The Holocaust Historiography Project

Partial translation of document 3545-PS

           FRANKFURTER ZEITUNG, 17, November 1938

        Speech by Funk in Berlin on 15 November 1938.

The state and the economy constitute a unity. They must be
directed according to the same principles. The best proof
thereof has been rendered by the most recent development of
the Jewish problem in Germany. One cannot exclude the Jews
from the political life, but let them live and work in the
economic sphere. The fact that the last violent explosion of
the disgust of the German people, because of a criminal
Jewish attack against the German people, took place at a
time when we were standing just before the termination of
the economic measures for the
elimination of the Jews from the German economy — this fact
is a result of the other fact that in the last years we had
not handled this problem sufficiently early and
consistently. In any event, the basis of a complete
elimination of the Jews also from the economy had already
been laid by the decrees of the Commissioner for the Four
Year Plan, Field Marshal Goering who was the first to
undertake the solution of this problem. In the meantime, by
means of Aryanization performed under governmental
supervision, the Jews had already been excluded completely
from the stock exchanges and the banks and almost completely
from the larger businesses and all important industrial
enterprises. According to estimates, of the net property of
approximately 7 billion marks, determined pursuant to the
decree for the registration of Jewish property, 2 billion
marks have already been transferred into German possession.