The Nazi press, in 1938 or later, did not bluntly state that they were going to exterminate all Jews. It was always cleverly couched in terms of forced emigration, allowing for Jews and non-Jews to hope for something less than mass murder.
Yes, that's what I thought, but it turns out to be completely false, as Homer's article from November 27, 1938 clearly demonstrates:
Nazis in Final Phase of Their War on Jews
Note the following remarks:
"But for 700,000 Jews of Great Germany, it definitely means emigration as penniless refugees or EXTERMINATION WITH "FIRE AND SWORD." THEY THEMSELVES ARE THE FIRST TO REALIZE THIS, with all the TERROR such realization entails..."
"...But hope of even that much is gone, because frank statements IN THE NAZI PRESS, unless the democracies and Jews in the outside world are willing to finance the emigration of German Jews, they will be put into ghettos and deprived of all normal livelihood, and the remaining "rich Jews" will be kept to support the poor Jews until all the Jewish capital has been eaten up, or some desperate Jews have taken to crime, when ACCORDING TO THE SCHWARTZ KORPS, GERMAN JEWS WILL BE EXTERMINATED BY "FIRE AND SWORD."
Note the reference is to the Nazi organ "Schwartz Korps." Clearly, the Nazis warned the world EXACTLY what they planned to do!
So the real questions are: was anyone listening? Did anyone believe them? Maybe not...
Finally, in all this discussion, it's important to remember that by the time war started in September 1939, when Nazis sealed the borders, over 70% of Jews had escaped from both Germany and Austria. Those left behind were mostly elderly and poor.
And the real problem then turned out to be that most escapees did not run nearly far enough. When the Germans conquered their neighboring countries, those Jews were eventually rounded up and shipped away to be murdered.