"...In the last few weeks the sterilization of the so-called mixed marriages has begun. But God, who created heaven and earth and whose commandments are for all men, and to whom even your Excellency will have to give account one day, has said to mankind: 'Be fruitful and multiply' (Gen. 1. 18). Sterilization is a physical and spiritual mutilation directly at variance with God's commandment that we shall not dishonour, hate, wound or kill our neighbours. Sterilization constitutes a violation of the divine commandment as well as of human rights. It is the last consequence of an anti-Christian racial doctrine that destroys nations, and of a boundless self-exaltation. It represents a view of the world and of life which undermines true Christian human life, rendering it ultimately impossible... [10] <VII> The fact that the protest of the Church against the persecution and annihilation of the Jews was an inseparable part of its general protest against the inhuman and anti-Christian character of modern anti-semitism places the documents collected in this volume in a broad historical context. These documents offer ample evidence of the Church's opposition to an historical phenomenon rooted long before the Nazis came to power, hence also prior to the rise of modern anti-semitism. The protest of the Church was fundamentally directed against those pagan and mythological elements that had crept into Christianity itself in the course of its historical development among the heathen. To many of the fathers of modern anti-semitism, which is the racial and political Anti-semitism that arose towards the end of the 19th century and reached its highest stage during the Third Reich, the rejection of Judaism was tantamount to the rejection of religion in general. This view goes back to Feuerbach's anthropological criticism of religion, to the young Hegelians (Max Stirner, Bruno Bauer) and to the early Romantics who longed to return to the primitive forms of a religion called "vorchristliches Germanenthum". [11] Modern anti-semitism was influenced by these streams of thought through Nietzsche's concept of the 'Antichrist', although Nietzsche himself kept aloof from the more vulgar manifestations of political anti-semitism of his day. In him the anthropological view reaches its culmination - God, who is nothing more than the deified form of man [12] is finally overthrown by Dionysian man who found courage to assert his instinctive life and abjure the gross and enslaving notions of Christianity that men <VIII> are equal and can be redeemed by faith, the gospel of the downtrodden and everything that creeps on earth. [13] These views, inimical to religion and to Christianity, were already being expounded with great vigour towards the end of the 19th century. Christian doctrine was accused of perverting man's