by Joseph Goebbels
A passage from Der Nazi-Sozi, Elberfeld: Verlag der Nationalsozialistischen Briefe, 1927:
“You make a lot of noise about the fact that you oppose the Jews. Isn’t anti-Semitism outdated in the twentieth century? Isn’t the Jew a human being like everyone else? Aren’t there decent Jews? Isn’t it bad that we 60 million fear 2 million Jews?”
“You miss the point. Try to think logically:
If we were only anti-Semites, we would be out-of-place in the twentieth century. However, we are also socialists. For us, the two go together. Socialism, the freedom of the German proletariat and thereby of the German nation, can only be achieved against the Jews. Since we want Germany’s freedom, or socialism, we are anti-Semites.
Sure, the Jew is also a human being. None of us has every doubted that. But a flea is also an animal—albeit an unpleasant one. Since a flea is not a pleasant animal, we have no duty to defend and protect it, to be of service to it so that it can bite and torment and torture us. Rather, our duty is to make it harmless.
The same is true of the Jew.
Sure, there are decent (weiße) Jews. More of them every day. That however, is not evidence for the Jews, but rather it is evidence against them. The fact that one calls scoundrels among us decent “Jews” is proof that to be Jewish carries a stigma, else one would call deceitful Jews “decent (gelbe) Christians.” The fact that there are so many decent Jews proves that the destructive Jewish spirit has already infected wide circles of our people. It is encouragement for us to carry on the battle against the Jewish world plague wherever possible.
It is a bad sign for you, not for us, that 60 million fear 2 million Jews. We do not fear these 2 million Jews, but rather we fight against them. You, however, are too much of a coward to join this battle, and behave like a cat on a hot stove.
If these 60 million fought the Jews as we do, they would have nothing more to fear. It would be the Jews’ turn to fear.”