All his life Adolf Hitler was seized by an obsession with the Jews and he had always been straightforward about his plans. His dream of a racially "pure" empire would tolerate no Jews and he announced at many occasions the "annihilation of the Jews" living in the territory under his control.

The Holocaust Victims

Hitler's very first political statement, his letter to Adolf Gemlich on 16 September 1919, already includes a clear declaration of his antisemitic position: "Rational antisemitism on the other hand, must lead to a systematic legal opposition and elimination of the special privileges that Jews hold, in contrast to the other aliens living among us (alien's legislation). Its final objective must unswervingly be the removal of the Jews altogether."

In those early days he often spoke of how he would deal with the Jews. His favourite words were Ausrottung (extirpation), Vernichtung (annihilation), Entfernung (removal), Aufräumung (cleaning up). Thus according to a police report of a NSDAP meeting on 6 April 1920 he declared:

".. we have no intention of being emotional antisemites who want to create the atmosphere of a pogrom. Instead, our hearts are filled with an inexorable determination to attack the evil at its roots and to extirpate it root and branch. In order to reach our goal every means will be justified, even if we have to make a pact with the devil."

In another speech on 12 April 1922 he said, referring to the Jewish Question: "Here, too, there can be no compromise - there are only two possibilities: either victory of the Aryan or annihilation of the Aryan and the victory of the Jew."

Hitler wrote Mein Kampf in Landsberg prison in 1924 and the destruction of the Jews is advocated time and again:

"It is the inexorable Jew who struggles for his domination over the nations. No nation can remove this hand from its throat except by the sword ... Such a process is and remains a bloody one."

/Louis Bülow