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One of the odd claims that has arisen amid today’s efforts to rehabilitate the image of Adolf Hitler is the assertion that Hitler not only never issued a written order commanding the extermination of the Jews, but never even intended to do so, or even spoke about wanting to do so. Tucker Carlson helped popularize this idea in September 2024 when he featured National Socialist apologist Daryl Cooper, who claimed that the deaths of the Holocaust came about merely because Hitler and his generals hadn’t planned to care for prisoners during the Russian winter.
In reality, however, as Antisemitism: History and Myth shows, Hitler predicted more than once that he would eradicate the Jews of Europe. As far back as September 16, 1919, Hitler, then an unknown agitator who had just begun to make a name for himself among the antisemites of Germany, wrote in a private letter to a man who had inquired about his political philosophy: “An antisemitism based on purely emotional grounds will find its ultimate expression in the form of the pogrom. 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.”
Hitler disdained the idea of a pogrom that would kill only a certain number of Jews. He wanted them eradicated entirely. Hitler apparently found these formulations pleasing, for he substantially repeated them at an April 6, 1920, meeting of the National Socialist German Workers Party: “We do not want to be the sort of emotional anti-Semites who create a pogrom mood. We are filled with the uncompromising determination to grasp this evil by the roots and tear it out in its entirety.” This threat, according to a record of the meeting, was met with “enthusiastic applause.”
Much later, on January 21, 1939, Hitler made it clear that the intervening two decades had not changed his mind about grasping “this evil” and tearing it out “in its entirety.” He told the Czech Foreign Minister Frantisek Chvalkovsky: “We are going to destroy the Jews. They are not going to get away with what they did on November 9, 1918,” the day that the Jews, in Hitler’s reckoning, had stabbed Germany in the back and compelled it to surrender in World War I. Hitler added ominously: “The day of reckoning has come.”
That was a private meeting, but just over a week later, Hitler proclaimed this threat before the entire world. On January 30, 1939, the sixth anniversary of his becoming chancellor of Germany, he said during a speech to the Reichstag:
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. During the time of my struggle for power it was in
the first instance the Jewish race which only received my prophecies with laughter when I said that I would one day take over the leadership of the State, and with it that of the whole nation, and that I would then among many other things settle the Jewish problem. Their laughter was uproarious, but I think that for some time now they have been laughing on the other side of their face. 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!
This statement was well-known in the Third Reich. In September 1941, the National Socialists even distributed this extract from “Hitler’s prophecy” as a wall poster to be displayed in homes, schools, offices, and the like: “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 victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.”
Hitler himself referred several times thereafter to this “prophecy.” On September 30, 1942, he declared: “On the first of September, 1939, we made two pronouncements in the Reichstag session of that date: First, now that the Jews have forced this war upon us, no amount of military force and no length of time will ever be able to conquer us; and second, if Jewry is starting an international world war to eliminate the Aryan nations of Europe, then it won’t be the Aryan nation which will be wiped out, but Jewry.”
Hitler’s memory was faulty. He had not said this on September 1, 1939. On that day, he did indeed address the Reichstag on the occasion of the beginning of the war he had just begun in Europe, but he did not mention this “prophecy.” However, in his 1942 statement, he remembered his prediction of the destruction of the Jewish people of Europe well enough.
On October 25, 1941, Hitler told his party comrades Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich: “This criminal race has the two million dead of the World War on their conscience, and now hundreds of thousands. Let no one say to me: we cannot send them into the mire. Who concerns themselves about our men? It is good if preceding us is the terror that we are exterminating the Jews. The attempt to found a Jewish state will fail.”
Hitler’s boast that efforts to found a Jewish state would fail and that he would exterminate them instead was remarkable; eight decades later, Jew-haters have transformed this assertion into the claim that the Jews fabricated the idea that Hitler tried to exterminate them in order to create the justification for a Jewish state.
Those who deny that the Holocaust took place or claim that the number of Jews who were murdered was actually vastly smaller than is claimed are thus in the peculiar position of insisting that while Hitler said he would exterminate the Jews, he didn’t take any steps actually to do so, at least on a large scale.
Empty braggarts have existed throughout history, but unfortunately, Adolf Hitler was not one of them.
