Mein Kampf Excerpt Page 175 and 176

(a) As soon as the first permanent settlements had been established the Jew was suddenly 'there'. He arrived as a merchant and in the beginning did not trouble to disguise his nationality. He still remained openly a Jew, partly it may be because he knew too little of the language. It may also be that people of other races refused to mix with him, so that he could not very well adopt any other appearance than that of a foreign merchant. Because of his subtlety and cunning and the lack of experience on the part of the people whose guest he became, it was not to his disadvantage openly to retain his Jewish character. This may even have been advantageous to him; for the foreigner was received kindly.

(b) Slowly but steadily he began to take part in the economic life around him; not as a producer, however, but only as a middleman. His commercial cunning, acquired through thousands of years of negotiation as an intermediary, made him superior in this field to the Aryans, who were still quite ingenuous and indeed clumsy and whose honesty was unlimited; so that after a short while commerce seemed destined to become a Jewish monopoly. The Jew began by lending out money at usurious interest, which is a permanent trade of his. It was he who first introduced the payment of interest on borrowed money. The danger which this innovation involved was not at first recognized; indeed the innovation was welcomed, because it offered momentary advantages.

(c) At this stage the Jew had become firmly settled down; that is to say, he inhabited special sections of the cities and towns and had his own quarter in the market-places. Thus he gradually came to form a State within a State. He came to look upon the commercial domain and all money transactions as a privilege belonging exclusively to himself and he exploited it ruthlessly.

(d) At this stage finance and trade had become his complete monopoly. Finally, his usurious rate of interest aroused opposition and the increasing impudence which the Jew began to manifest all round stirred up popular indignation, while his display of wealth gave rise to popular envy. The cup of his iniquity became full to the brim when he included landed property among his commercial wares and degraded the soil to the level of a market commodity. Since he himself never cultivated the soil but considered it as an object to be exploited, on which the peasant may still remain but only on condition that he submits to the most heartless exactions of his new master, public antipathy against the Jew steadily increased and finally turned into open animosity. His extortionate tyranny became so unbearable that people rebelled against his control and used physical violence against him. They began to scrutinize this foreigner somewhat more closely, and then began to discover the repulsive traits and characteristics inherent in him, until finally an abyss opened between the Jews and their hosts, across which abyss there could be no further contact.

In times of distress a wave of public anger has usually arisen against the Jew; the masses have taken the law into their own hands; they have seized Jewish property and ruined the Jew in their urge to protect themselves against what they consider to be a scourge of God. Having come to know the Jew intimately through the course of centuries, in times of distress they looked upon his presence among them as a public danger comparable only to the plague who were generally in financial straits, gladly granted if they received adequate payment in return. However high the price he has to pay, the Jew will succeed in getting it back within a few years from operating the privilege he has acquired, even with interest and compound interest. He is a real leech who clings to the body of his unfortunate victims and cannot be removed; so that when the princes found themselves in need once again they took the blood from his swollen veins with their own hands.

This game was repeated unendingly. In the case of those who were called 'German Princes', the part they played was quite as contemptible as that played by the Jew. They were a real scourge for their people. Their compeers may be found in some of the government ministers of our time.

It was due to the German princes that the German nation could not succeed in definitely freeing itself from the Jewish peril. Unfortunately the situation did not change at a later period. The princes finally received the reward which they had a thousand-fold deserved for all the crimes committed by them against their own people. They had allied themselves with Satan and later on they discovered that they were in Satan's embrace.

(g) By permitting themselves to be entangled in the toils of the Jew, the princes prepared their own downfall. The position which they held among their people was slowly but steadily undermined not only by their continued failure to guard the interests of their subjects but by the positive exploitation of them. The Jew calculated exactly the time when the downfall of the princes was approaching and did his best to hasten it. He intensified their financial difficulties by hindering them in the exercise of their duty towards their people, by inveigling them through the most servile flatteries into further personal display, whereby he made himself more and more indispensable to them. His astuteness, or rather his utter unscrupulousness, in money affairs enabled him to exact new income from the princes, to squeeze the money out of them and then have it spent as quickly as possible. Every Court had its 'Court Jews', as this plague was called, who tortured the innocent victims until they were driven to despair; while at the same time this Jew provided the means which the princes squandered on their own pleasures. It is not to be wondered at that these ornaments of the human race became the recipients of official honours and even were admitted into the ranks of the hereditary nobility, thus contributing not only to expose that social institution to ridicule but also to contaminate it from the inside.

Naturally the Jew could now exploit the position to which he had attained and push himself forward even more rapidly than before. Finally he became baptized and thus entitled to all the rights and privileges which belonged to the children of the nation on which he preyed. This was a high-class stroke of business for him, and he often availed himself of it, to the great joy of the Church, which was proud of having gained a new child in the Faith, and also to the joy of Israel, which was happy at seeing the trick pulled off successfully.

(h) At this stage a transformation began to take place in the world of Jewry. Up to now they had been Jews--that is to say, they did not hitherto set any great value on pretending to be something else; and anyhow the distinctive characteristics which separated them from other races could not be easily overcome. Even as late as the time of Frederick the Great nobody looked upon the Jews as other than a 'foreign' people, and Goethe rose up in revolt against the failure legally to prohibit marriage between Christians and Jews. Goethe was certainly no reactionary and no time-server. What he said came from the voice of the blood and the voice of reason. Notwithstanding the disgraceful happenings taking place in Court circles, the people recognized instinctively that the Jew was the foreign body in their own flesh and their attitude towards him was directed by recognition of that fact.

(e) But then the Jew began to reveal his true character. He paid court to governments, with servile flattery, used his money to ingratiate himself further and thus regularly secured for himself once again the privilege of exploiting his victim. Although public wrath flared up against this eternal profiteer and drove him out, after a few years he reappeared in those same places and carried on as before. No persecution could force him to give up his trade of exploiting other people and no amount of harrying succeeded in driving him out permanently. He always returned after a short time and it was always the old story with him.

In an effort to save at least the worst from happening, legislation was passed which debarred the Jew from obtaining possession of the land.

(f) In proportion as the powers of kings and princes increased, the Jew sidled up to them. He begged for 'charters' and 'privileges' which those gentlemen,