Dear Colleague,

The wonderful filmmaker, Professor, and Director of the Film Studies Program at Boston College, John J. Michalczyk, wrote to me recently asking to remind him of the source of Hitler's quote about the about the "gassing of Hebrews" in Mein Kampf.

In Volume I, Chapter VII, Hitler discussed the poison gas attack that wounded him in the last days of the First World War:

And, finally, almost in the last few days of that titanic struggle, when the waves of poison gas enveloped me and began to penetrate my eyes, the thought of becoming permanently blind unnerved me.

In Volume II, Chapter XV, he fulminated:

If at the beginning of the War and during the War, 12 or 15 thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas, as happened to hundreds of thousands of our very best German workers in the field, the sacrifice of millions at the front would not have been in vain.

Hitler had been subject to a poison gas attack during the First World War. In Mein Kampf, he wrote about subjecting Jews to a poison gas attack. Of course, Jews ("Hebrews") had nothing to do with the poison gas attack that Hitler had suffered. It was the British who unleashed the poison gas that injured Hitler--and thousands of other Germans.

Nonetheless, the logic--relationship between the two events--is clear. Hitler brought the Holocaust into being to express the idea: Do unto other as has been done unto you. Hitler was reliving a trauma, but now Jews would be subject to asphyxiation rather than German soldiers (and himself).

What an incredible, astonishing phenomenon, a historical miracle: that Hitler could express a fantastic, bizarre idea in Mein Kampf--a wish or desire about gassing Jews--and then would enact this fantasy or desire through the vehicle of the Holocaust.

With best regards,

Richard Koenigsberg