A letter written by Adolf Hitler in 1919, over a decade before he became the future Chancellor of Germany , has been revealed to the public for the first time in New York. According to BBC, the letter was displayed briefly at the Museum of Tolerance in New York, before being purchased by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which will place it on permanent display at their Los Angeles location.
The statement by the then 30-year-old soldier is regarded as a key historical document from the period because it demonstrates how early the future Nazi leader was forming his views. The document suggests that Hitler already believed, more than two decades before the Holocaust, that Jews should be removed from society.
“To begin with, Judaism is definitely a racial and not a religious group,” writes Hitler in the four page document that is also known as the “Gemlich letter.” Rabbi Marvin Hier of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in LA explained that his organization purchased the letter- originally found at the end of WWII by an American soilder- for $150,000 from a private dealer. When questioned on the reasoning behind the purchase, the Rabbi explained: “It does not belong in private hands. It has too much to say to history. It belongs in public hands, and it has found its home at the Museum of Tolerance.” “This is the first document of its kind that deals with the Jews exclusively and postulates the solution,” Hier went on to say. “We have 50,000 archives, and this is the most important archive I’ve ever seen.”
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