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Conclusion 203

the Jews. streicher, the editor of the virulently anti-semitic Stürmer, was
equally obsessed with the Jewish threat to Germany; Goebbels, the Nazi
Party’s chief propagandist, never tired of denouncing the Jews as the source
of all evil; and Heinrich Himmler, the head of the Gestapo, devoted much
of his working day to the same issue. during the early Nazi period, r. P.
F. edwards, the commercial secretary to the British embassy in Berlin, ex-
pressed dismay at the fervor with which senior Nazi officials spoke of the
Jewish danger. On april 5, 1933, he wrote a personal letter to sir edward
Crowe on a meeting with Göring and Goebbels, both of whom seemed
“only comparable [in their fanaticism] with those distinguished students
from Oxford, who have decided not to fight for King and country under
any circumstances. their one topic of conversation is the destruction of the
Jews. apart from that i do not think that they have any ideas at all, but un-
fortunately they have been exciting the population and their own followers
for the last five or six years and promising that the Jews should be extermi-
nated.” But officials below the top level in the Nazi movement also toed
3
the line on anti-semitism. “No leading Nazi could prosper,” Christopher r.
Browning rightly noted, if he did not “appear to take the Jewish question
as seriously as Hitler himself did.” 4
the diplomats’ accounts of Germany’s persecution of the Jews, espe-
cially those composed by British and american officials, were often so de-
tailed that they brought to light facts not widely known. the most startling
revelation was that although Nazi leaders did not decide on genocide un-
til sometime in 1941, the subject was bruited about throughout the 1930s.
On no fewer than nine occasions—beginning in 1933 and ending early in
1939—the subject of the physical elimination of the Jewish community was
touched upon in diplomatic dispatches. the most revealing consideration
of this sensitive subject took place in april 1935, when streicher warned
Nazis not to spread rumors that Jews must be exterminated for allegedly
planning to assassinate the Führer. streicher actually dismissed one local
official who had violated the rule of silence on the ground that he had been
guilty of “undue rashness.” streicher did not deny that the elimination of
the Jews was a possibility, but he considered it unwise and premature to
bring the subject into the open.
several references by Western diplomats to the likelihood that the Nazis
would resort to mass murder of the Jews were based on their perception of
Nazi intentions, not on specific pronouncements by Hitler or his subordi-
nates. the diplomats sensed that the Nazis’ hatred of the minority was so
deep-seated and irrational that the persecution would continue to intensify