The following is the text of Professor Yehuda Bauer’s speech during a dinner at the President’s Residence for world leaders and other dignitaries in Jerusalem for the 5th World Holocaust Forum, January 22, 2020:

Why did World War II break out? Because Nazi Germany wanted it. Why?

By 1936, German industrial production had reached the 1929 pre-crisis level. Unemployment had been more or less eradicated, and millions of workers were now bringing home wages, so the internal and external markets were rising. Why then? Because, they say, the Nazis thought that Germany needed a living space, a Lebensraum, to get the grain, the coal and the iron of the Ukraine, and the oil of the Caucasus. But Germany was getting it needed from the Soviet Union anyway. Was then the Lebensraum propaganda a cover for the real reasons? Probably yes.

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Here is an answer. In October, 1936, Hitler announced the start of a German four-year plan, with which he charged his Number 2, Hermann Goering. Two months before that, he prepared this move in talks with Goering. Goering wanted written instructions, and Hitler, in August, 1936, gave him a memorandum.

The first page was an explanation why a plan was needed to prepare Germany for war within four years, and Hitler wrote in the first person singular: I. The crucial sentences were these: “Since the beginning of the French Revolution, the world has been drifting with increasing speed towards a new conflict, whose most extreme solution is named Bolshevism, but whose content and aim is only the removal of those strata of society which gave the leadership to humanity up to the present, and their replacement by international Jewry… I wish only to record my conviction that this crisis cannot and will not fail to arrive, and that Germany has a duty to make its existence secure by all possible means… For a victory of Bolshevism over Germany would not lead to a Versailles treaty, but to the final destruction, even the extermination of the German people. “Ausrottung des deutschen Volkes.”

This was not propaganda. It was not intended for publication, but was an instruction from the dictator to his No. 2. It was quoted at the Nuremberg trials, and published in its original German by the German Federal Republic in 1977.

Its message is perfectly clear: War is inevitable, the enemy is Bolshevism, which is Jewish and which wants to subject all of humanity – not just Europe – to international Jewry.

A central Nazi motivation for the war was the hatred of Jews, which we call anti-Semitism. No mention of a living space, a Lebensraum. Obviously, because the Ukraine and the Caucasus were in the hands of Bolshevism, which was Jewish, and the victory over Bolshevism, that means over international Jewry, would in any case mean German rule over the Lebensraum.

Where, will you ask, are the Jewish capitalists of the West? Hitler gave an answer to that in his speech to the Reichstag on January 30, 1939. There he said: “Today I will once more be a prophet: If the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war” – as we all know, World War I was caused by the Jews, right? – “then the result will not be the bolshevization of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe” Die Vernichtung der jüdischen Rasse in Europa. So, the Jewish capitalists rule the West, and what they want is the victory of Bolshevism. The result will be the annihilation of the Jews.

There are, my friends, 29 million reasons for you to fight anti-Semitism. Not because of the Jews, but to protect your societies from a deadly cancer

It is perfectly clear that this was no propaganda but a deeply held belief that demanded action, to prevent the physical annihilation of the German people at the hands of the chimera he and millions of others believed and still believe in, of a secret cabal of an invented international Jewry that controls both East and West.

ISIS and al Qaeda disseminate this today. World War II was the result, at least in large measure, of this ideology. The war, as we all know, caused some 35 million dead in Europe alone, of whom some 5.6 to 5.7 million were Jews who died in the Holocaust. But some 29 million were non-Jews from Europe and North America who died, in large part, because of the hatred of Jews, and the majority of these victims were Soviet citizens.

Anti-Semitism is not a Jewish illness, but a non-Jewish one; it is a cancer that kills and destroys your nations and your countries.

So, there are, my friends, 29 million reasons for you to fight anti-Semitism. Not because of the Jews, but to protect your societies from a deadly cancer. Don’t you think that 29 million reasons are enough?