page_title: Hitler's prophecy
section_title: Jews
hierarchical_section_title: Hitler's prophecy / Speech of 30 January 1939 / Jews
caption_attribution_description: For documentary purposes the German Federal Archive often retained the original image captions, which may be erroneous, biased, obsolete or politically extreme. Reichstag, Begrüßung Adolf Hitler Die Abgeordneten des Großdeutschen Reichstags grüßen den Führer (6.10.39.) [Berlin.- Adolf Hitler vor dem Reichstag in der Kroll-Oper zum Abschluss des Feldzugs gegen Polen.] Abgebildete Personen: Hitler, Adolf: Reichskanzler, Deutschland
context_page_description: During a speech at the Reichstag on 30 January 1939, Adolf Hitler predicted "the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe" in the event of another world war. These words, which were similar to comments that Hitler had previously made to foreign politicians in private meetings, came towards the end of a long speech that dealt with several topics. They were made in the context of Nazi attempts to increase Jewish emigration from Nazi Germany, before the outbreak of World War II.
  Allusions to Hitler's prophecy by Nazi leaders and in Nazi propaganda were common from 30 January 1941, when Hitler mentioned it again in a speech. The prophecy took on new meaning with the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 and the German declaration of war against the United States that December, accelerating the systematic mass murder of Jews and leading to the globalization of World War II. In late 1941, Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels stated that the prophecy was being fulfilled while justifying the mass deportation of Jews from Germany.
context_section_description: Although the Évian Conference in July 1938 had failed to open other countries to Jewish emigrants, the Nazis still attempted to hasten the emigration of Jews from Germany. Discussions continued between Göring and George Rublee, director of the Intergovernmental Committee for Refugees. Hitler ridiculed "German businessmen devoid of any conscience" who felt sympathy for Jews. He complained that there was "enough space for settlement" in the world for German Jews to go, and contended that Europe could "not become pacified before the Jewish question has been settled". In a long rant against Jews, Hitler first mocked them, remarking at "how the whole democratic world [was] oozing with sympathy for the poor tormented Jewish People [and yet] remains hard-hearted when it comes to helping these supposedly most valuable members of the human race". He said that it was time to "wrestle the Jewish world enemy to the ground", and that the German government was completely determined "to get rid of these people". 
  Hitler accused Jews of having "nothing of their own, except for political and sanitary diseases" and being parasites on the German nation, turning Germans into "beggars in their own country". He asserted there had to be an end to the misconception that "the good Lord had meant the Jewish nation to live off the body and productive work of other nations", or else the Jews would "succumb to a crisis of unimaginable severity". At this point Hitler got to what Longerich describes as "the core of what he had to say":
  I have very often in my lifetime been a prophet and have been mostly derided. At the time of my struggle for power it was in the first instance the Jewish people who only greeted with laughter my prophecies that I would someday take over the leadership of the state and of the entire people of Germany and then, among other things, also bring the Jewish problem to its solution. I believe that this hollow laughter of Jewry in Germany has already stuck in its throat. I want today to be a prophet again: if international finance Jewry inside and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, the result will be not the Bolshevization of the earth and thereby the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.
  Hitler claimed that the Jews were trying to incite "millions among the masses of people into a conflict that is utterly senseless for them and serves only Jewish interests".
caption: The audience performs a Nazi salute during the speech
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