On the evening of 5 November, remarks about the ‘racial inferiority’ of the English lower class led Hitler once more into a monologue about the Jews. As usual, he linked it to the war. This was the ‘most idiotic war’ that the British had ever begun, he ranted, and would lead in defeat to an outbreak of antisemitism in Britain which would be without parallel. The end of the war, he proclaimed, would bring ‘the fall of the Jew’.147 He then unleashed an extraordinary verbal assault on the lack of ability and creativity of Jews in every walk of life but one: lying and cheating. The Jew’s ‘entire building will collapse if he is refused a following,’ he went on. ‘In one moment, it’s all over. I’ve always said the Jews are the most stupid devils that exist. They don’t have a true musician, thinker, no art, nothing, absolutely nothing. They are liars, forgers, deceivers. They’ve only got anywhere through the simple-mindedness of those around them. If the Jew were not washed by the Aryan, he wouldn’t be able to see out of his eyes for filth. We can live without the Jews. But they can’t live without us.’148
The links, as he saw them, between the Jews and the war that they had allegedly inspired, now also, after years in which he had scarcely mentioned the Jews, found a prominent place in his public speeches. But, whatever the rhetorical flourishes, whatever the propaganda motive in appealing to the antisemitic instincts of his hard-core supporters in the Party, there cannot be the slightest doubt, on the basis of his private comments, that Hitler believed in what he said.
In his speech to the ‘Old Guard’ of veterans of the Putsch, on 8 November 1941, Hitler pressed home the theme of Jewish guilt for the war. Despite the victories of the previous year, he stated, he had still worried because of his recognition that behind the war stood ‘the international Jew’. They had poisoned the peoples through their control of the press, radio, film, and theatre; they had made sure that rearmament and war would benefit their business and financial interests; he had come to know the Jews as the instigators of world conflagration. England, under Jewish influence, had been the driving-force of the ‘world-coalition against the German people’. But it had been inevitable that the Soviet Union, ‘the greatest servant of Jewry’, would one day confront the Reich. Since then it had become plain that the Soviet state was dominated by Jewish commissars. Stalin, too, was no more than ‘an instrument in the hand of this almighty Jewry’. Behind him stood ‘all those Jews who in thousandfold ramification lead this powerful empire’. This ‘insight’, Hitler suggested, had weighed heavily upon him, and compelled him to face the danger from the east.149
Hitler returned to the alleged ‘destructive character’ of the Jews when talking again to his usual captive audience in the Wolf’s Lair in the small hours of 1–2 December. Again, there was a hint, but no more than that, of what Hitler saw as the natural justice being meted out to the Jews: ‘he who destroys life, exposes himself to death. And nothing other than this is happening to them’ — to the Jews.150 The gas-vans of Chelmno would start killing the Jews of the Warthegau in those very days.151 In Hitler’s warped mentality, such killing was natural revenge for the destruction caused by the Jews — above all in the war which he saw as their work. His ‘prophecy’ motif was evidently never far from his mind in these weeks as the winter crisis was unfolding in the east. It would be at the forefront of his thoughts in the wake of Pearl Harbor. With his declaration of war on the USA on 11 December, Germany was now engaged in a ‘world war’ — a term used up to then almost exclusively for the devastation of 1914-18. In his Reichstag speech of 30 January 1939, he had ‘prophesied’ that the destruction of the Jews would be the consequence of a new world war. That war, in his view, had now arrived.
On 12 December, the day after he had announced Germany’s declaration of war on the USA, Hitler addressed the Reichsleiter and Gauleiter — an audience of around fifty persons — in his rooms in the Reich Chancellery. Much of his talk ranged over the consequences of Pearl Harbor, the war in the east, and the glorious future awaiting Germany after final victory. He also spoke of the Jews. And once more he evoked his ‘prophecy’.
