“The Hitler candidate had said it, the political prisoner Hitler had written it, the German people read it and the German people voted …”
Unique historic document. Signed autograph of the French colonel Charles de Gaulle, to his friend, regarding the Nazi persecution of the Jews in Germany. Written the day after Kristallnacht. November 11, 1938.
Specifications: [12] lined pages 13×19 cm. French. Certificate of authenticity confirming this letter is the original.
For many years, there there will be historiographic deliberations analyzing the foundations of Nazi antisemitism and their murderous plan. De Gaulle, in this letter which was written at a very early stage, indicates several important elements of Nazi policy: the backdrop of historic European antisemitism, the failure of the statesmen at the Munich conference, turning the Jew into the enemy of each national community, the social order in the modern country, the influence of Nazi propaganda in general and Mein Kampf in particular, state legitimization of wild primary impulses, a path of deterioration which advanced as circumstances allowed, from rejecting the Jews, to hating them, and until a legal norm of violence against them.
Content of the Letter: De Gaulle relates to the serious events that have shaken Germany at the time. He sees in the acts of violence against the Jewish community of the Reich a demonstration of the violent and dehumanizing character of Hitlerian ideology. Should people be surprised? He indicates that the leaders of Germany raged and threatened into the air. De Gaulle is angry and not appeased at this pointless hatred. The violence, in his opinion, is only an application of the old hatreds and current angers born of a sacrificed peace. “The Hitler candidate had said it, the political prisoner Hitler had written it, the German people read it and the German people voted …” This hatred of the Jew, according to him, is not linked to National Socialism, it is intrinsically liked to two thousand years of a European culture that has made the Jew an enemy for each national community and for the entire social order. “History speaks for those who today are unleashed against the children of Israel.” Europe has complex relations with Judaism, no one can deny it. Germany is neither a special case nor a land of visceral anti-Semitism. But, unlike Dreyfus’s France, it has become a land where cultural anti-Semitism has given way to doctrinaire anti-Semitism, and this doctrine justifies the passage from rejection to hatred, and hatred to violence. It is to Hitler and his pamphlet that it owes it. Mein Kampf , beyond all political considerations, is a laissez-passer liberating the most primary impulses that the exalted of all edges consider as having the force of law since its author arrived, by the game of universal suffrage, master of the new Germany. This Pogrom should not be a surprise to anyone, it is only a consequence, a continuity in action. De Gaulle calls it ‘the cold and justified application of a text become gospel of a people whose foundations and social structures were put down by the very one who had to be the guarantor; the state.’ Hitler’s Germany has definitely swept away cultural antisemitism by instituting state-sponsored, law-governed antisemitism, but well beyond it, having established as a fact accepted and accepted by all that violence and hatred could now and legally be admitted by the whole society as a norm. De Gaulle concludes his letter: “Before going to Munich, our leaders would have been inspired to read Mein Kampf !”
Charles Andre Joseph Marie de Gaulle (1890-1970) was the General commanding the armored forces during WWII. He supported offensive armored warfare, and tried to warn against the ineffectiveness of the French army’s strategy, who was interested in digging into the Maginot line, in the face of the German blitzkrieg. He opposed French surrender to Germany and was the leader of Free France during the war, eventually becoming the first president of the fifth republic of France and one of the architects of its constitution. One of the greatest French leaders of the modern era, and one of the most admired national figures in France.
Condition: Very fine condition. Fold marks.
