German Propaganda Archive Calvin University

line

Background: Hanns Oberlindober, the author of this collection of letters, was an early Nazi who headed the Nazi organization for wounded veterans. This book was first published in 1939 and seems to have sold well. I’m working from the third printing, which brought the print run to 55,000. This letter is an example of how Nazi anti-Semitism was presented to a foreign audience, though since it was printed in Germany, it was also part of the domestic campaign against the Jews.

The source: Hanns Oberlindober, Ein Vaterland, das allen gehört! Briefe an Zeitgenossen aus zwölf Kampfjahren (Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP, 1940), pp. 152-167.


The “Decent” Jew

A Letter to an Englishman, 1937


Dear Mr. Smith !

Well, Baron R. came to you to ask for help, did he? He described himself as a “good German” and as a “decent Jew.” He fled from the “Nazi hell.” He is an émigré.

Oberlindober PostcardYou ask me what you should do with this interesting baron. I reply: Please read the following letter to him, and he will stop asking you for help. And if you pass this letter on to the public, you will do your English people a valuable service. It is both an accusation and a rejection.

I am a “good German” and a “decent Jew”! Only a Jew has the insolence to make such a claim. I answer it only to reach the public and finally dispatch the absurd notion of the “decent Jew.” The fable of the “decent Jew” is not a German fable that has been handed down by our people and therefore something with educational value, but rather it is a shameless lie designed to lull the host people to sleep and appeal to hysterical weaklings.

This Jewish method has undoubtedly had some success in the past, and also works today in countries and peoples with democratic foundations that have given themselves over to Jewish control. However, outside of a tiny group of intellectual know-it-alls, no reasonable person in Germany would want to say “decent” and “Jew” in the same breath.

To the German mind, decency demands absolute selflessness.

A “good German” works hard and joyfully to serve his people. For him, “making something” has always been a more important result of his creative strength than “making money.” The good German values each creation, each discovery, as a service to the German people’s community that is more valuable to him than the possibility of making money. The best German is not he who makes the most money, but rather he who is of greatest service to his people. I doubt that one can translate this sentence into Hebrew, since it goes far beyond any Jewish understanding.

And you think you can be a “good German”! True, you do speak German, just as your racial comrades in other countries speak English, French, Spanish, and Polish, but you are no more a German than they are Englishmen, Frenchmen, Spaniards, or Poles, since Jews are a foreign body in every people.

Your own son — you’ll note than I am well informed — is a “good Swiss,” and your second son is a “good German,” and you think yourself a “good German.”

You Jews must think your host peoples are stupid! You have always done your duty as a citizen, you claim, punctually paying your not insubstantial taxes, probably because it could not be avoided even after you had taken advantages of all the deductions and loopholes. You have done much good, and carefully recorded every bit of it in order to demand repayment. You have made contributions to maintain historic castles and palaces, and can prove it by letters of thanks from the appropriate officials. And you also have medals from various minor nobles to prove your decency.

And so you are a “good German,” as if one did not know that you had taken the same steps to gain the esteem of the Legion of Honor, even “earning” papal medals and similar honors just to be safe. Even your noble title that you gained as a court Jew means as little to us as the baptismal water that you had to tolerate in order to join the nobility. Both prove only that there are money-hungry nobles and church proselytizers who ignore the laws of blood and race, just as you do, for their own benefit!

But now you are losing all your capital holdings in Germany, for the German people and its leadership today are unforgiving in this area. There were times when Jews like you could buy titles, citizenship, religion, and stature, just as you could buy plastic surgery for your nose or devices for flat feet. That, however, does not mean that the new Germany of Adolf Hitler has to pay the bills for your investments that you claim to be your due as a “good German.”

Within your own circles, you perhaps are already saying that it would have been better to become a “good Englishman” or a “good Frenchman.”

Despite the sensitivity of the democrats to the world’s moaning and groaning, the warmongering incitement of the so-called world press and the agonized howls of those of your nature and religion, the National Socialist people’s and state leadership has only done its simple duty to the German people, namely to investigate and determine the results and consequences that the “good Germans” and “decent Jews” have left behind for the German people, and to ensure that there will never again be a time of unlimited or concealed Jewish domination.

I say Jewish domination intentionally, for there is no more dreadful tyranny than when world Jews enslave their host people through their willing, bribed, and obedient democratic lackeys.

Revenge for centuries in the ghetto dominates your thinking, guides your decisions, and dictates your actions.

Zionism only conceals your true intentions from those blinded circles who see in Jewry a different ideal than the will to totally control the world. The “poor Jews” hope that once they have torn apart the peoples of the world, putting them at the service of the Jews, they will be able, with the help of money, to assure the rule of a world bled dry. I willingly admit that, until recently, the prospect seemed likely. Until the National Socialist takeover in the German Reich, you Jews understood how to clothe yourself with the mantel of irresistibility. With the help of the press, film, advertising, historical misrepresentation and silence about the accomplishments of all other races, you were able to present yourselves as the best, most diligent, smartest, and most noble people in the world, suggesting to an unhappy people bleeding from the thousand wounds of the war that they had to accept the unavoidable joy of Jewish leadership.

For decades, you controlled so-called statesmen like puppets, keeping yourself in the background despite your native Jewish vanity. Between you and the peoples, there hung the mystic curtain of your lodges, your so-called religious mission, and your obvious cowardice.

But the German people have ripped apart this nimbus of Jewish irresistibility, and thus cleared the way for an open discussion among the peoples about the value or lack thereof of the Jews. The peoples can only win as a result, the Jews can only lose!

We German National Socialists see the public controversy with Jewry not only as the answer to a question that is the result of a new social order and the solution of the racial struggle between host peoples and parasitic manifestations, but also as a major contribution to the moral, physical, and economic health of the world. Direct or indirect Jewish domination has brought the world to the edge of ruin.

I draw my conclusions from the incontrovertible evidence that the Jewish people has given to us Germans.

I begin with the moral qualities of the Jews that they love to bring up. Never was the level of public morality lower than during the time in which your racial comrades had nearly complete control over film, the stage, and the arts. I remember with disgust the so-called educational films and similar such depravity for which there was sensational propaganda. Other Jews praised such things to the heavens, and still other Jews kept the police from stopping these general attacks on public morality. The damage done to our youth by Magnus Hirschfeld [a prominent Jewish sexual researcher] alone, and the fact that the rest of Jewry tolerated him, is by itself sufficient to justify the harshest measures against the Jews. But Magnus Hirschfeld was no unfortunate single case, but rather one of a legion of Jewish corrupters of the youth, sexual criminals, pseudo-scientists, playwrights and novelists, painters and sculptors, theater and cabaret directors, publishers and distributors of pornographic literature. They competed with each other to produce their filth, surpassing each other in obscenity, making easier the work of their racial comrades seeking to dominate an unnerved and powerless people rendered susceptible by such “art.” The absence of moral rules was called freedom and unrestrained drives were proclaimed to be the right of the young.

What do “decent Jews” say about such incontrovertible facts of the recent past? Were the poor parents of these boys and girls to haul such pigs from the muck and drive them through the streets in a pogrom, it would not be hard to understand, for the poisoning of young souls is worse than bestial murder.

More than that, your racial comrades intentionally and cold-heartedly preached and encouraged the murder of the unborn children of our people through abortion. The racial hatred Jews had for their Aryan host people extended to the growing life in a mother’s womb. Jewish scoundrels made this part of the programs of political parties. How many millions of unborn children and how many hundreds of thousands of mothers fell prey to the greed and racial hatred of Jewish doctors? The Jews kept the number secret by controlling and influencing the official statistics of the German Reich. To my knowledge, no “decent Jew” raised his voice against such organized murder.

The picture would be incomplete were I to be silent about the criminal side of a “decent Jew.” This has long been concealed by the cloak of Christian or Marxist brotherly love. There is no crime, from pickpocketing to bank robbery, from train robbery to brutal murder, from drugs to the defilement of corpses, from document forgery to perjury, from embezzlement to counterfeiting, in which the names of your brethren are not written large as perpetrators or accomplices in the history of criminality. These “poor widows’ sons” were then represented by Jewish attorneys before Jewish judges. Presented as the victim of circumstances, they received mild sentences, which were in turn covered up by the Jewish journalists of the Jewish press.

But he who called the Jew a Jew and described his drives as Jewish, on the other hand, was given draconian sentences by those same courts for religious incitement.

The new Germany has finally put a stop to Asiatic criminal drives. Above all, it placed the Jewish race under the laws governing foreigners, declaring racial mixing to be racial defilement, a deadly danger for the German people, and punishing it with the appropriate penalties.

We Germans are far prouder of the inheritance of our blood than certain Jewish tribes that trace their origins to the expulsion of the Children of Israel from Egypt. Our daughters, the mothers of the coming generation, are far too holy to us to allow them to be given to the lusts of the offspring of parasitic Hebrew nomads. We are hardly impressed by the mention of lovely sacks of money that are used to make tasteful racial poisoning. It will be forever impossible here for faded coats of arms to be regilded through marriage with baptized Jewesses. There will be no more Holofernes [an Assyrian general beheaded by Judith in the apocryphal book] lured to destruction by the arms of a Jewish courtesan. The racial struggle will no longer be carried into the bridal bed.

That is why your brethren, “you decent Jew and good German,” have long been reaching for other weapons, as Marcus Eli Ravage cynically admitted in the American magazine The Century (Nr. 3, 1938, p. 346):

“You have not begun to appreciate the real depth of our guilt. We are intruders. We are disturbers. We are subverters.

We have taken your natural world, your ideals, your destiny, and played havoc with them. We have been at the bottom not merely of the latest great war but of nearly all your wars, not only of the Russian but of every other major revolution in your history. We have brought discord and confusion and frustration into your personal and public life. We are still doing it. No one can tell how long, we shall go on doing it.

Look back a little and see what has happened. Nineteen hundred years ago you were an innocent, care-free, pagan race. You took unblushing pride in the glory of your naked bodies. Disporting yourselves on the hillsides and in the valleys of the great outdoors, you took to speculating on the wonder and mystery of life and laid the foundations of natural science and philosophy. Yours was a noble, sensual culture, unirked by the pricklings of a social conscience or by any sentimental questionings about human equality. Who knows what great and glorious destiny might have been yours if we had left you alone.

We made you the willing and unconscious bearers of our mission to the whole world, to the barbarous races of the earth, to the countless unborn generations. Without fully understanding what we were doing to you, you became the agents at large of our racial tradition, carrying our gospel to the unexplored ends of the earth.

Our tribal customs have become the core of your moral code. Our tribal laws have furnished the basic groundwork of all your august constitutions and legal systems. And the law which went forth from Zion became the official religion of Rome.

But what are the Protocols of the Elders of Zion besides the unquestionable historical conspiracy which we have carried out, which we have never denied because you never had the courage to charge us with it, and of which the full record is extant for anybody to read?” [This satiric article, actually published in the January 1928 issue of The Century, has been taken seriously by several generations of anti-Semites.]

We German National Socialists, however, do raise this charge, and we prove our just charge with such Jewish witnesses. The state that Adolf Hitler has created judges the conspirators on German soil, and the community of working and fighting German people carries out a just verdict which even you, the “decent Jew and good German,” cannot escape.

Should we consider the arsonists of the world to be “the chosen people,” they who cynically confess in public to having started the Great War and modern revolutions, thereby earning the guilt for the deaths of over ten million of the best of Aryan mankind, who are responsible for hunger and catastrophe, and who are proclaiming yet more revolutions to gain world dominance? Shall we continue to assist them, thereby bringing guilt on ourselves for the collapse of our own people and the destruction of the entire world?

No appeal to sentimental tolerance and no threat will be able to stop the German people from making the “undeniable historical conspiracy” impossible inside the German Reich. Just as a Jew can no longer be a citizen, neither is he able to have an influence on any part of our public and economic life. The German people has freed itself politically from the Jews, breaking their spiritual and material power. You Jews can no longer find lackeys in the German Reich to fight your battles for you. You must either fight for yourselves or lead other obedient peoples into war!

But these other peoples, too, show clear signs of your Jewish greed. Even if unwillingly, they still bear the load of Jewish interest slavery. Their living standards sink as Jewish financial power increases.

They are beginning to ask why members of a foreign race have more to say in their nation than those who bled and died for their nation.

They rightly ask who won the war, and who benefited from it. One day, they will know the answer. No one then will believe the fables of “decent Jews and good Frenchmen or Englishmen or Americans” any longer.

So far, I have intentionally avoided the corrupting and destructive effects of your racial comrades in economic life, of the attempt to destroy the National Socialist economy, of the central banking system and the brutal efforts of the Jewish world economy to monopolize raw materials. I have not wanted to speak of three hundred years of history that everyone knows, of the Rothschilds, the Warburgs, the Speyers, the Löbs, the Kuhns, and the Pereiras, nor of the court Jews and their noble friends, nor of Jewish swindlers and their lackeys. These are side effects that have for the moment been overcome. They show the spiritual and moral power of Jewry, which has been broken.

I am sure that you Jews have been heartily amused by the focus of anti-Semitism on the external characteristics of your race, the crooked nose, the beards and flat feet. You still laughed when it focused only on your businesses, whether they were honest or not. You could claim hard work, diligence and luck, and reject any attack as the result of envy. But today you Jews are laughing no longer, for your very nature, your spirit, is revealed, and you must fight without your masks.

A people has forced you to your knees, but other peoples have remained spiritually and morally at your mercy. At the moment, only two nations have been victorious against your destructive efforts: Germany and Italy. Both affirm their blood, and have thus become strong. They will resist any attack against their life, their nature, their culture or their economy, and are therefore unbeatable, because they have through their own values recognized the inner lack of values of the Jewish world enemy.

Today Germany and Italy proclaim their right to life to the world, and demand their share of the wealth of creation. To satisfy their wishes will not cost other nations anything. Only a small part of the wealth we demand is owned by other nations. The rest is almost exclusively in the greedy hands of Jews intent on world domination.

Despite these incontrovertible facts, you Jews are impudent enough to appeal to the tolerance of a people and simultaneously incite other peoples to wage war against it.

Adolf Hitler, the Führer of Germany, is determined to lead his people to a free, moral, and strong future, despite Jewish incitement and humanitarian complainers. He has torn apart the law of the nomads and revealed Jewry for what it is.

Today you must leave Germany, as you once left Egypt. Bearing the mark of Cain, you must wander until your fate is fulfilled.

Only then will the age of true peace between the peoples of this earth begin!

[Page copyright © 2003 by Randall Bytwerk. No unauthorized reproduction. My e-mail address is available on the FAQ page.]


Go to the 1933-1945 Page.

Go to the German Propaganda Home Page.