Thoughts on what actually made Hitler hate the Jews.

I know the predominant thought on the matter. His mother country was heavily into the classification of ethnicity. This was also picked up from other places in his life.

But I personally think his family doctor Eduard Bloch.
Eduard Bloch - Wikipedia

The doctor noted he never saw some mourn like Adolf did as his mother lay dying. So what if the fact this doctor could not save his mother pushed the hatred and then later, of course, he used it to focus people.

 

Hitler was affected more by her death than Bloch being Jewish. There are a myriad of reasons that contributed to his anti-semitism. One in particular was his time in Vienna. Vienna at the time was a hub of virulent antisemitism. AH was living a hobos existence, with no formal education in philosophy, history and politics. His brain was consumed with antisemitic teachings from the streets and by reading a spectrum of nationalistic literature that his infantile brain couldn't handle.

 

I agree Otto. It was indeed prevalent throughout Europe, he just cultivated it.

 

I thought it was rampant in the U.S. as well? We had a lot of practicing Christians back then. Jews were frowned upon because they didn't believe in Jesus Christ as The Messiah. Anyone that was not a Christian was "bad."

 

The Germans weren't especially anti-Semitic themselves, especially they elites of which the German Jews were a part of. There are numerous examples of Berliners protesting the deportations of Jews in 1943. The protests were so serious even alarmed Goebbels mentioned them a few times in his diary.

But the soldiers and the population were subjected to brutal anti-Jewish Nazi propaganda which being well made gave "good" results.

Antisemitism weren't really prevalent in Europe, although there were numerus conflicts involving the Jews, for so diverse reasons there no single reason can be said it was it.
It only look bad if you do a fishing expedition through history and mass all the incidents from the entire Europe, spanning tens of years, in a few pages, ignoring all the background history - all the wars, uprisings, revolutions. massacres.

That Hitler hated Jews wasn't a problem, he hated many people, and generally people frequently hate others.
The problem was he was a conspiracy theorist who paranoidly believed the Jews were extremely dangerous people - even in small groups, that they hated Germany, wanted her destruction, and that they were responsible for the WW2.

 

With all due respect, huh? Antisemitism wasn't prevalent in Europe?

 

He never forgave the generals for surrendering in WW1 and viewed it as a Jewish plot. He would not accept that Germany had lost the war and needed to pin the blame somewhere. He found himself in the midst of a post war country that was being rent apart by differing political parties trying to gain a foothold in a chaotic starving regime. Read Mein Kamf - it will answer your question. I know that a lot of people regard this book as the rantings of a madman but if people had taken his threats a bit more seriously in the 30's, they would not have appeased Hitler. Yes, I know that hindsight is all very well but it is a lesson to us all today. Mein Kamf is a tedious and hard read but he does not hide his feelings nor intentions.

 

Anti-semitism was rife in Europe for centuries. Even in Germany.

 

Agree with many above.
There've always been attempts to pin down absolutely specific reasons for Adolf's hate for Jews, and I don't find it necessary or particularly valuable to do so.
Ball of rage +'the Jews did it' a common refrain across Europe from the highest to the low + a social 'enemy' is so useful in building popular movements.
Not like the regime only had Jews to hate. Gypsies, Homosexuals, mentally ill, Bolsheviks, bankers, you name it. Pretty general hate on some pretty standard targets of the time.

If you must put up a theory, maybe start with the ultimate Nazi bugbear; the thing that helped them really build a platform, even as far as recruiting friewillege & quislings in other states: that fear and loathing of Bolshevism.
Russia, a great power, had fallen to what many saw as the most insidious and dangerous political and social cancer really very recently. That was strongly seen (accurately or not) as being somehow driven by Jewish intellectuals. Consider the amount of speeches and official publications that automatically conflate Bolshevism and Judaism.

And Wm.,
"Antisemitism weren't really prevalent in Europe,"
Oh dear...
I'm just going to roll my eyes on that one.
Again.

 

That Untitled Document is just a small collection of random quotes fished out from tons of writings published in Europe in the last two centuries. In times when such a brutal style of writing was almost the norm.
It's ridiculous to think that an everyday German read philosophical treatises of French or British philosophers and conspiracy theorists (like Arthur de Gobineau or Houston Stewart Chamberlain), he/she at best read Karl May (the man who invented Winnetou).

A week after Kristallnacht a Polish diplomat in Berlin reported:

All the information I have obtained from Germany indicates that German society as a whole, except for the most obstinate party formations, took a rather negative view of the retaliatory action applied to the Jewish population.
Even though the majority of German society approved of the Nuremberg Laws as measures aimed at the separation of the Jewish element from the Germans, even at the cost of heavy material losses for the Jews, the systematic destruction of Jewish property, be it in the form of breaking windows and equipment in shops and dwellings and the plunder of objects, or in the form of setting synagogues on fire or blowing them up with dynamite, organised by the party in broad daylight and before the eyes of the public, has exceeded the measure of what a normal German citizen considers acceptable.
Thus, criticism is unexpectedly widespread and includes all social strata.

So in 1938 the German society as a whole considered violence against the Jews unacceptable.



The unknown author writes that "so many of them help in the killing of millions", without specifying what he/she means by so many - thousands, millions of Germans?
Well, I can fill her in, the number of Germans in the one of the largest extermination camps - Sobibór was sixteen, that's right sixteen Germans exterminated 250,000 Jews. And actually the crews of the other extermination camps weren't much larger.

The Holocaust was on of the most top secret operations, only small number of people knew what was going on. The rest was just doing what they were told to do, i.e. to send the Jews to the East.
Even Goebbels in his private diary didn't dare to write about the Holocaust openly, at time when he thought the Germans victory was certain.
The Germans were told the Jews were sent to the East as a security measure, that they were to be put to work in agriculture. Food was scarce in Germany, people who worked in agriculture were envied for their easy access to food.

Of course there were Einsatzgruppen - death squads that executed Jews in large numbers, but as it happened they executed Poles, Russian, Belorussians, Ukrainians in large numbers too.
Was their hate towards the Jews was different from their hate towards the others? Even if, it didn't matter - they executed them all, the end result was the same.
Hannah Arendt in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, and Christopher Browning in his Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 actually show that those people "killed out of a basic obedience to authority and peer pressure, not blood-lust or primal hatred".

In my city, the pre-war German Breslau, the largest and most popular supermarket located directly in the center of the city was owned by Jews (most of the others too), the liberal synagogue was one of the most prominent buildings in that city, the Jewish hospital was one of the largest, the main Jewish cemetery was the most beautiful.
Am I to believe the Jews of Breslau willingly invested so much money in a country with a long tradition of anti-Semitism? Many of those people thanks to their wealth could have emigrated to the US, Britain, everywhere - any time they wished.
In fact one of them - Walter Tausk traveled to Palestine in 1938, took a good look around and returned to Nazi Germany believing it was a better place to live.

Below, the largest synagogue in Breslau:

 

While I agree that Germany was not wholly anti-semitic, Europe (including Germany I regret to inform you) was permeating with it. I understand to support your point you need to cherry pick your sources, understood, but it seems extremely naive. Let's not pull the wool over our eyes and act like their weren't multiple nationalistic ideologies that built their foundations and precepts on the hatred of the Jews that originated in Europe. I have read many personal sources, both antisemitic and non, that were fully aware of the rumors and what was truly happening. Not at first I give you that, but as the war progressed, they were truly content with the Jews being deported and had no squabbles. Melita Maschmann, for example, was very open about her feelings towards Jews. She states in her manuscript many times that in retrospect, she regrets the treatment of the Jews and wished she would have spoken up. However, she also continuously falls back on her loyalty to the party and that the deportations were necessary in their eyes. We can go back and forth on an individual basis where antisemitism was displayed, but the fact of the matter is, Europe was very antisemitic. Whether one participates or stands idly by is just a question of severity. In addition, you mentioned how accepting the people were towards the 1935 adoption of the Nuremberg Laws. Seems very clear.

 

In this day and age, let us not pretend.

"Breslau"; one of only seven electoral districts (of 35 electoral districts in Germany) in the whole of Germany that gave the Nazis an absolute majority in the election of March, 1933. In the elections of 1932, Breslau had strong Nazi presence, with the election results for the Nazis there well above the German average.

Thousands of Jews from Breslau were compelled to emigrate after 1933 (and had to pay an exorbitant price for the 'privilege'), hundreds of businesses were 'Aryanized,' and after the burning of the synagogue in 1938, 2,500 Jews were arrested and sent to concentration camps. Every arrest, a German police officer made. Your fellow Walter Tausk was one the first shipped off in 1941 to his death. There are a myriad of reasons why Walter might have decided not to emigrate. His aged mother, for one. Hope, timing are others. Whatever rationalization he previously had made to himself, he probably regretted it on that day he was shot in 1941.

Anti-semitism was present in the myth of the Dolchstoßlegende, in news paper articles, and in attitudes of the time, otherwise the Nazis would not have been able to exploit it. Prominent Germans supported it, were right-wing, anti-bolshevik, and anti-semitic. Ludendorff is but one example.

It all happened, and Germans saw it happen, and let it happen, to fellow Germans that were Jews. They happily received the goods and apartments of emigrated Jews, and later of Jews that were 'deported' East. No one was really deceived by the euphemisms, unless they wanted to be. Is anyone every really fooled by the use of euphemisms? Seriously? We use them everyday, usually for less serious things than offing hordes of people.

It doesn't matter what Goebbels did or didn't write in his diary. People witnessed, and talked. The way the Jews were rounded up and transported off to concentration camps. Litterally, thousands of cattle wagons overloaded with wailing people in inhumane cramped conditions, defecating, urinating and dying on their journey, with locomotive drivers, and tenders, and stops necessitated on the way. But no one saw, or could imagine anything other than "voluntary resettlement." A whole apparatus to collect, transport, and eradicate, involving thousands of people, with soldiers shooting "resisters." That was just within western Europe, faraway from the Eastern front. Soldiers went on leave from the front. Three million armed men participating in the atrocities behind the front lines, and no one talking. Officers talked about the atrocities in captivity with each other in England (and none of them were captured in the East), so obviously, they didn't know either.... but somehow they did.

What happened was the average German decided to pretend not to know in order to have plausible deniability, a common psychological defence.

 

There are Nixon tapes where him and Haldeman discuss the Jews saying they are disloyal, "deceiving bastards" and that they make perfect spies because they are devious loyal to no one... According to Nixon and Haldeman, they had an "arrogance" that allowed them to be spies. Those are actually excerpts from tapes from Nixon by Nixon. antisemitism was everywhere. Hitler and the Nazi movement was from that occult old-world secret society mindset that just came out in the open blatantly and said publicly what a lot of people thought privately.

 

The Nazis were bastardized freemasonry with racism and they went public with a lot of things the free-masons, Bavarian Illuminati, Skull n Bones, Thule, and the other secret Germanic societies did i private.

 

And? People are talking shit about other people, and other groups all the time.
Have you heard? The Americans are fat, lazy, badly educated and live in over-sized wooden dog houses. I'm hearing that all the time.
Would you like to hear what your friends are saying about you behind your back? It's quite probable you would be surprised or even offended.

What is only remarkable in that story is that members of the Washingtonian elites (Haldeman - B.A. from UCLA, a member of Beta Theta Pi fraternity) aren't any different from us - the unwashed masses.

If stupid statements about Jews, jokes are the same as Hitler's statements the word "antisemitism" will lose any meaning.
Haldeman wasn't going to gas Jews, as the "Americans are idiots" crowd is not going to gas Americans. They are all just venting their frustration.

And the point is that talking shit about others usually means nothing.

And btw, do you know it was Nixon who ordered the operation Nickel Grass which most likely saved Israel from destruction in 1973?
That man did more for the Jews than anybody else.

 

The people in Breslau didn't vote for Hitler because they hated the Jews.
And generally the Germans didn't too.
They voted for him because he promised them a better future, and for a few years delivered on his promise.

The apartments, the goods were allocated to the victims of Allied bombings - people who lost everything.

The German, Austrian Jews weren't sent to camps, they were sent to ghettos in Poland first (small number of them were sent directly to Auschwitz in 1943). They were transported in better conditions than any other Jews - except some transports from Western Europe.

To transport all the German Jews a few dozens trains were needed, and nobody saw them. Nazi TV didn't show them (for obvious reason), there was no internet to share pictures and videos.
People barely knew what was going on outside their neighborhoods.

 

Are you calling such seminal works like Arendt's or Browning's lousy sources? I hope you know what you are doing.