Hitler's First Draft of the Final Solution

The Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Los Angeles has acquired a letter purportedly revealing Hitler’s earliest anti-Semitic diatribes.

The centre procured the four-page document (long known to historians as “the Gemlich letter”) for $150,00 US, and put it on public display for the first time in New York on Tuesday.

"This is the most important item we have in an archive of more than 50,000 objects," Simon Wiesenthal Centre founder Rabbi Marvin Hier said.

The letter was written and signed by Hitler on September 16, 1919, when he was developing propaganda for the German Army. It is extremely poignant in that it illustrates even then, his vehement hatred towards the Jews.

“Everything men strive after as a higher goal, be it religion, socialism, democracy, is to the Jews only means to an end, the way to satisfy his lust for gold and domination,” Hitler writes in the document.

‘The danger posed by Jewry for our people today finds expression in the undeniable aversion of wide sections of our people. The cause of this aversion is not to be found in a clear recognition of the consciously or unconsciously systematic and pernicious effect of the Jews as a totality upon our nation. Rather, it arises mostly from personal contact and from the personal impression which the individual Jew leaves - almost always an unfavourable one,” he rants.

“An anti-Semitism based on purely emotional grounds will find its ultimate expression in the form of the pogrom. An anti-Semitism based on reason, however, must lead to systematic legal combating and elimination of the privileges of the Jews. The ultimate objective must, however, be the irrevocable removal of the Jews in general,” Hitler chillingly wrote.

The document will go on display at the centre’s Tolerance Museum in Los Angeles in July.