Does anyone have the original German translation of this speech. Is the word exterminate a true translation from the German?
13th February 1945
It is one of the achievements of National Socialism that it was the first to face the Jewish problem in a realistic manner.
The Jews themselves have always aroused anti-semitism. Throughout the centuries, all the peoples of the world, from the ancient Egyptians to ourselves, have reacted in exactly the same way. The time comes when they become tired of being exploited by the
ing Jew. They give a heave and shake themselves, like an animal trying to rid itself of its vermin. They react brutally and finally they revolt. It is an instinctive reaction, a reaction of repugnance against a stranger who refuses to adapt himself and become part of the whole, a parasite which clings to the host, imposes on it and exploits it to the utmost. By nature, the Jew is a parasite which cannot and will not be assimilated. A distinguishing feature of the Jew is that, unlike other foreigners, he everywhere claims all the rights of citizenship in the community that shelters him - and at the same time remains always a Jew. He regards it as his right to be allowed to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds; and he is the only man in the whole world to claim such an extravagant privilege.
National Socialism has tackled the Jewish problem by action and not by words. It has risen in opposition to the Jewish determination to dominate the world; it has attacked them everywhere and in every sphere of activity; it has flung them out of the positions they have usurped; it has pursued them in every direction, determined to purge the German world of the Jewish poison. For us, this has been an essential proces of disinfection, which we have prosecuted to its ultimate limit and without which we should ourselves have been asphyxiated and destroyed.
With the success of the operation in Germany, there was a good chance of extending it further afield. This was, in fact, inevitable, for good health normally triumphs over disease. Quick to realize the danger, the Jews decided to stake their all in the life and death struggle which they launched against us. National Socialism had to be destroyed, whatever the cost and even if the whole world were destroyed in the process. Never before has there been a war so typically and at the same time so exclusively Jewish.
I have at least compelled them to discard their masks. And even if our endeavours should end in failure, it will only be a temporary failure. For I have opened the eyes of the whole world to the Jewish peril.
One of the consequences of our attitude has been to cause the Jew "to become aggressive. As a matter of fact, he is less dangerous in that frame of mind than when he is sly and cunning. The Jew who openly avows his race is a hundred times preferable to the shameful type which claims to differ from you only in the matter of religion. If I win this war, I shall put an end to Jewish world power and I shall deal the Jews a mortal blow from which they will not recover. But if I lose the war, that does not by any means mean that their triumph is assured, for then they themselves will lose their heads. They will become so arrogant that they will evoke a violent reaction against them. They will, of course, continue to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds, to claim the privileges of citizenship in every country and, without sacrificing their pride, continue to remain, above all, members of the Chosen Race. The shifty, the shamefaced Jew will disappear and will be replaced by a Jew vainglorious and bombastic; and the latter will stink just as objectionably as the former - and perhaps even more so. There is, then, no danger in the circumstances that anti-semitism will disappear, for it is the Jews themselves who add fuel to its flames and see that it is kept well stoked. Before the opposition to it can disappear, the malady itself must disappear. And from that point of view, you can rely on the Jews: as long as they survive, anti-semitism will never fade.
In saying this, I promise you I am quite free of all racial hatred: It is, in any case, undesirable that one race should mix with other races. Except for a few gratuitous successes, which I am prepared to admit, systematic cross-breeding has never produced good results. Its desire to remain racially pure is a proof of the vitality and good health of a race. Pride in one's own race - and that does not imply contempt for other races - is also a normal and healthy sentiment. I have never regarded the Chinese or the Japanese as being inferior to ourselves. They belong to ancient civilizations, and I admit freely that their past history is superior to our own. They have the right to be proud of their past, just as we have the right to be proud of the civilization to which we belong. Indeed, I believe the more steadfast the Chinese and the Japanese remain in their pride of race, the easier I shall find it to get on with them.
This pride of race is a quality which the German, fundamentally, does not possess. The reason for this is that for these last three centuries the country has been torn by internal dissension and religious wars and has been subjected to a variety of foreign influences, to the influence, for example, of Christianity - for Christianity is not a natural religion for the Germans, but a religion that has been imported and which strikes no responsive chord in their hearts and is foreign to the inherent genius of the race. When pride of race manifests itself in a German, as it sometimes does and in a most aggressive form, it is in reality nothing more than a compensatory reaction for that inferiority complex from which so many Germans suffer. This, I need hardly say, does not apply to the Prussians. From the time of Frederick the Great they have possessed that quiet and simple pride which is the hall-mark of people who are sure of themselves and who have no need of ostentation to bear witness to what they are. Thanks to those qualities which are inherently theirs, the Prussians were able, as they well showed, to create a united Germany. National Socialism has tried to give to all Germans that pride which hitherto has been possessed by the Prussians alone among us.
The Austrians, too, have in their blood a pride very akin to that of the Prussians, a pride born of the fact that for centuries they have never been dominated by any other race, but had, on the contrary, been for a very long time the ones who gave orders and were obeyed. They possess the accumulated experience of domination and power, and to that is attributable that panache of Atticism which no one can gainsay.
In its crucible National Socialism will melt and fuse all those qualities which are characteristic of the German soul; and from it will emerge the modern German-industrious, conscientious, sure of himself yet simple withal, proud not of himself or what he is, but of his membership of a great entity which will evoke the admiration of other peoples. This feeling of corporate superiority does not in any way imply the slightest desire to crush and overwhelm others. We have, I know, on occasions exaggerated our cult of this sentiment, but that was necessary at the outset and we were compelled to jostle the Germans pretty roughly in order to set their feet on the right road. In the nature of things, too violent a thrust in any direction invariably provokes an equally violent thrust in the opposite direction. All this, of course, cannot be accomplished in a day. It requires the slow-moving pressure of time. Frederick the Great is the real creator of the Prussian type. In actual fact, two or three generations elapsed, before the type crystallized and before the Prussian type became a characteristic common to every Prussian.
Our racial pride is not aggressive except in so far as the Jewish race is concerned. We use the term Jewish race as a matter of convenience, for in reality and from the genetic point of view there is no such thing as the Jewish race. There does, however, exist a community, to which, in fact, the term can be applied and the existence of which is admitted by the Jews themselves. It is the spiritually homogeneous group, to membership of which all Jews throughout the world deliberately adhere, regardless of their whereabouts and of their country of domicile; and it is this group of human beings to which we give the title Jewish race. It is not, mark you, a religious entity; although the Hebrew religion serves them as a pretext to present themselves as such; nor indeed is it even a collection of groups, united by the bonds of a common religion.
The Jewish race is first and foremost an abstract race of the mind. It has its origins, admittedly, in the Hebrew religion, and that religion, too, has had a certain influence in moulding its general characteristics; for all that, however, it is in no sense of the word a purely religious entity, for it accepts on equal terms both the most determined atheists and the most sincere, practising believers. To all this must be added the bond that has been forged by centuries of persecution - though the Jews conveniently forget that it is they themselves who provoked these persecutions. Nor does Jewry possess the anthropological characteristics which would stamp them as a homogeneous race. It cannot, however, be denied that every Jew in the world has some drops of purely Jewish blood in him. Were this not so, it would be impossible to explain the presence of certain physical characteristics which are permanently common to all Jews from the ghetto of Warsaw to the bazaars of Morocco - the offensive nose, the cruel vicious nostrils and so on. .
A race of the mind is something more solid, more durable than just a race, pure and simple. Transplant a German to the United States and you turn him into an American. But the Jew remains a Jew wherever he goes, a creature which no environment can assimilate. It is the characteristic mental make-up of his race which renders him impervious to the processes of assimilation. And there in a nutshell is the proof of the superiority of the mind over the flesh! . . .
The quite amazing ascendancy which they achieved during the course of the nineteenth century gave the Jews a sense of their own power and caused them to drop the mask; and it is just that that has given us the chance to oppose them as Jews, self proclaimed and proud of the fact. And when you remember how credulous the Germans are, you will realize that we must be most grateful for this sudden excess of frankness on the part of our most mortal enemies.
I have always been absolutely fair in my dealings with the Jews. On the eve of war, I gave them one final warning. I told them that, if they precipitated another war, they would not be spared and that I would exterminate the vermin throughout Europe, and this time once and for all. To this warning they retorted with a declaration of war and affirmed that wherever in the world there was a Jew, there, too, was an implacable enemy of National Socialist Germany.
Well, we have lanced the Jewish abscess; and the world of the future will be eternally grateful to us.
