The following remarkable passage from Mein Kampf sets out Hitler's views on how the Jews had been active in German and international history up to the present day.
It is mad, mad stuff. Hitler's basic premise is that Jews are obsessed with money and want to take over the world. Liberalism, democracy, capitalism and socialism were all creatures of Jewish self-interest. The sheer paranoia is striking. In Hitler's mind, the Jews controlled the course of history and were seeking to enslave the rest of the world.
Hitler was not a man of the Counter-Enlightenment, at least not in a straightforward sense. The Nazis, like the fascist movement more generally, had an ambivalent relationship with reactionary conservatives, which sometimes extended to mutual enmity and persecution. However, this excerpt bears the clear influence of Counter-Enlightenment ideas. There is the broad-brush condemnation of modernity, from constitutional government to liberal capitalism to Marxist communism. There is also the conspiratorialism and identification of Jews and Freemasons as the enemy - notions which derive directly from 19th century counterrevolutionary propaganda, even if Hitler did tend to justify his antisemitism in terms of modern, "scientific" biological racism.
"(a) With the appearance of the first fixed settlement, the Jew is suddenly 'at hand.' He comes as a merchant and at first attaches little importance to the concealment of his nationality. He is still a Jew....
(b) Gradually he begins slowly to become active in economic life, not as a producer, but exclusively as a middleman. With his thousand-year-old mercantile dexterity he is far superior to the still helpless, and above all boundlessly honest, Aryans....
(c) The Jew has now become a steady resident; that is, he settles special sections of the cities and villages and more and more constitutes a state within a state....
(d) Finance and commerce have become his complete monopoly.... [T]he aversion against him gradually increases to open hatred....
(e) Now the Jew begins to reveal his true qualities. With repulsive flattery he approaches the governments, puts his money to work, and in this way always manages to secure new license to plunder his victims....
To prevent the very worst, at least, the people begin to withdraw the soil from his usurious hands by making it legally impossible for him to acquire soil.
(f) Proportionately as the power of the princes begins to mount, he pushes closer and closer to them. He begs for 'patents' and 'privileges,' which the lords, always in financial straits, are glad to give him for suitable payment....
(g) And so, his ensnarement of the princes leads to their ruin.... With his deftness, or rather unscrupulousness, in all money matters he is able to squeeze, yes, to grind, more and more money out of the plundered subjects, who in shorter and shorter intervals go the way of all flesh. Thus every court has its 'court Jew' - as the monsters are called who torment the 'beloved people' to despair and prepare eternal pleasures for the princes. Who then can be surprised that these ornaments of the human race ended up by being ornamented, or rather decorated, in the literal sense, and rose to the hereditary nobility, helping not only to make this institution ridiculous, but even to poison it?
Now, it goes without saying, he can really make use of his position for his own advancement.
Finally he needs only to have himself baptized to possess himself of all the possibilities and rights of the natives of the country. Not seldom he concludes this deal to the joy of the churches over the son they have won and of Israel over the successful swindle.
(h) Within Jewry a change now begins to take place. Up till now they have been Jews.... Thus - despite all the shameful actions of the courts - the people instinctively saw in the Jew a foreign element and took a corresponding attitude toward him.
But now all this was to change. In the course of more than a thousand years he has learned the language of the host people to such an extent that he now thinks he can venture in future to emphasize his Judaism less and place his 'Germanism' more in the foreground....
The reason why the Jew decides suddenly to become a 'German ' is obvious. He feels that the power of the princes is slowly tottering and therefore tries at an early time to get a platform beneath his feet. Furthermore, his financial domination of the whole economy has advanced so far that without possession of all 'civil' rights he can no longer support the gigantic edifice, or at any rate, no further increase of his influence is possible. And he desires both of these; for the higher he climbs, the more alluring his old goal that was once promised him rises from the veil of the past, and with feverish avidity his keenest minds see the dream of world domination tangibly approaching. And so his sole effort is directed toward obtaining full possession of 'civil' rights.
This is the reason for his emancipation from the ghetto.
(i) So from the court Jew there gradually develops the people's Jew, which means, of course: the Jew remains as before in the entourage of the high lords; in fact, he tries to push his way even more into their circle; but at the same time another part of his race makes friends with the 'beloved people.'...
In a short time he begins to twist things around to make it look as if all the injustice in the world had always been done to him and not the other way around. The very stupid believe this and then they just can't help but pity the poor 'unfortunate.'...
But even more: all at once the Jew also becomes liberal and begins to rave about the necessary progress of mankind.
Slowly he makes himself the spokesman of a new era.
Also, of course, he destroys more and more thoroughly the foundations of any economy that will really benefit the people....
[T]he Jewish influence on economic affairs grows with terrifying speed through the stock exchange. He becomes the owner, or at least the controller, of the national labor force.
To strengthen his political position he tries to tear down the racial and civil barriers which for a time continue to restrain him at every step. To this end he fights with all the tenacity innate in him for religious tolerance - and in Freemasonry, which has succumbed to him completely, he has an excellent instrument with which to fight for his aims and put them across. The governing circles and the higher strata of the political and economic bourgeoisie are brought into his nets by the strings of Freemasonry, and never need to suspect what is happening.
....The glovemakers and linen weavers, however, cannot be caught in the fine net of Freemasonry; no, for them coarser but no less drastic means must be employed. Thus Freemasonry is joined by a second weapon in the service of the Jews: the press....
....While he seems to overflow with 'enlightenment,' 'progress,' 'freedom,' 'humanity,' etc., he himself practices the severest segregation of his race. To be sure, he sometimes palms off his women on influential Christians, but as a matter of principle he always keeps his male line pure. He poisons the blood of others, but preserves his own.... In order to mask his activity and lull his victims, however, he talks more and more of the equality of all men without regard to race and color. The fools begin to believe him.
....His ultimate goal in this stage is the victory of 'democracy,' or, as he understands it: the rule of parliamentarianism. It is most compatible with his requirements; for it excludes the personality and puts in its place the majority characterized by stupidity, incompetence, and last but not least, cowardice....
(j) The tremendous economic development leads to a change in the social stratification of the people. The small craftsman slowly dies out, and as a result the worker's possibility of achieving an independent existence becomes rarer and rarer; in consequence the worker becomes visibly proletarianized....
Now this question again, and this time on a much larger scale, faced the state and the nation. More and more masses of people, numbering millions, moved from peasant villages to the larger cities to earn their bread as factory workers in the newly established industries. The working and living conditions of the new class were more than dismal....
The separation of worker and employer now seems complete in all fields of life. How far the inner Judaization of our people has progressed can be seen from the small respect, if not contempt, that is accorded to manual labor. This is not German....
While the bourgeoisie is not at all concerned about this all-important question, but indifferently lets things slide, the Jew seizes the unlimited opportunity it offers for the future; while on the one hand he organizes capitalistic methods of human exploitation to their ultimate consequence, he approaches the very victims of his spirit and his activity and in a short time becomes the leader of their struggle against himself....
Scarcely has the new class grown out of the general economic shift than the Jew, clearly and distinctly, realizes that it can open the way for his own further advancement. First, he used the bourgeoisie as a battering-ram against the feudal world, then the worker against the bourgeois world....
Here the Jew's procedure is as follows:
He approaches the worker, simulates pity with his fate, or even indignation at his lot of misery and poverty, thus gaining his confidence. He takes pains to study all the various real or imaginary hardships of his life and to arouse his longing for a change in such an existence.... He establishes the Marxist doctrine.
....This theory represents an inseparable mixture of reason and human madness, but always in such a way that only the lunacy can become reality and never the reason. By the categorical rejection of the personality and hence of the nation and its racial content, it destroys the elementary foundations of all human culture which is dependent on just these factors.... With the shattering of the personality and the race, the essential obstacle is removed to the domination of the inferior being - and this is the Jew.
....Thus there arises a pure movement entirely of manual workers under Jewish leadership, apparently aiming to improve the situation of the worker, but in truth planning the enslavement and with it the destruction of all non-Jewish peoples.
The general pacifistic paralysis of the national instinct of selfpreservation begun by Freemasonry in the circles of the so-called intelligentsia is transmitted to the broad masses and above all to the bourgeoisie by the activity of the big papers which today are always Jewish. Added to these two weapons of disintegration comes a third and by far the most terrible, the organization of brute force. As a shock and storm troop, Marxism is intended to finish off what the preparatory softening up with the first two weapons has made ripe for collapse.
....The practical struggle which now begins, sketched in broad outlines, takes the following course:
In keeping with the ultimate aims of the Jewish struggle, which are not exhausted in the mere economic conquest of the world, but also demand its political subjugation, the Jew divides the organization of his Marxist world doctrine into two halves which, apparently separate from one another, in truth form an inseparable whole: the political and the trade-union movement.
....By the creation of a press whose content is adapted to the intellectual horizon of the least educated people, the political and trade-union organization finally obtains the agitational institution by which the lowest strata of the nation are made ripe for the most reckless acts....
....Slowly fear of the Marxist weapon of Jewry descends like a nightmare on the mind and soul of decent people.
They begin to tremble before the terrible enemy and thus have become his final victim.
The Jew's domination in the state seems so assured that now not only can he call himself a Jew again, but he ruthlessly admits his ultimate national and political designs. A section of his race openly owns itself to be a foreign people, yet even here they lie. For while the Zionists try to make the rest of the world believe that the national consciousness of the Jew finds its satisfaction in the creation of a Palestinian state, the Jews again slyly dupe the dumb Goyim. It doesn't even enter their heads to build up a Jewish state in Palestine for the purpose of living there; all they want is a central organization for their international world swindle, endowed with its own sovereign rights and removed from the intervention of other states....
It is a sign of their rising confidence and sense of security that at a time when one section is still playing the German, Frenchman, or Englishman, the other with open effrontery comes out as the Jewish race.
....With satanic joy in his face, the black-haired Jewish youth lurks in wait for the unsuspecting girl whom he defiles with his blood, thus stealing her from her people. With every means he tries to destroy the racial foundations of the people he has set out to subjugate. Just as he himself systematically ruins women and girls, he does not shrink back from pulling down the blood barriers for others, even on a large scale. It was and it is Jews who bring the Negroes into the Rhineland, always with the same secret thought and clear aim of ruining the hated white race by the necessarily resulting bastardization, throwing it down from its cultural and political height, and himself rising to be its master.
For a racially pure people which is conscious of its blood can never be enslaved by the Jew. In this world he will forever be master over bastards and bastards alone.
And so he tries systematically to lower the racial level by a continuous poisoning of individuals.
And in politics he begins to replace the idea of democracy by the dictatorship of the proletariat.
In the organized mass of Marxism he has found the weapon which lets him dispense with democracy and in its stead allows him to subjugate and govern the peoples with a dictatorial and brutal fist.
He works systematically for revolutionization in a twofold sense: economic and political.
Around peoples who offer too violent a resistance to attack from within he weaves a net of enemies, thanks to his international influence, incites them to war, and finally, if necessary, plants the flag of revolution on the very battlefields.
In economics he undermines the states until the social enterprises which have become unprofitable are taken from the state and subjected to his financial control.
In the political field he refuses the state the means for its selfpreservation, destroys the foundations of all national self-maintenance and defense, destroys faith in the leadership, scoffs at its history and past, and drags everything that is truly great into the gutter.
Culturally he contaminates art, literature, the theater, makes a mockery of natural feeling, overthrows all concepts of beauty and sublimity, of the noble and the good, and instead drags men down into the sphere of his own base nature.
Religion is ridiculed, ethics and morality represented as outmoded, until the last props of a nation in its struggle for existence in this world have fallen.
(k) Now begins the great last revolution. In gaining political power the Jew casts off the few cloaks that he still wears. The democratic people's Jew becomes the blood-Jew and tyrant over peoples. In a few years he tries to exterminate the national intelligentsia and by robbing the peoples of their natural intellectual leadership makes them ripe for the slave's lot of permanent subjugation.
The most frightful example of this kind is offered by Russia, where he killed or starved about thirty million people with positively fanatical savagery, in part amid inhuman tortures, in order to give a gang of Jewish journalists and stock exchange bandits domination over a great people.
The end is not only the end of the freedom of the peoples oppressed by the Jew, but also the end of this parasite upon the nations. After the death of his victim, the vampire sooner or later dies too."
