Background: Walter Groß was head of the Nazi Party’s Racial Policy Office and one of the most influential advocates of Nazi racial theory. In this article from the party magazine for racial policy, written just before the invasion of the Soviet Union, Groß advocates expelling all Jews from Europe. He does not suggest where they should go, adding only that it should not be to Arab areas. By May 1941, the Nazi leadership had no intention of resettling Jews — but the details of mass murder were not suitable for public dissemination.
The source: Walter Groß, “Zur Lösung der Judenfrage,” Neues Volk 9 (May 1941), pp. 4-5. The picture is from the German Bundesarchiv, via Wikipedia.
As long as Jewry has lived among other peoples it has always led to the most severe tensions, regardless of the time, the geographical location, or other conditions peculiar to the people. This has always brought the “Jewish question” to the foreground and led to attempts at solution. These attempts usually did not result from a deep understanding of the nature of the the problem, only from a feeling of antipathy toward Jewry. They were as a result not implemented in a systematic and careful way, but rather only impulsively, spontaneously, and without consistency and thoroughness. They always had a local character, limited to a city or dukedom, at best to a country, while neighboring cities, dukedoms, or countries had a completely different relationship with Jewry. As a result all of these outbreaks of antipathy toward the foreign people historically rem
ained without deeper results.
Only 150 years ago did a stronger and more lasting interest begin in the peculiar manifestation of this foreign people living amidst the Europeans. Characteristically and fatefully, this process of growing awareness of the Jewish question developed with critical intellectual leadership from Jewish circles.
Remarkably, complaints from the Jews about discrimination against them were more prominent than complaints from the host peoples about the harm resulting to gentiles.
This resulted in the peculiar fact that in the following liberal century discussion of the Jewish question, when it surfaced at all, was primarily in the intellectual tradition of improving life for the Jews. It was quickly evident that the idea of Jewish emancipation while maintaining Jewish characteristics had only theoretical significance and was but a short transitional period. Jewry used the “freedom” it had won to promote the path to assimilation. It was the age of Jewish baptism that concealed religious peculiarities, the age of adopting gentile names, taking on leading positions and professions in the economy previously denied to Jews, the rejection of linguistic peculiarities, giving up customs and traditions at home and in the family that had previously distinguished Jews from gentiles. Then Jewish sons and daughters married into the families of host peoples. The Jew concealed his foreign nature through that last step, which made him the son-in-law of old European noble families, the brother-in-law of leading merchants, academics, officers, politicians, making him as father or mother the heir of enormous fortunes and centuries-old family traditions. This concealment, or as one thought back then the setting aside and elimination of his foreign nature, reached its highpoint and the liberal age believed that in several generations the old Jewish Question could and must entirely vanish from history.
But there was a decisive development in the intellectual world. The concept of race, which two generations earlier was deficient due to a lack of clear understanding of the laws of inheritance, had been arbitrary, shifting, and disputed. Now modern genetics and anthropology developed. A clear anthropological concept of race developed. It understood a race to be a human group with common genetic makeup that distinguished its physical and intellectual-spiritual nature from other human groups.
If one consistently applied such an absolutely clear scientific racial concept to Jewry, both historical research and anthropological investigation agreed on the same identical conclusion. Jewry was not a single race from this perspective, but was rather the result of a racial mixing going back thousands of years, which was replaced by strict inbreeding thereafter. Because of the intellectual-spiritual characteristics of the constituent races, this racial mixing led to a fanatically-held sense of blood and community that forever separated Jews from gentiles. From a strictly scientific perspective we cannot see Jewry as an independent race, but rather as an independent people, a people that anthropologically and historically is a racial mixture. This distinguishes the people of the Jews from all other European peoples, and distinguishes the Jewish Question from all other ethnic and so-called minority questions though one decisive fact: it is the nature of the racial mixing that is the foundation of the Jewish people.
From the anthropological perspective, most European peoples are not racially uniform, but are the result of racial mixing. In Europe, however, although the peoples have various elements the mixture always goes back to one and the same original race. One can in a historic sense call these the “European” races. The racial foundation of the Jewish people is radically different. There are elements of the past European races (e.g., Mediterranean, western) and occasional injections of blood over the course of Jewish history. These European additions of blood are only, if one can use the phrase, additives to the two fundamental components of the Jewish racial mixture that give Jewry its character and from the European perspective render him foreign and non-European. These two decisive racial components are entirely foreign to Europe. Science calls them Near Eastern (vorderasiatisch) and Oriental and means by that two broad anthropological groups that entered history and developed independent of Jewry, but which never belonged to the European world.
These anthropological conclusions make absolutely clear the historical and sociological facts of the total foreignness of the Jew among the European peoples: he is physically and intellectually-spiritually determined by racial elements that make entirely foreign and different to all European races. As is well-known, this foreignness is so great that in many areas he seems the opposite, the deadly enemy of the highest values and deepest ideas of European peoples. One may not overlook the fact that although Jewry embodies characteristics that are repulsive and provocative to Europe, it is not a distinct and individual race, but rather a stable racial mixture that developed over the centuries and millennial. This is important. It is easy for us to ascribe Jewry’s characteristics that to us are bad and hostile to the Near Eastern or Oriental race. That would be a big mistake. Those races that developed in relative purity are indeed foreign and different than the Europeans, but in their own living space cultures they have admirable and attractive characteristics. One need only think of the Arabian tribes and peoples, whose racial foundation is apparently entirely Oriental. The fact that Jewry is inferior and hostile in comparison to racially related peoples goes back to the historical unique and obviously discordant racial mixture out of which the Jews developed. That is why Near Eastern and Oriental peoples who are entirely different from a racial perspective than Europeans still reject and fight Jewry. The passionate racial and political resistance of the Arabs against the Jewish usurpation of Palestine is evidence of that. For the sake of clarity, it would be good if the European world always stayed with the idea of anti-Jewish struggle, not using the term “anti-Semitism” as in the past. The battle is not against peoples speaking Semitic languages, but rather against the discordant Near Eastern-Oriental-Mediterranean Jewish people, which is also so passionately opposed by the pure or predominately Oriental and Semitic tribes and peoples.
With these racial conclusions we can now establish the following: The foreignness and hostility of Jewry in Europe is not the result of its faith, its sentiments, its education. It cannot be altered by a change in religion or through assimilation and emancipation. It is a result of the unalterable and innate genetic-racial characteristics that we cannot change in any way. The foreignness and enmity of Jewry within the European peoples will remain eternally. Therefore, the elimination of the centuries-long tensions and unrest can be achieved only in one way: the removal of the Jews from Europe. It is at the same time clear that such a view of the Jewish question comes not from the perspective of a single particularly anti-Jewish people. Jewry is entirely foreign not only to the Germans or Italians. The same internal foreignness is also true for each other European people. It would, therefore, be a utopia if one thought to solve the problem by driving the Jews out of this or than European country and resettling them in some other part of Europe.
Let us turn to the second important question: to whom does this perspective apply? One must define the term “Jew” and incorporate the definition in the coming legal system of the European peoples. It is clear that the concept must be the same in the laws of all European states if the solution to the Jewish question is to be real, complete, and satisfactory.
Since the first Jewish laws of National Socialist Germany, a series of European states have passed or proposed laws to define and limit the position of the Jews. I name only the most important: Italy, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and the Vichy government in France. These laws often differ significantly from each other. That is understandable, since the political, sociological, or economic nature of the Jewish question is often very different in these countries. The significance, the number, the influence, and the technical possibilities to exclude them differ in the different countries. It is, therefore, not possible instantly to have identical measures against the Jews in all these countries. It is also unnecessary if one views all of these Jewish laws as provisional, as a transition, having validity only until a final solution, which must be the removal of the Jews from Europe. The content of current Jewish laws can vary from country to country without great harm being done, depending on local circumstance, but it is problematic when there are important differences in the definition of the concept of Jew.
To conclude our discussion, racial biology and racial policy lead us to the following conclusions about the future European solution to the Jewish question:
Jewry is foreign to all European peoples to the same degree. Its historical and spiritual danger cannot be eliminated through assimilation. Eliminating the dangerous effects of its existence in Europe is possible only through its complete removal.
Because of its racial mixture fixed through inbreeding, it is also foreign to the so-called Semitic peoples.
For racial-political reasons, therefore, Jews cannot be resettled in any European country nor in any of the lands outside Europe belonging to the Arabs.
In determining who is considered Jewish, only racial considerations must be applied, not questions of religion, dwelling place, nationality, and the like.
Independent of existing or yet to be passed transitional solutions of the various countries, agreement of the growing anti-Jewish political forces in all European countries on the racial-political foundations of the Jewish question is necessary and urgent.
Last edited 20 September 2024
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