Chapter 3

The speech in chapter 2 by Hitler was a loud and clear warning to the Jewish community that if, and when, he came to power that their fate would be sealed.

Of course, most historians point to his 1939 speech as being the starting point to the Holocaust, but it seems to me that the 1920 speech was the initial airing of the “Final Solution” straight from Hitler’s own mouth and directed at international Jewry.

It was a fairly long period of time in that interval.

The world saw exploding new industrialization, the excesses of the “Flapper era” and the world-wide economic disaster of inflation, depression, and joblessness. The Versailles Treaty created cumulative national pressures that bubbled beneath the surface. Hitler consolidated his political power and eventually he transitioned into a leadership role in national government. The Spanish Civil War saw a struggle between Nationalism and the Traditional Republican government. General Franco staged a military coup and eventually declared Spain to be neutral in World War Two. Despite his declaration of neutrality, he covertly supported the Nazi regime in various ways. Switzerland was allowed to declare neutrality and the quick fall of France led to Germany allowing the landlocked country to remain neutral.

The Nazi war machine was on a roll, and it pushed forward as rapidly as possible to absorb one country after another. Hitler’s non-aggression pact with Stalin was a farce from the beginning and Hitler moved out from his position in his share of Poland to initiate Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union. It was considered his biggest mistake of the War and the fateful battle of Stalingrad was deemed the turning point of the War in Europe.

In mid-1940 everything seemed to be going Hitler’s way.

He had already started his detention camp policies for “Enemies of the State” with the focus on incarceration of the Jewish populace in Germany and eventually many other occupied countries.

In order to fully understand the development of the period of 1940 to 1945, historians should make an effort to look to the past to understand the logic or rather the lack of logic of Hitler’s plan to rid the world of International Jewry.

Long-time Jewish residents of Marseille and in the entire Provence sector of France had been lulled into a false sense of security based on promises made by the pre-fall of France French government. Right up to the beginning of 1940, the Jews of Marseilles did not understand that the spreading influx of non-assimilated Jews from Eastern Europe after the end of World War II had accelerated the rise of deep seated racial hatred in the hearts and minds of the non-Jewish population. The effects of the world-wide Great Depression had escaped the recognition of typical French Jews and infused in them a” head in the sand” mentality that permeated though the post 1940 area of Vichy France.