Hitler’s weird opinions on Jews and the Ten Commandments, in his own words

By Gunnar Heinsohn, AMERICAN THINKER

Because the angry debate about Whoopi Goldberg’s statements is focused on the definition of racism and its role in the Holocaust, perhaps the views of Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) himself will be of interest.

In one of his last statements on Judaism (3 February 1945), Hitler told Martin Bormann (1900–1945), his personal secretary and head of the NSDAP chancellery:

I never held the opinion that the Chinese or the Japanese, for example, were racially inferior. … I admit that their tradition is superior to ours. … Our Nordic racial consciousness is aggressive only towards the Jewish race. However, we speak of a Jewish race only for reasons of linguistic convenience, for … from the genetic point of view, there is no Jewish race. Circumstances make us label in this way a racially and spiritually coherent group, membership in which is claimed by Jews all over the world, no matter which individual citizenship is given by passports. This group of people we call the Jewish race. … The Jewish race is most of all a spiritual community. … Spiritual race is tougher and more enduring than natural race. The Jew, wherever he goes,  remains a Jew … and to us he must appear as a piece of evidence for the superiority of “spirit” over flesh.  (H. Trevor-Roper, A. Francois-Poncet, eds., Hitlers Politisches Testament. Die Bormann Diktate vom Februar und April 1945, Hamburg: Albrecht Knaus, 1981, pp. 66, 68, 69)

If nothing else, Hitler’s ideas have led to confusion and perplexity among scholars.  Thus, Yehuda Bauer (*1926), Israel’s most experienced Holocaust specialist, laments: “In principle, Hitler can be explained; but this does not mean that he has been explained” (R. Rosenbaum, Die Hitler-Debatte: Auf der Suche nach dem Ursprung des Bösen, München/Wien: Europa-Verlag, 1999, p. 7).  Germany’s most productive scholar and publicist on Nazi Germany, Joachim Fest (1926–2006), confessed in his last interview: “I do not comprehend it [the annihilation of the Jews —G.H.], and nobody who has ever dealt with it has even come close … to a convincing interpretation” (J. Fest, “Mitleidlosigkeit bis zum allerletzten Punkt” in: Die Welt, 10 September 2004, p. 3).

What did Hitler mean by “spirit” in relation to his campaign of mass murder?  The Nazi killings started inside Germany with “full-blooded Aryans” who had been disabled from birth, and with German soldiers who had been severely wounded during the attack on Poland (1 September 1939).  Eugen Stähle (1890–1948), Hitler’s deputy in charge of poisoning patients in the Grafeneck home for the handicapped (southwest Germany), defended himself against a senior Church Council member, Reinhold Sautter (1888–1971) from Stuttgart, who had accused him of violating the Fifth Commandment.  Stähle replied, “The 5th Commandment, ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ is not at all a commandment by God, but a Jewish invention” (H.-W. Schmuhl, Rassenhygiene, Nationalsozialismus, Euthanasie. Von der Verhütung zur Vernichtung “lebensunwerten Lebens” 1890–1945, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, p. 152).

As early as 1932, according to the records of Hermann Rauschning (1887–1982), a leading NSDAP man in Danzig/Gdansk, Hitler stated: “This devilish ‘Thou shall, thou shall!’  And that stupid ‘Thou shall not!’  We must clean our blood from it, from this curse of Mount Sinai! … The day will come when against these commandments I will erect the tables of a new law.  And history will recognize our movement as the great battle for the liberation of mankind, liberation from the curse of Sinai. … That is it what we are fighting: this masochistic attitude of self-torturing, this curse of so-called morality, which is made an idol to protect the weak from the strong, given the eternal fight, the great law of divine nature.  It is the so-called Ten Commandments that we fight” (H. Rauschning, Gespräche mit Hitler, Wien: Europa-Verlag, 1988, p. 210).

When Germans began exterminating the handicapped at home, and then moved on to murdering the Jews and killing the inhabitants of Slavic territories, no one ever again was to stop them by calling out, “Thou shalt not kill.”  One might — in the cold language of the computer age — say Hitler had ordered that the hardware of biblical morality, the Jewish people themselves, be eliminated in order to erase the software, the Jewish principles of the sanctity of life.  Christians, and all other people who followed this Jewish core, which had become the West’s moral code, were persecuted, too.

What Whoopi Goldberg and many others don’t realize is that the Nazi extermination of the “Jewish race,” the handicapped, and the Slavs went together.  The Holocaust was intended to eliminate moral inhibitions, thereby immunizing Germans against any reluctance they might feel about carrying out the rest of Hitler’s homicidal plans for Europe and the world.

Gunnar Heinsohn Heinsohn (*1943) established, in 1993, Europe’s first institute for comparative genocide research at the University of Bremen.  His studies include “Why Auschwitz?” (1995), “Lexikon der Völkermorde” (1998), “What makes the Holocaust a uniquely unique genocide?” (2000), and “Hitler’s Motive for the Holocaust” (2014).

February 6, 2022 | 12 Comments »

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  1. And Israel comes into the picture.

    …Yet another reason for us not to trust the note from 13 February 1945 is that Hitler is there portrayed as having stated that the Jews were in fact not a race at all, but only a ‘spiritual community’ (Gemeinschaft des Geistes), and that from a genetic point of view there was no such thing as a Jewish race.64 This statement has been taken seriously by some scholars who have examined Hitler’s religious views, who have referred to it in support of their argumentation.65 But the view expressed here goes against everything we know about Hitler’s views on this topic. In Mein Kampf, for example, Hitler wrote the exact opposite of this, namely that the Jews were only a race and absolutely not a religious or spiritual community. The Jews lacked the necessary idealistic character to form such a spiritual community, and Hitler expressly ignored the distinction between ‘Volk’ and ‘Rasse’ that many of the racial ideologists, such as Hans F. K. Günther, espoused.66 Hitler repeated this position in the manuscript to his second book, and in notes dated 5 November 1941 and 27 February 1942 Heim records utterances to this effect too.67 Moreover, Hitler ended his verifiably authentic ‘Political Testament’ from 29 April 1945 by demanding that the new German leaders should strictly follow the race laws and brutally defend themselves against the Jews who poisoned all peoples.68 There would be no point in following rigorous race laws if the Jews were not a race. Indeed, without the assumption that the Jews made up a distinct race, the whole National Socialist project is without foundation. There would no longer be any need for regulations against mixing of the races if the Jews were unable to propagate their so-called Jewishness through biological means, i.e. via the blood through procreation.

    If we are to believe that this statement is genuine we must assume that Hitler stated the complete opposite view to every other recorded statement he had made on this topic on 13 February 1945, only to revert back to his old belief in his final statement to the world ever. That is certainly very hard to believe. Neither is it at all likely that Bormann would ever make a mistake of this magnitude. On the other hand, this discrepancy could also be said to be an argument for authenticity, because any forger that managed to get this point so backwards would not be worth his salt it seems. We seem to be stuck in a Catch-22 situation where no option is likely to be true. However, if the forger had a reason to skew Hitler’s views in such a way then we would have a good explanation. In fact, Genoud did have a strong incentive to change Hitler’s views on this topic. Genoud was involved in financing Arab terrorism during this time period, and Willy Winkler has noted that the text, which makes the case for decolonization of the Arab world, sometimes reads like a political manifesto from the 1960s. Winkler drew the conclusion that Genoud was simply putting his own words into Hitler’s mouth in order to have the Führer state the case for him. Genoud had also been involved in the defence of Adolf Eichmann after he was kidnapped by Mossad in Argentina and taken back to Israel to stand trial for his crimes. He had connections to the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and certainly nurtured a hatred for Israel.69 By denying the Jews status as a distinct race, and thus a people and a nation, the basis for the state of Israel would also be shaken to its core. This would supply Genoud with both the motive and the opportunity to make this change even though it so obviously contradicted everything else Hitler had said on the subject. Genoud could of course not mention Israel or the Jewish state directly, since it did not exist in 1945. But he could jibe at it implicitly in this way. If his contemporary political agenda was more important to Genoud than historical accuracy, he may simply not have cared whether or not this corresponded to Hitler’s true views or not.

    There is yet another fact that points to Hitlers politisches Testament being, at least partly, a forgery. Notes No. 12 and 13 are dated 20 and 21 February 1945 respectively, and these also coincide with dates on Bormann’s letters to his wife.70 The problem for the proposition that Bormann made these notes in the bunker in Berlin (let us remember that according to the German edition Hitler dictated these words to Bormann) is that Bormann was not with Hitler during these days. In fact, he was not even in Berlin. We know this because Bormann’s diary, which was found by Soviet troops during the last days of the war, places him en route to the Party Headquarters in Munich on the morning of the 20th, and he was in Munich for the rest of the day. In Munich he met with: Helmuth Friedrichs and Gerhard Klopfer, i.e. the two highest-ranking Nazi officials after Bormann in the Parteikanzlei; Friedrichs’ deputy, Heinrich Walkenhorst; Bormann’s adjutant, Wilhelm Zander (one of the three people who would later smuggle Hitler’s actual testament out of Berlin); and another official, Dr Schmidt-Römer…71

    ibid

  2. @Reader

    Constructing a Pseudo-Hitler? The question of the authenticity of Hitlers politisches Testament

    ABSTRACT
    This article provides the first in-depth scholarly analysis of the collection of notes dated February and April 1945 colloquially known as ‘Hitler’s political testament’. This article uses sources from private and public archives in several countries to assess this issue of authenticity and concludes that these notes are most likely forgeries. The purported history of these documents cannot be trusted, the dating of several of the notes has clearly been manipulated, and the published text contain statements that cannot be authentic. The original notes were allegedly destroyed, which means that the published versions cannot be checked for accuracy. Until these notes have been conclusively proven to be genuine — something that is very hard to do without access to the original documents — historians should refrain from using them…

    https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13507486.2018.1532983

  3. @Sebastian Zorn

    alleged private meanderings of which I am highly skeptical

    Like I said, there are real aims, and then there is propaganda to make the “mob” accomplish these aims.

    It is a distinction with a lot of difference.

    If you think you know everything better than all the Holocaust researchers, there is nothing to discuss.

    Just because the Nazi laws where based on the racial laws of the American South doesn’t mean that their idea of race was the same as in the American South, e.g., skin color and the kind of facial features which are typical for Whites, Blacks, or Orientals (yes, they did trace the black ancestry back even for those who could “pass”).

    The Arabs can be pretty dark skinned but the Nazis didn’t mind the Arabs at all.

    Which means that W.G. was right in her narrow understanding of race because the Jews of Europe WERE white, and the Nazis didn’t care what color they were or how they looked even if they would have managed to get to the Jews of Morocco, or Egypt, or Ethiopia, or whatever.

    The Holocaust WAS unique in that the Germans sought to exterminate ALL Jews but I don’t think she argued that point.

    OK, I already said everything I wanted to say on this topic, I think.

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  4. @Reader

    Elizabeth Woolf
    , Employee at United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
    Answered 4 years ago · Author has 95 answers and 185.4K answer views
    Originally Answered: what were Hitler’s last words?
    He dedicated his final recorded words to the Jews. This is the final sentences of his last statement, which he gave on April 29th, the day before he killed himself.

    “Above all I charge the leaders of the nation and those under them to scrupulous observance of the laws of race and to merciless opposition to the universal poisoner of all peoples, International Jewry.”

  5. SEPTEMBER 16, 1919
    On September 16, 1919, Hitler issues his first written comment on the so-called Jewish Question.

    In the statement, he defined the Jews as a race and not a religious community, characterized the effect of a Jewish presence as a “race-tuberculosis of the peoples,” and identified the initial goal of a German government to be discriminatory legislation against Jews. The “ultimate goal must definitely be the removal of the Jews altogether.” Hitler’s years in Vienna (1908–1913) and his military service were important stages for his development of a comprehensive racist ideology.

    https://www.ushmm.org/learn/timeline-of-events/before-1933/adolf-hitler-issues-comment-on-the-jewish-question

    “To begin with, Judaism is definitely a racial and not a religious group,” Hitler wrote in the statement, known as the Gemlich letter.”
    Landmark Hitler letter on Jews unveiled in New York
    Published8 June 2011

    https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-13692755

    Saying he didn’t mean race in the Black/White sense is nonsense and in today’s Woke climate means not as bad when it was worse.

    It’s Holocaust denial, pure and simple.

  7. @Reader What may or may not have been going on in Hitler’s private thoughts at one point or another is Debatable but irrelevant. It’s a distinction without a difference. At the Nuremberg trials, the Nazi defence of the Nuremburg Racial Laws was that they were based on the racial laws of the American South. The Nazis were not racist against Asians, incidentally. Every single writing, speech, edict and action of the Nazi regime treated Jews as an inferior race, explicitly. You have to really be divorced from the reality of the time to make such ridiculous statements based on private meanderingd by Hitler at the end of the war. Nazism was and is completely fixated on race in the exact same sense.

  8. @Sebastien Zorn

    The article is about Hitler’s views of the ”Jewish race”.

    Obviously, his real reason for the genocide of the Jews was different from the ways it was “marketed” (to ensure the results Hitler wanted) to the German population and the populations of the countries that Germany occupied.

    The mostly rural or lower middle class population couldn’t care less about his philosophizing about Jewish spirituality which denies the mankind the right to live by the law of the survival of the fittest, and many would probably dislike this line of thinking.

    That’s why they had to come up with the “right reasons” to convince the population that exterminating Jews was not a crime but a heroic or at least commendable deed – saving the Heimat, saving the world from Bolshevism, saving the highest “races” from being destroyed by the inferior “races”, etc.

    In any case, Hitler did not consider Jews a race in the same way as Blacks, Whites, and Orientals are considered races in the US (the way Whoopi Goldberg understands the term “race”).

    There are links to some of the author’s articles – you can create a free account on academia.edu and download them.

    The rest of his books are, unfortunately, in German.

  9. @Dreuveni-

    No you wre wrong. it is correctly translated, but 4 words cannot express the real meaning. You are right that it refers to murder. From those 4 words have issued writings which could ,if piled up , reach the moon.

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  10. That 5th commandment, thou shalt not kill, is quite simply incorrectly translated. It should be, thou shalt not murder. There is a major difference between the two.
    While I am not a biblical scholar by any means, the Lord also instructed the children of Israel to completely annihilate certain enemies. Of course, they knew better..

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  11. According to the philosophy of Nazi antisemitism, Jewry was considered a group of people bound by close, genetic (blood) ties who formed an ethnic unit that one could neither join nor secede from. Early 20th-century books on Nordicism such as Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race, had a profound effect on Hitler’s antisemitism. He was convinced that the Nordic Race/Culture constituted a superior branch of humanity, and viewed International Jewry as a parasitic and inferior race, determined to corrupt and exterminate both Nordic peoples and their culture through Rassenschande (“racial pollution”) and cultural corruption.

    ihttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mischling

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