00.html [with comments]
===
Adolf Hitler's First Antisemitic Writing
(September 16, 1919)
Hitler returned from a military hospital to Munich in early 1919. There he underwent a Reichswehr sponsored course of systematic political education for demobilizing soldiers that featured PanGerman nationalism, antisemitism, and antisocialism. These same themes were prominent in Bavarian politics following the repression of the Munich revolution of 191819. Because antisemitism had not played a notable part in Bavarian politics prior to the revolutionary disturbances, a Herr Adolf Gemlich was prompted to send an inquiry about the importance of the "Jewish question" to Captain Karl Mayr, the officer in charge of the Reichswehr News and Enlightenment Department in Munich. Mayr referred him to Hitler, who had distinguished himself in the abovementioned course by the vehemence of his radical nationalist and antisemitic views, and by his oratorical talents. Hitler was already feeling his way toward a political career; four days before responding to Gemlich in the letter translated below, he had paid his first visit to the German Workers' Party (eventually renamed, the National Socialist Workers' Party) as a confidential agent of the Reichswehr.
In the letter to Gemlich he appears anxious to establish his credentials as a knowledgeable and sober anti-Semite. Compared to the inflammatory massmeeting oratory that he was soon to make his specialty, Hitler's rhetoric here is quite tame, stressing the need for a "rational" and "scientific" antisemitism. Some historians have interpreted the letter's call for the "irrevocable removal [Entfernung]" of the Jews from German life as a prefiguring of the Holocaust. But it is clear from the context and from later statements that, at this point, Hitler meant segregation or expulsion rather than systematic liquidation.
The letter, Hitler's first explicitly political writing, impressed his Reichswehr superiors and he soon gained a reputation among radical rightist and socially respectable nationalist conservative groups as a man who could help inoculate the masses against revolution and whose antisemitic rhetoric could help discredit the democratic Weimar Republic. The letter may thus be seen as the launching of his political career. Source: Eberhard Jäckel (ed.), Hitler. Sämtliche Aufzeichnungen 19051924. (Stuttgart, 1980), pp. 8890. Translated by Richard S. Levy.
TEXT:
*
[September 16, 1919]
Dear Herr Gemlich,
The danger posed by Jewry for our people today finds expression in the undeniable aversion of wide sections of our people. The cause of this aversion is not to be found in a clear recognition of the consciously or unconsciously systematic and pernicious effect of the Jews as a totality upon our nation. Rather, it arises mostly from personal contact and from the personal impression which the individual Jew leaves almost always an unfavorable one. For this reason, antisemitism is too easily characterized as a mere emotional phenomenon. And yet this is incorrect. Antisemitism as a political movement may not and cannot be defined by emotional impulses, but by recognition of the facts. The facts are these: First, Jewry is absolutely a race and not a religious association. Even the Jews never designate themselves as Jewish Germans, Jewish Poles, or Jewish Americans but always as German, Polish, or American Jews. Jews have never yet adopted much more than the language of the foreign nations among whom they live. A German who is forced to make use of the French language in France, Italian in Italy, Chinese in China does not thereby become a Frenchman, Italian, or Chinaman. It's the same with the Jew who lives among us and is forced to make use of the German language. He does not thereby become a German. Neither does the Mosaic faith, so important for the survival of this race, settle the question of whether someone is a Jew or nonJew. There is scarcely a race whose members belong exclusively to just one definite religion.
Through thousands of years of the closest kind of inbreeding, Jews in general have maintained their race and their peculiarities far more distinctly than many of the peoples among whom they have lived. And thus comes the fact that there lives amongst us a non German, alien race which neither wishes nor is able to sacrifice its racial character or to deny its feeling, thinking, and striving. Nevertheless, it possesses all the political rights we do. If the ethos of the Jews is revealed in the purely material realm, it is even clearer in their thinking and striving. Their dance around the golden calf is becoming a merciless struggle for all those possessions we prize most highly on earth.
The value of the individual is no longer decided by his character or by the significance of his achievements for the totality but exclusively by the size of his fortune, by his money.
The loftiness of a nation is no longer to be measured by the sum of its moral and spiritual powers, but rather by the wealth of its material possessions.
This thinking and striving after money and power, and the feelings that go along with it, serve the purposes of the Jew who is unscrupulous in the choice of methods and pitiless in their employment. In autocratically ruled states he whines for the favor of "His Majesty" and misuses it like a leech fastened upon the nations. In democracies he vies for the favor of the masses, cringes before the "majesty of the people," and recognizes only the majesty of money.
He destroys the character of princes with byzantine flattery, national pride (the strength of a people), with ridicule and shameless breeding to depravity. His method of battle is that public opinion which is never expressed in the press but which is nonetheless managed and falsified by it. His power is the power of money, which multiplies in his hands effortlessly and endlessly through interest, and which forces peoples under the most dangerous of yokes. Its golden glitter, so attractive in the beginning, conceals the ultimately tragic consequences. Everything men strive after as a higher goal, be it religion, socialism, democracy, is to the Jew only means to an end, the way to satisfy his lust for gold and domination.
In his effects and consequences he is like a racial tuberculosis of the nations.
The deduction from all this is the following: an antisemitism based on purely emotional grounds will find its ultimate expression in the form of the pogrom.[1] An antisemitism based on reason, however, must lead to systematic legal combating and elimination of the privileges of the Jews, that which distinguishes the Jews from the other aliens who live among us (an Aliens Law). The ultimate objective [of such legislation] must, however, be the irrevocable removal of the Jews in general.
For both these ends a government of national strength, not of national weakness, is necessary.
The Republic in Germany owes its birth not to the uniform national will of our people but the sly exploitation of a series of circumstances which found general expression in a deep, universal dissatisfaction. These circumstances however were independent of the form of the state and are still operative today. Indeed, more so now than before. Thus, a great portion of our people recognizes that a changed stateform cannot in itself change our situation. For that it will take a rebirth of the moral and spiritual powers of the nation.
And this rebirth cannot be initiated by a state leadership of irresponsible majorities, influenced by certain party dogmas, an irresponsible press, or internationalist phrases and slogans. [It requires] instead the ruthless installation of nationally minded leadership personalities with an inner sense of responsibility.
But these facts deny to the Republic the essential inner support of the nation's spiritual forces. And thus today's state leaders are compelled to seek support among those who draw the exclusive benefits of the new formation of German conditions, and who for this reason were the driving force behind the revolutionthe Jews. Even though (as various statements of the leading personalities reveal) today's leaders fully realized the danger of Jewry, they (seeking their own advantage) accepted the readily proffered support of the Jews and also returned the favor. And this payoff consisted not only in every possible favoring of Jewry, but above all in the hindrance of the struggle of the betrayed people against its defrauders, that is in the repression of the antisemitic movement.
Respectfully,
Adolf Hitler
NOTE
[1] Pogrom in Russian means devastation. Until recently, the term described exclusively the organized or spontaneous massacres of Jews. In Russia the worst pogroms occurred in 1881, 1903, 1905, and during the civil war following the Revolution of 1917 in areas controlled by the antiBolshevik White armies, especially the Ukraine.
*
Source: H-German Web Site
Copyright 2010 The American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/Adolf_Hitler's_First_Antisemitic_Writing.html
Greensburg, KS - 5/4/07
"Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty."
from John Philpot Curran, Speech
upon the Right of Election, 1790
F6
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