Rabbi Daniel Lapin is an Orthodix rabbi, radio personality, and author of America's Real War. He is President of Toward Tradition, www.towardtradition.org.

This essay was previously published in The American Enterprise, Nov/Dec 1999, and reprinted with permission of the author.

* Editor's Note: Julius Streicher was a Nazi leader hanged after the Nuremberg trials.

Landsberg prison, which I entered on April 1, 1924, and where I wrote Mein Kampf, is strangely similar to this place I entered after shooting myself on April 30, 1945. I found myself in both places involuntarily, yet they have each provided me with peace as well as perspective.

As one tends to do in the timeless eternity of our existence here, I often reflect upon my single most regrettable error - underestimating America. Exactly one month after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor I told you at our Berlin headquarters that America is a decayed country. My feelings against Americanism were feelings of hatred and deep repugnance. Everything about the behavior of American society reveals that it's half Judaized and the other half Negrified. How can one expect a state like that to hold together? Well, America did somehow hold together and seized victory from us. However, and this is important my friend, she has finally adopted many of the vital ideas of our movement. Could not this be described as an ultimate vindication of all we lived and died for? Perhaps it is even a victory of sorts.

Let me explain. First and foremost we were socialists. As national socialists, or Nazis, we presumed that government and the people were hostile to one another. Thus, we understood that the old German tradition of citizens' owning guns had to end. On March 18, 1938, we enacted our Law on Weapons and ruled that only government agents may own firearms. You can imagine my approval as I watched Senator Thomas Dodd craft America's Gun Control Act of 1968 by having our own law of 1938 translated for him by an official of the Library of Congress. My dear Julius, we can be proud of how similarly the two laws read. Those gun control efforts are naive and well-meaning, but their results will resemble ours. We told the German people that gun control laws were needed to curb gang activity and preserve democracy, but what those laws did was help us prevail.

We Nazis understood that every German citizen must live for the state. And in the same way that wise farmers accept responsibility for the health of their herds, we used the power of government to keep our flocks healthy. We were disgusted by the addictive powers of cigarettes, since both mind and body were supposed to belong to the Führer. We succeeded in almost criminalizing the smoking of cigarettes.

Our Ministry of Science and Education ordered elementary schools to discuss the dangers of tobacco. Government-sponsored cultural and educational events were declared "smoke-free." In the late 1930s we called for increased taxes on cigarettes and later instituted bans on cigarette advertising. I am most proud of the legislation we introduced prohibiting sales of cigarettes to minors. We set up counseling centers for the psychological treatment of smokers, and we established smoke-free restaurants.

We soon managed to prohibit smoking on Luftwaffe properties and followed that with prohibiting smoking in post offices, government buildings, and many workplaces. In 1940, S.S. Chief Heinrich Himmler announced a smoking ban for all on-duty police and S.S. officers. Our comrade, Hermann Goering, decreed soldiers may not smoke in public, and most cities banned smoking on public transport in order to protect the ticket takers from second-hand smoke. We can indeed be proud that today America has also come to realize the importance of central government taking the initiative in regulating what people do not have the good sense to do voluntarily.

Do you remember that awkwardness in late 1940? The American consulate in Leipzig reported on our policy of conducting compassionate euthanasia on the patients in the Grafeneck Mental Asylum in Württemberg. What an uproar resulted in America! But now one of America's most prestigious institutions, Princeton University, has appointed as professor of bioethics one Peter Singer, who openly advocates putting to death the mentally defective, the terminally ill, and even severely disabled infants. He would give parents and doctors the right to actually kill (not just withhold treatment from) newborns with, for instance, spina bifida and hemophilia. Singer insists a newborn has no greater right to life than pigs, cows, and dogs. So the ridiculous idea that all human life is sacred is now finally under attack in America. A sitting President was re-elected after affirming the legitimacy of exterminating infants during birth, and doctors in their province of Oregon have begun doing away with the elderly and weak. Yes, America is certainly coming around to our way of seeing things.

Finally, dear Julius, you will remember what I frequently said and wrote in Mein Kampf: "The state must declare the child to be the most precious treasure of the people." I explained that as long as the government is perceived as working for the benefit of children, the people will happily endure almost any curtailment of liberty and almost any deprivation. It is truly heartwarming to see how well this lesson has been learned by the American government. In the name of children, incursions into the private lives of American citizens have been made that we Nazis would have gazed at with open-mouthed admiration. Does it matter that our bodies failed as long as our spirit still triumphs?

I know you have a question to ask me, my friend: What about the Jews? After all, how can I say that much of America is adopting our views when Jews still exert such disproportionate influence in that country? Grasp the genius of your Führer. You see, dear Julius, with well-meaning earnestness, most American Jews are solidly behind the ideas I have been describing. In the mistaken belief that they are making America safer for minorities, American Jews have joined those advocating ever larger and ever more powerful government. In reality, what they are doing is making America more hospitable to national socialism. When it eventually arrives, they too will see the real dangers, but then it will be too late. Now they only see danger in illiterate thugs with no hair on their heads. American Jews are frightened by a handful of the sort of people we used to execute, instead of being terrified of the institutionalized danger they are helping to create- government with limitless power that could one day be hospitable to tyranny.

We didn't just kill Jews-we were obsessed with them. We knew and understood the power their God conferred upon them. It was either their 3,000-old vision of holiness or our modern ideas of scientific progress that would prevail. Do you recall that Israeli thug, Isser Harel, who founded their cursed Mossad and captured our brother Eichmann in Buenos Aires in 1960? Harel was astounded when Eichmann, upon realizing that he had been captured by Jews, called out the Hebrew prayer Shema Yisrael, "Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One." Eichmann understood. You, Julius, you also understood. You ascended the gallows in Nuremberg and your very last words were "Heil Hitler!" (for which I thank you) and then "Purim Fest 1946." You knew that when the Allies hanged my ten friends, they were playing out a modern day version of the biblical book of Esther in which ten enemies of the Jews were hanged on the festival of Purim.

And it wasn't just the Jews. Joseph Goebbels put it quite well: "The Führer is deeply religious though completely anti-Christian. He views Christianity as a symptom of decay. Rightly so; it is a branch of the Jewish race."

We can be confident America will preserve and develop our Nazi ideas of scientific human perfectibility because of one stroke of genius even Reich minister of propaganda, Goebbels, has to admire: Those who are advocating socialism in America, whether deliberately or inadvertently, have succeeded in turning the term "Nazi" into a slur that may only be used against those on the right, such as Christian conservatives. Never is it used against those on the left who are precisely the Americans doing most to advance our agenda. We are winning Julius, we are winning. Heil Hitler.

Pamphlet No. 1088, March, 2002