Kristallnacht marked the beginning of Hitler’s war against the Jews

The title of my blog post today is a quote from an editorial piece written by Rabbi Brad Hirschfield on Fox News.  I previously blogged about the events leading up to Kristallnacht here.

Here is the full quote from Rabbi Brad Hirschfield’s editorial:

Kristallnacht marked the beginning of Hitler’s war against the Jews – his campaign for a “final solution” to the so-called “Jewish problem.” Seventy-four years later, people gather around the world to remember that horrible and fateful night. But how does one remember and commemorate a terrible past when the present is good and the future is looking even better?

What was “the so-called Jewish problem?”

The title of the Wannsee Conference, ordered by Hermann Goering, where the Holocaust was planned, was “The total solution to the Jewish question in Europe.”  According to Goering’s testimony at the Nuremberg IMT, the German word “Die Endlösung” meant “the total solution, not the final solution.”

On the third day of his cross examination of Goering at the Nuremberg IMT, the American prosecutor Robert Jackson questioned him about the treatment of the Jews in Nazi Germany, including the anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws on Citizenship, which Goering had signed in September 1935.

Then Jackson confronted Goering with the most incriminating piece of evidence in the entire trial: a letter dated July 31, 1941, in which Goering had ordered Reinhard Heydrich, the chief of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), to prepare a plan for the “Final solution of the Jewish question.” Goering testified that the German term “Die Endlösung” in the letter should have been translated as the “total solution,” and that it referred only to “the emigration of the Jews,” not the extermination of  the Jews.

“The Jewish Question” was Should the Jews have their own state, or their own state-within-a-state?  Those who were against the Jews having their own state, or their own state within another country, were called anti-Semites because they wanted the Jews to assimilate, instead of having their own state.  Hitler was NOT an anti-Semite.  He did not want the Jews in Europe to assimilate; he wanted them to have their own state.

As the rabbi makes clear in his editorial, the Jews in America have assimilated, so there is no “Jewish problem” in America today.