Why We Are Antisemites
by Adolph Hitler
Translation from German by Hasso Castrup (Copenhagen, Denmark), January, 2013, from the original published in Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 16. Jahrg., 4. H. (Oct., 1968), pp. 390-420. http://www.ifz-muenchen.de/heftarchiv/1968_4.pdf Edited by Carolyn Yeager. English Translation Copyright 2013 Carolyn Yeager -
Friday 15 August 1920
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National Socialist German Workers Party
Public meeting in the Great Hall of the Hofbräuhaus
Friday 15 August 1920
Adolf Hitler
~~Why We Are Antisemites~~
My dear countrymen and women! We are quite used to being generally referred to as monsters. And we are considered particularly monstrous because, in a question that certain gentlemen in Germany are nervous about, we are marching at the head – namely in the question of the opposition to the Jews.
Our people understand many things but this one problem nobody wants to understand, and in particular because, as a worker explained: “What connection is there at all between the workers and the Jewish Problem, when in reality most of the people have no idea what this problem means.” Most people let themselves be guided by feelings and say: “I have seen good and bad people among them, just like among ourselves.”
Very few have learned to view the problem free of emotion, in its clean form. I will at once begin with the word “work”.
What does it mean – work?
Work is an activity performed not of one’s free will, but for the sake of one’s fellowmen. If there is a difference between man and animals, so it is particularly regarding work, which does not originate in an instinct but comes from an understanding of a necessity. Hardly any revolution had so deep an effect as the slow one which gradually transformed the lazy man of primeval time into the man who works.
Talking of work, we can assume that this activity followed these three phases:
First, it was an effect of a simple instinct of self-preservation which we also see in animals. Later, it developed into the second form of work – the one from pure egoism. Also this form became gradually replaced by the third: Work out of ethical sense of duty, where an individual does not work because he is forced to it. We see it at every turn. Millions of people work without being constantly forced to it. Thousands of intellectuals are sometimes bound to their studies for whole nights on end, day after day, although they may not do it for material gains. The hundreds of thousands of German workers after the end of their work tend their gardens. And, generally, we see today that millions of people cannot imagine living without some sort of occupation.
When I said that this process represents a slow but perhaps also the greatest of all revolutions in human history, then one must assume that also this revolution had to have a cause, and this cause was the greatest Goddess of this Earth, the one who is able to whip men to the uttermost – the Goddess of Hardship.
We can see this hardship in early prehistory, above all in the northern part of the world, in those enormous ice deserts where only the meagrest existence was possible. Here, men were forced to fight for their existence, for things which were, in the smiling South, available without work, and in abundance. In those times man made perhaps his first groundbreaking discovery: In those cold stretches man was forced to find a substitute for the only gift of Heaven which makes life possible – the Sun. And the man who produced the first artificial sparks later appeared to Humanity as a god – Prometheus, the fire-bringer. The North forced men to further activity – production of clothes, building of abodes. First, it was simple caves, later huts and houses. In short, he created a principle, the principle of work. Life would not have been possible without it.
Although work was still simple, it had already to be planned beforehand and each individual knew that if he has not done his part, he will die of hunger in the coming winter. At the same time another development followed – the terrible hardship became a means for breeding of a race. Whoever was weak or sickly could not survive the terrible winter period and died prematurely. What remained was a race of strong and healthy giants. Yet another trait of this race was born. Where man is externally muzzled, where his radius of action is limited, he begins to develop internally. Externally limited, internally he becomes unlimited. The more man, due to external forces, must depend on himself, the deeper internal life he develops and the more he turns inward.
These three achievements: The recognized principle of work as a duty, the necessity, not only out of egoism but for preservation of the whole group of people – a small clan; second – the necessity of bodily health and thereby also of normal mental health; and third – the deep spiritual life. All these gave the northern races the ability to go to the world and build states.
If this power could not find its full expression in the high North, it became apparent when the ice shackles fell and man turned south to the happier, freer nature. We know that all these northern peoples had one symbol in common – the symbol of the Sun. They created cults of Light and they’ve created the symbols of the tools for making fire – the drill and the cross. You will find this cross as a Hakenkreuz as far as India and Japan, carved in the temple pillars. It is the Swastika, which was once a sign of established communities of Aryan Culture.
Those races, today called Aryans, created all the great cultures of the ancient world. We know that Egypt was brought upon its high cultural level by Aryan immigrants. Similarly, Persia and Greece; the immigrants were blond, blue eyed Aryans. And we know that outside of these Aryan states no civilized states have been founded. There emerged mixed races between the black, dark eyed and dark colored, southern races and the immigrants, but they failed to create any large, creative culture states.
Why is it that only Aryans possessed the ability to create states? It was due, almost exclusively, to their attitude toward work. Those races which, as the first, stopped seeing work as the result of coercion and saw it rather as a necessity born out of hundreds of thousands of years of hardship, had to become superior to other people. And, besides, it was work that made people come together and divide the work among them. We know that the moment the individual work to sustain oneself turned into work within communities, the community tended to assign a particular work to those particularly talented, and with increasing division of work it became necessary for still greater joining together into still bigger groups. So, it is work which created kinships at first, later tribes, and still later, led to the creation of states.
If we see, as the first prerequisite for creating states, the conception of work as social duty, so the second necessary ingredient is racial health and purity. And nothing helped the northern conquerors more against the lazy and rotten southern races than the refined strength of their race.
States would remain an empty vessel if not decorated with that which we normally call culture. If we removed everything and kept just railways, ships, etc.; if we removed everything we consider art and sciences, such a state would in reality become empty and we would understand the creative power of the northern tribes. The moment their great, inborn imagination could act in great, free areas, it created everywhere immortal works. We see this process repeated continuously even in the smallest scale. Similarly, we know that great minds are often born at the bottom of society, unable to develop there but, given an opportunity, they begin to grow and become leaders in arts, sciences, and also in politics.
We know today that there are extensive interrelations between the state, nation, culture, art and work and it would be madness to think that any of them could exist independently of the others. Let us take art – considered as an international domain – and we shall see that it is unconditionally dependent on the state. Art blossomed in those areas where the political development made it possible. The art of Greece reached its highest level when the young state had triumphed over invading Persian armies. Construction of the Acropolis began at that time. Rome became the city of art after the end of the Punic Wars, and Germany built her cathedrals, as in Worms, Speyer and Limburg, when the German Empire under Salians had achieved its greatest triumphs. We can follow this connection to our time. We know that art, for example the beauty of German towns, always depended on political development of these towns; that it was political considerations which moved Napoleon III to regulating of the Boulevards and Friedrich the Great to establishing Unter den Linden. Similarly in Munich where it was obvious that the city could not become an industrial center and so art was chosen to elevate the rank of the city, which now everyone who wants to get to know Germany must visit. Similar were the origins of today’s Wien (Vienna).
The case was similar with other arts. The moment the small, powerless statelets began to unite into one state, then also one German art, proud of itself, began to grow. The works of Richard Wagner appeared in the period when shame and powerlessness were replaced by a unified, great German Reich.
And so, not just art is dependent on the state, on the politics of the state; the same is the case with work itself because only a sound state is in the position to give the opportunity of working to its citizens and let them use their talents. The opposite is the case with the race in relation to everything else. A state with a rotten, sick and unsound race will never produce great works of art or make great politics, or at least bask in abundance. Each of these factors depends on the others. And only when all of them complement each other, can we say: There is harmony in the state, the way we Germanics understand it.
Can the Jew build a state?
Now we have to ask ourselves the question: How about the Jew as a state builder? Does the Jew possess the power to create a state? First we must examine his attitude to work, find out how he perceives the principle of work, and excuse me if I now take a book called The Bible. I am not claiming that all its contents are necessarily true, as we know that Jewry was very liberal in writing it. One thing, however, is certain: it has not been written by an antisemite. (Laughter) It is very important because no antisemite would have been able to write a more terrible indictment against the Jewish race than the Bible, the Old Testament. Let us take a look at a sentence: “By the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat bread.” And it says that it was to be a punishment for the Fall of Man.
Ladies and Gentlemen! Already here we see that the whole world lies between us; we could never conceive of work as a punishment – otherwise we would all have been convicts. We do not want to conceive of work as punishment. I must confess: I would not have been able to exist without work, and hundreds of thousands and millions would have been able to withstand perhaps 3 or 5 days, maybe even 10, but not 90 or 100 days without any activity. If Paradise really existed, the Land of Plenty, then our people would have been unhappy in it. (Calls: Hear, hear) We Germans seek constantly a possibility to do something and if we cannot find anything, at least from time to time we hit one another in the face. (Laughter) We are unable to bear absolute rest.
Thus we see, already here, a big difference. Because a Jew has written this, true or not is unimportant because it still reflects the opinion which Jewry has about work. For them work is not an obvious ethical duty but at most a means to sustenance. In our eyes, this is not work because in this case any activity serving self-preservation, without regard to fellow men, might be called work. And we know that this work, in the past, consisted of plundering of caravans, and today in planned plundering of indebted farmers, industrialists and workers. The form has changed but the principle is the same. We do not call it work, but robbery. (Calls: Hear, hear)
When already such a basic notion separates us, here comes another. I have already explained that in the long period in the North the races became purified. This means that all the inferior and weak gradually died out and only the soundest remained. Also, here the Jew differs from us because he has not become purified but instead practiced inbreeding; he multiplied greatly but only in narrow circles, and without selection. And therefore we see a generation which is plagued by defects caused by inbreeding.
Finally, the Jew does not possess the third factor: The inner spiritual life. I do not need to explain here what a Jew generally looks like. You all know him. (Laughter) You know his constant restlessness that never gives him a possibility to concentrate and have a spiritual experience. In the most solemn moments he flickers his eyes and one can see that even during the most beautiful opera he is calculating dividends. (Laughter) The Jew has never had his own art. (Hear, hear) His own temple has been built by foreign builders: The first was the Assyrians, and for the building of the second – the Roman artists. He has not left anything which might be called art, no buildings, nothing. In music, we know that he is only able to skillfully copy the others’ art. We shall not conceal that today he has many famous conductors whose fame he can thank the well-organized Jewish Press for. (Laughter)
When a nation does not possess these three traits, it is not able to create states. And that is true because throughout centuries the Jew was always a nomad. He has never had what we might call a state. It’s a mistake which is spreading widely today to say that Jerusalem was a capital of a Jewish state of a Jewish nation. On the one side, there was always a great chasm between the tribes of Judah and Caleb and the northern Israeli tribes, and only David, for the first time, succeeded in gradually bridging the chasm through the unitary cult of Yahweh. We know precisely that this cult has at a very late time chosen for itself Jerusalem as its sole seat. Only from that moment have the Jewish people gotten a center, like Berlin or New York or Warsaw today. (Hear, hear) This was a town in which the Jew, thanks to his talents and traits, gradually achieved predominance, partly through the force of arms, partly through the “power of trombones.” Besides, the Jews, already in those times, lived as a parasite in the body of other peoples and it had to be so. Because a people which does not want to work – the often hard work of building and maintaining a state – to work in mines, factories, in construction etc.; all this was unpleasant to the Hebrew. Such a people will never establish a state but prefers to live in some other state where others work and he acts as an intermediary in business, a dealer in the best case, or in good German – a robber, a nomad who undertakes robbing raids just like in ancient times. (Lively bravo! and hand clapping)
And so we can now understand why the whole Zionist state and its establishing is nothing but a comedy. Herr Chief Rabbi has now said in Jerusalem: “Establishment of this state is not the most important; it is far from certain if it will at all be possible.” However, it is necessary that Jewry has this city as its spiritual headquarters because Jewry “materially and in fact are the masters of several states; we control them financially, economically and politically.” And so the Zionist state is going to be a harmless corn of sand in the eye. Efforts are made to explain that so and so many Jews have been found that want to go there as farmers, workers, even soldiers. (Laughter) If these people really have this urge in themselves, Germany today needs these ideal men as turf cutters and coal miners; they could take part in building our water power plants, our lakes etc. but it does not occur to them. The whole Zionist state will be nothing else than the perfect high school for their international criminals, and from there they will be directed. And every Jew will, of course, have immunity as a citizen of the Palestinian state (Laughter) and he will of course keep our citizenship. But when caught red-handed, he will not be a German Jew any longer but a citizen of Palestine. (Laughter)
One can almost say that the Jew cannot help it because everything stems from his race. He cannot do anything about it and, besides, it doesn’t matter whether he is good or bad for he must act according to the laws of his race, just as do members of our people. A Jew is everywhere a Jew; consciously or unconsciously, he resolutely represents the interests of his race.
Thus we can see the two great differences between races: Aryanism means ethical perception of work and that which we today so often hear – socialism, community spirit, common good before own good. Jewry means egoistic attitude to work and thereby mammonism and materialism, the opposite of socialism. (Hear, hear) And due to these traits, which he cannot ‘overstep’ as they are in his blood and, as he himself admits, in these traits alone lays the necessity for the Jew to behave unconditionally as a destroyer of states. He cannot do otherwise, whether he wants to or not. And thereby he is unable to create his own state because it requires a lot of social sense. He is only able to live as a parasite in the states of others. He lives as a race amongst other races, in a state within others states. And we can see very precisely that when a race does not possess certain traits which must be hereditary, it not only cannot create a state but must act as a destroyer, no matter if a given individual is good or evil.
The Jewish path of destruction
We can follow this fate of Jewry from the earliest prehistory. It is not important if there is truth in every word of the Bible. In general, it gives us at least an extract of the history of Jewry. We see how the Jews present themselves because the Jew wrote these words quite innocuously. It did not appear to him as outrageous when a race, through cunning and deceit, invaded and despoiled other races, was always finally expelled and, unoffended, sought to repeat the same elsewhere. They pimped and haggled even when it came to their ideals, always ready to offer even their own families. We know that not long ago a gentleman was staying here, Sigmund Fraenkel, who has just written that it is quite unjust to accuse Jews of a materialistic spirit. One should only look at their sunny family life. However, this intimate family life did not prevent Grandfather Abraham from pimping off his own wife to the Pharaoh of Egypt in order to be able to do business. (Laughter) As was the grandfather, so was the father and so were the sons who never neglected their business. And you can be sure that they are not neglecting the business even as we speak. Who among you was a soldier, he will remember Galicia or Poland: There, at the train stations, these Abrahams were everywhere. (Laughter and hand clapping)
They penetrated into other races for millennia. And we know very well that wherever they stayed long enough symptoms of decay appeared and the peoples could do nothing else than to liberate themselves from the uninvited guest or to disappear themselves. Heavy plagues came over the nations, no less then ten in Egypt – the same plague we experience today firsthand – and finally the Egyptians lost their patience. When the chronicler describes that the Jews were suffering when they finally left, we know differently, for as soon as they were out, they began to long after coming back. (Laughter) It seems that they did not have it so badly. On the other hand, if it’s true they had been forced to help build pyramids, it would mean today forcing them to earn their bread by working in our mines, stone quarries etc. And just as you are not going to see this race voluntarily do it, so there was nothing left to the Egyptians but to force them. What hundreds of thousands of others do as a matter of course, means for the Jew another chapter of suffering and persecution.
Still later, the Jew was able to infiltrate the then soaring Roman Empire. We can still see his traces in southern Italy. Already 250 years before Christ he was there in all places, and people began to avoid them. Already, then and there, he made the most important decision and became a trader. From numerous Roman texts we know that he traded, like today, with everything from shoelaces to girls. (Hear, hear) And we know that the danger grew, and that the insurrection after the murder of Julius Caesar was mainly fomented by the Jews.
The Jew knew even then how to make friends with the masters of the Earth. Only when they became shaky in their rule, he suddenly became a populist and discovered his wide open heart for the needs of the broad masses. So it was in Rome, as we know. We know that the Jew used Christianity, not out of love for Christ, but partly because he knew that this new religion questioned all earthly power and so it became an axe at the root of the Roman state, the state which was built on the authority of the public servant. And he became its chief bearer and propagator, without becoming a Christian – he couldn’t, he remained a Jew, precisely as today when he, never stooping to the level of worker, remains a master pretending to be a socialist. (Bravo!) He did the same 2000 years ago, and we know that this new Teaching was nothing else than a resurrection of the old truism that people in a state should have legal rights and, above all, that equal duties should give equal rights. This obvious Teaching was gradually turned against the Jew himself, as the similar Teaching of socialism has to turn on the Hebrew race today, its distorters and corrupters. We know that throughout the middle Ages the Jew infiltrated all European states, behaving like a parasite, using new principles and ways which the people did not know then. And from a nomad he became a greedy and bloodthirsty robber of our time. And he went so far that people after people rebelled and attempted to shake him off.
We know it is untrue when people say that the Jew was forced to this activity; he could easily acquire land. And he did acquire land but not to work it but in order to use it as a trade object, just as he does today. Our forefathers were wiser; they knew that land was holy and they excluded the Jew from it, (Lively ovation) and if the Jew ever had the intention to tend the land and build a state, he could easily have done so at the time when whole new continents were discovered. He could easily have done it if only he used a small part of his power, craftiness, cunning, brutality and ruthlessness, as well as some of his financial resources. Because if this power was sufficient to subdue whole peoples, it would have been more than sufficient to build their own state. If only he had had the basic condition for this, which is a will to work, but not in the sense of usurious trade but in the sense in which millions work in order to keep a state going. Instead, we see him also today as a destroyer. In these days we see a great transformation: the Jew was once a Court Jew, submissive to his master he knew how to make the master pliable in order to dominate his subjects. For this purpose he whetted the appetites of these great men for unattainable things, extended the credit and soon turned them into debtors. In this way he himself got power over peoples. And he played this game with the same cruelty as, a few years later, the humanistic and philanthropic Jew whose wealth did not suffer at all when he showed his humanitarianism and his spirit of sacrifice to our people. (Big laughter) I said that he transformed from Court Jew (Hofjude) to Populist Jew (Volksjude). Why? Because he felt that the ground began to burn under his feet.
The ethical duty to work
Gradually, he also had to lead an existential struggle against the growing awakening and anger of the people. This forced him to lay his hands on the inner structure of the states if he wanted to remain the master of the peoples.We see the resulting destruction in three areas, namely those same three areas which were preserving and developing the states.
The first area was the fight against the principle of the ethical duty to work. The Jew had found another kind of work for himself where he could earn gold without practically moving a finger. He developed a principle which, throughout millennia, made it possible for him to amass fortunes without sweat and toil, unlike all other mortals, and above all – without taking risk.
What does the word “industrial capital” really mean? Ladies and Gentlemen! People often accuse us, particularly in the factories: “You don’t fight against the industrial capital, just against finance and loan capital.” And most people don’t understand that one must not fight against industrial capital. What is industrial capital? It is a constantly changing factor, a relative concept. Once it was a needle and thread, a workshop and a couple of cents in ready money which a tailor in Nurnberg possessed in the 13th century. It was a sum that made work possible, that is: tools, workshops and a certain amount of money in order to survive for a period of time. Gradually, this small workshop became a big factory. But workshops and tools, machines and factories have, per se, no value able to produce value but are a means to an end. What produces value is work, and the few cents which made it possible to survive difficult times and buy some fabrics, multiplied through time, stand before us today – we call it Capital for continued operation in bad times, that is Working Capital.
Here I want to emphasize one thing: Tools, workshop, machine, factory – or working capital, that is, industrial capital – against this you cannot fight at all. You can perhaps make sure that it is not abused but you cannot fight against it. This is the first major scam that one makes to our people, and they make it to distract us from the real fight, to pull it off from the capital which should and must be fought – from the loan and financial capital. (Stormy bravo! and applause). This capital arises in a very different way. The smallest master craftsman was dependent on the fate that might affect him every day, on the general situation in the middle Ages, perhaps on the size of his city and its prosperity, the security in this city. Also today is this capital, that is, the industrial capital tied to the state and to the people, depending on the will of the people to work, but depending also on the possibility to procure raw materials in order to be able to offer work and find buyers who will really buy the product. And we know that a collapse of the state, under certain circumstances, renders the greatest values worthless, devalues them, as distinguished from the other capital, the finance and loan capital, which accrues interest very evenly without any regard to whether the owner, for example, of these 10,000 Mark himself passes away or not. The debt remains on the estate. We experience that a state has debts, for example, the German Reich’s bonds for Alsace-Lorraine railways; these bonds must bear interest although the railways are no longer in our possession. We know that this railway fortunately has now a 20 billion deficit but their bonds must bear interest, and even though they were sold, in part, more than 60 years ago and have already been repaid four times, the debt, the interest, runs further, and while a great nation gains nothing on this company, it still must bleed; the loan capital continues to grow completely irrespective of any outside disturbance.
Here we already see the first possibility, namely that this kind of money-making, which is independent of all the events and incidents of daily life, must necessarily, because it is never hindered and always runs evenly, gradually lead to huge capitals which are so enormous that they ultimately have only one fault, namely the difficulty of their further accommodation.To accommodate this capital, you have to proceed to destroying whole states, to destroy entire cultures, to abolish national industries – not to socialize, but to throw all into the jaws of this international capital – because this capital is international, as the only thing on this Earth that is truly international. It is international because its carrier, the Jews, are international through their distribution across the world. (Consent)
And already here one should knock oneself on the head and say: if this capital is international because its carrier is distributed internationally, it must be madness to think that this capital can be fought internationally with the help of the members of the same race which possesses it. (Hear, hear) Fire is not extinguished by fire but by water and the international capital belonging to the international Jew can only be broken by a national force. (Bravo and applause!) So, this capital has grown to incredibly large proportions and today virtually rules the Earth, still eerily growing and – the worst! – is completely corrupting all honest work. For it is appalling that the common man who has to bear the burden in order to return the capital sees that, despite his hard work, diligence, thrift and in spite of the real work, he is hardly able to nourish himself and still less to dress, while this international capital devours billions just in interest, which he also must supply, and at the same time a whole racial stratum which does no other work than collect interest and cut coupons, spreads in the state. This is a degradation of any honest work, for every honestly working man must ask today: Does it have a purpose at all that I work? I will really never accomplish anything, and there are people who, practically without work, can not only live, but in practice even dominate us, and that’s their goal.
Yes, one of the foundations of our strength is being destroyed, namely the ethical concept of work, and that was the brilliant idea of Karl Marx to falsify the ethical concept of work, and the whole mass of the people who groan under the Capital are to be organized for the destruction of the national economy and for the protection of international finance-and-loan capital. (Stormy applause) We know that today 15 billion of industry capital is facing 500 billion of loan capital. These 15 billion of industry capital is invested in creative values, while this 500 billion loan capital, which we always get in spoonful rates of 6 and 7 billion and which we use in periods of 1 to 2 months to supplement our rations a little, these 6 to 7 billion today which are decreed almost worthless scraps of paper, at a later date, should we ever recover, will have to be repaid in high quality money i.e. in a money behind which lies practical work. This is not only the destruction of a state, but already the application of a chain, of a neck collar for later times.