December 12: The Reich Chancellery meeting

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LOVE Quote of the Day - Dec. 12

"When you interact with another, an illusion is part of this dynamic. This illusion allows each soul to perceive what it needs to understand in order to heal." ~ Gary Zukav  

 

The Reich Chancellery meeting of 12 December 1941 was a meeting between Adolf Hitler and the highest ranking officials of the Nazi party. Almost all important party leaders were present, to hear Hitler declare the imminent destruction of the Jewish race; yet it remains less known than the later Wannsee Conference.

Background

The announcement Hitler made on 12 December to the Reichsleiter and Gauleiter refers to an earlier statement he had made on 30 January 1939
"If the world of international financial Jewry, both in and outside of Europe, should succeed in plunging the Nations into another world war, the result will not be the Bolshevization of the world and thus a victory for Judaism. The result will be the extermination of the Jewish race in Europe."
With the entry of Japan and the United States into the Second World War on 7 December 1941 and the declaration of war on the US by Nazi Germany on 11 December, the war, especially in regard to the above statement, had become truly a World War.
Adolf Hitler announced this declaration of war on 11 December in the German Reichstag, a speech broadcast on radio as well.
The next day, in the afternoon of 12 December 1941, he had a meeting with the most important Nazi leaders.

The meeting

On the afternoon of 12 December 1941, Hitler ordered the leading members of the Nazi party to a meeting in his private rooms at the Reich Chancellery. Because the meeting took place in private rooms rather than Hitler's office, no official record of it exists. However, entries in the diaries of Goebbels and Frank confirm it.

Joseph Goebbels noted Hitler's words in his records:

Regarding the Jewish question, the Führer is determined to clear the table. He warned the Jews that if they were to cause another world war, it would lead to their own destruction. Those were not empty words. Now the world war has come. The destruction of the Jews must be its necessary consequence. This question is to be regarded without sentimentalism. We are not here to have sympathy with the Jews, but rather with our German people. If the German people have sacrificed 160,000 dead in the eastern campaign, so the authors of this bloody conflict will have to pay for it with their lives.

Apart from the fact that the "European war" had turned into a "World War", another reason for this shift must been seen in the fact that the entry of the USA into the war meant that the Jewish population had lost its value for Hitler as hostages against this war entry and he was finally free to act according to his long-term plans.
The much more well-known Wannsee Conference in January 1942, was the next step along the Nazis plans to exterminate the Jews. However, unlike this meeting, it was mostly attended by senior bureaucrats. It also undermines claims that Hitler was ignorant of The Holocaust and that it was carried out by subordinates without his knowledge
The meeting marked a turning point in the Nazi regime's attitude towards the Jewish people. It was part of a shift from propaganda, intimidation and attacks to outright and planned extermination. The latter step had already been taken in some parts of Eastern Europe as early as September 1941