page_title: Hitler's prophecy
section_title: Background
hierarchical_section_title: Hitler's prophecy / Background
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. An den Fenstern jüdischer Geschäfte werden von Nationalsozialisten Plakate mit der Aufforderung "Deutsche, wehrt euch, kauft nicht bei Juden" angebracht.
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: According to historian Ian Kershaw, upon Nazi Party leader Adolf Hitler seizure of power on 30 January 1933, the Nazi mass movement was already "proto-genocidal" and "held together by the utopian vision of national salvation, to be achieved through racial cleansing at the core of which was the 'removal' of the Jews". In April 1933, the one-day Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses was announced and SA paramilitaries were posted around Jewish businesses to enforce the boycott. Between 1933 and 1939, more than 400 anti-Jewish laws and decrees were enacted. In April 1933, Jews were barred from holding positions in the civil service; this law also created the Aryan Paragraph, which was later used to define and exclude Jews from organizations and professions. The same year, quotas were imposed on the number of Jewish students allowed to study at schools and universities, as well as the number of Jews allowed to practice medicine and law. In 1935, the Nuremberg Laws were passed, which defined Jews by their ancestry rather than religious confession and formalized their exclusion from society. The Nuremberg Laws also outlawed marriages and sexual relationships between Jews and "Aryans". Various laws impeded Jews from owning property or earning a living; in the process known as Aryanization, most Jewish-owned businesses had been confiscated and turned over to "Aryan" ownership by 1939.
  Hitler had associated the Jews and war in multiple speeches before 1939. In 1931, Hitler said in the event of war, the Jews would be "crushed by the wheels of history"; he also characterized the 1933 anti-Nazi boycott as a Jewish declaration of war against Germany. According to historian Claudia Koonz, between taking power in 1933 and his prophecy speech in January 1939, Hitler only "directly vent[ed] his phobic racial hatred" on two occasions: in a 1935 speech announcing the introduction of the Nuremberg Laws, and at the Nuremberg Rally in September 1937. Given that Hitler regularly gave two- and three-hour speeches, "racial policy hardly figured in his pronouncements" overall, according to Koonz. Hitler found subtle ways to signal antisemitism to his core followers while maintaining a moderate public image. In discussions of the proper solution to the Jewish Question in the 1930s, extermination was often discussed as an option by SS officials, although it was usually discarded.
caption: SA paramilitaries outside a Berlin store on 1 April 1933. The sign reads: "Germans! Defend yourselves! Don't buy from Jews!"
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