STREICHER: That is an anti-Semitic play of words. Again it has nothing to do with the great political aim.
LT. COL. GRIFFITH-JONES: It may be an anti-Semitic play of words, but the only meaning it can have is murder. Is that not true?
STREICHER: No.
LT. COL. GRIFFITH-JONES: Will you turn to the next page, 25 May 1944; and I remind you that these are all after you must have read of the murder in Israelitisches Wochenblatt. I quote the second paragraph:
“How can we overcome this danger and restore humanity to health? Just as the individual human being is able to defend himself against contagious diseases only if he proclaims war against the cause of the disease, the germ, so the world can be restored to health only when the most terrible germ of all times, the Jew, has been removed. It is of no avail to battle against the outward symptoms of the world disease without rendering the morbific agents innocuous. The disease will break out again sooner or later. The cause and the carrier of the disease, the germ, will see to that. But if the nations are to be restored to health and are to remain healthy in the future, then the germ of the Jewish world plague must be destroyed, root and branch.”
Is that what you mean? Are you saying there when you say “must be destroyed root and branch”—did you mean to say “ought to be given a Jewish national state”?
STREICHER: Yes, it is a far cry from such a statement in an article to the act, or to the will, to commit mass murder.
LT. COL. GRIFFITH-JONES: Turn over to the 10th of August. “When it loses this struggle, Judaism will be ruined, then the Jew will be extinguished. Then will Judaism be annihilated down to the last man.”
Are we to read from these words: Provide the Jews with a Jewish national state?
STREICHER: That is a vision of the future. I would like to call it an expression of a prophetic vision. But it is not incitement to kill 5 million Jews. That is an opinion, a matter, of belief, of conviction.