History Unfolded: US Newspapers and the Holocaust

Headline: Goebbels Threatens To Exterminate All Of the Jewish Race

Publication Date: Saturday, June 20, 1942
Historical Event: Nazi Plan to Kill All Jews Confirmed
This database includes 932 articles about this event
Tags: Gannett full page downloadable; Deportation and Mass Murder
Article Type: Editorial or Opinion Piece
Newspaper: The Austin Statesman/The Austin American-Statesman
Location: Austin, Texas
Page Section and Number: 4
Author/Byline: --
Article Text: The Jews in Germany are now threatened with physical extermination. That is the plain meaning of the statement made by Paul Joseph Goebbels in an article published in Das Reich and subsequently broadcast on the authority of the German government.

The nazi propaganda minister, in effect, has admitted that the recent British bombing raids on Cologne and other industrial centers in Germany have done great damage and that the luftwaffe, presumably because of its commitments on the Russian front, is not able to reply in kind. Therefore, according to Goebbels, because the Jewish race is responsible for this war—and so for the suffering of the German people—it will be exterminated if the raids are continued.

That the Hitlerite government is capable of such ferocity already has been shown by mass executions of civilians in the various occupied countries of Europe, the victims of which now are believed to number about 500,000. It should be noted, however, that this form of international blackmail has a limit, where it begins to defeat its own purpose. Should the royal air force cease its operations over Germany, as a result of that threat, who today would imagine the German Jews would be any better off?

They then would simply be under a constant death sentence, to achieve every nazi purpose in the present war. To yield on this point would not be to save Jewish lives but only to produce other demands from the German government, enforced by the same extermination threat, and in the end the policy of racial slaughter would probably be carried out, whatever concessions were made. The sole hope of the German Jews, in fact, lies in the utter destruction of Hitlerism, and that quickly as possible.
History Unfolded Contributor: Carlos G.
Location of Research: Newspapers.com (https://www.newspapers.com)