most important aspects of Hitler's political views. Historian Peter Longerich writes: "There can be no doubt that Hitler's behaviour during his entire political career... was characterised by radical antisemitism". Correspondingly, Germanic cultural and racial purity remained paramount in his understanding of the world, having once exclaimed: "The greatest danger is and remains for us, the alien racial poison in our body. All other dangers are transitory". Hitler wrote his first antisemitic letter to Adolf Gemlich on 16 September 1919 stating that Jews were a race and not a religious group and that the aim for the government "must unshakably be the removal of the Jews altogether". Throughout Mein Kampf, Hitler employs biological crudity by describing the Jews as "parasites" or "vermin". Reflecting back on the beginning of the First World War, Hitler makes the eerily prescient statement that if "twelve or fifteen 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." Underlining the argument that Hitler had overt eliminationist intentions for the Jews is the "prophecy" quote from the 30 January 1939 Reichstag speech: German historian Klaus Hildebrand insisted that Hitler's moral responsibility for the Holocaust was the culmination of his pathological hatred of the Jews and his ideology of "racial dogma" formed the basis of Nazi genocide. Historian David Welch asserts that even if Hitler never gave the direct order for the implementation of the Final Solution, this is nothing more than a "red herring" as it fails to recognize his "leadership style" where Hitler's simple verbal statements were sufficient to launch initiatives "from below". Those "working towards the Führer" would often implement "his totalitarian vision without written authority". Throughout his work Hitler and the Final Solution, historian Gerald Fleming demonstrates that on multiple occasions Heinrich Himmler referenced a Führer-Order concerning the destruction of the Jews, making it abundantly clear that Hitler had at the very least verbally issued a command on the matter. The diary entries of Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels allude to Hitler being the driving force behind the Nazi genocide, that he followed the subject closely and that Goebbels even described Hitler as "uncompromising" about eliminating the Jews. Taking the scale of the logistical operations that the Holocaust comprised in the middle of