“The Minister had no doubt that the stupid talk abroad about purely internal German affairs, as for example the Jewish problem, will quickly be silenced if one realizes that the necessary cleaning up of public life must temporarily entail individual cases of personal hardship but that nevertheless it served only to establish all the more firmly the authority of justice and law in Germany.”
Was that your view in September 1933, of the action against the Jews and against the left-wing sympathizers up to that time, that it was a “necessary cleaning up of public life,” which would, of course, temporarily involve “individual cases” of hardship, and that was necessary “more firmly” to establish “the authority of justice and law in Germany”? Was that your view?
VON NEURATH: I told you during—during—during my—I think it was the day before yesterday in answer to the question of what my attitude was toward the Jewish problem, that in view of the inundation and domination of public life in Germany by Jews which occurred after the last war, I thought it absolutely right to have these things either eliminated or restricted. That is what I am referring to here.
SIR DAVID MAXWELL-FYFE: So that it is right—I mean, you are not running away from what you said on the 17th of September 1933—that you thought the treatment of the Jews in 1933 a “necessary cleaning up of public life” in Germany? Are we to take it that your view then is your view now, and you do not deviate from it at all? Is that right?
VON NEURATH: That is still my view today, do you not see, only it should have been carried out by different methods.
SIR DAVID MAXWELL-FYFE: All right. Well, we will not go into discussions of it.
Am I to take it that you knew and approved of the breakdown of political opposition?
VON NEURATH: No, that is...
SIR DAVID MAXWELL-FYFE: Well, then, let us take it by stages. Did you believe in the prescribing, the making illegal of the Communist Party?
VON NEURATH: In those days, most certainly, because you have heard, have you not, that we were facing civil war.