The Political Situation 

Politics is the conduct and process of the historical struggle for the life of nations. The aim of these struggles is survival. Idealistic struggles over world views (Weltanschauung) also have their ultimate causes, and draw their deepest motivating power from purposes and aims in life that derive from national (voelklich) sources. But religions and world views can give such struggles an especial sharpness and by this means endow them with a great historic effectiveness. They can put their mark on the character of centuries. It is then not possible for nations and states which exist within the sphere of influence of such conflicts of philosophical or religious nature to stand apart or exclude themselves from these events....

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 replacing by international Jewry....

It is not the purpose of this memorandum to prophesy when the intolerable situation in Europe will become an open crisis. In these lines 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 own existence secure by all possible means in face of this catastrophe and to protect itself against it; a number of conclusions follow from this necessity, and these involve the most important tasks that our nation has ever faced. 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....

The extent of such a catastrophe cannot be foreseen. How, indeed, would the whole of densely populated Western Europe (including Germany) after a collapse into Bolshevism, live through probably the most gruesome catastrophe for the peoples which has been visited upon mankind since the downfall of the States of antiquity.

Faced with the need to fend off this danger, all other considerations must be relegated to the background as totally without significance....

Akten zur deutschen auswaertigen Politik 1918-1945 ("Documents on German Foreign Policy 1918-1945"), series E (1933-1937), Vol. V, 2. Goettingen, 1977, pp. 793-795.