He also had specific notions about other peoples. The Slavic people, for instance, were cast as inferior, predestined to be dominated. Hitler felt that the German people could only be strong if they were 'pure'. As a consequence, people with hereditary diseases were considered harmful.
These included people with physical or mental disabilities, as well as alcoholics and 'incorrigible' criminals. Once the Nazis had come to power, these ideas led to the forced sterilisation and killing of human beings. The ideas that Hitler developed in the s remained more or less the same until his death in What did change is that in , he was handed the power to start realising them.
During the s, he did everything he could to expel the Jews from German society. Once the war had started, the Nazis resorted to mass murder. Nearly six million Jews were murdered during the Holocaust. Antisemitism: an age-old phenomenon Hitler did not invent the hatred of Jews. Hitler is introduced to antisemitism The origin of Hitler's hatred of Jews is not clear.
Imaginative explanations There are countless imaginative explanations for the reasons for Hitler's antisemitism. German nationalism and antisemitism What we do know is that two Austrian politicians greatly influenced Hitler's thinking. Jews as the scapegoats for the lost war The German defeat was hard to swallow for many Germans, and for Hitler, too. Capitalism and communism: a Jewish conspiracy? Holocaust The ideas that Hitler developed in the s remained more or less the same until his death in Evans, Richard J.
Ullrich, Volker, Hitler. Knopf, Many of the anti-Semitic practices seen in Nazi Germany actually have their roots in medieval Europe. In many European cities, Jews were confined to certain neighborhoods called ghettos. Some countries also required Jews to distinguish themselves from Christians with a yellow badge worn on their garment, or a special hat called a Judenhut.
This resulted in economic resentment which forced the expulsion of Jews from several European countries including France, Germany, Portugal and Spain during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
Jews were denied citizenship and civil liberties, including religious freedom throughout much of medieval Europe. Poland was one notable exception.
Jews did not receive citizenship and gain rights throughout much of western Europe, however, until the late s and s. Throughout the s and early s, Jews throughout the Russian Empire and other European countries faced violent, anti-Jewish riots called pogroms.
Pogroms were typically perpetrated by a local non-Jewish population against their Jewish neighbors, though pogroms were often encouraged and aided by the government and police forces. In the wake of the Russian Revolution , an estimated 1, pogroms are thought to have taken place across Ukraine alone, leaving nearly half a million Ukrainian Jews homeless and killing an estimated 30, to 70, people between and Pogroms in Belarus and Poland also killed tens of thousands of people.
Adolf Hitler and the Nazis rose to power in Germany in the s on a platform of German nationalism, racial purity and global expansion.
The Nuremberg Laws of introduced many anti-Semitic policies and outlined the definition of who was Jewish based on ancestry. Nazi propagandists had swayed the German public into believing that Jews were a separate race. According to the Nuremberg Laws, Jews were no longer German citizens and had no right to vote.
And insofar as German power reaches outward, beginning in , and destroys Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland, and then tries to destroy the Soviet Union, it creates a zone where the escalation of the Final Solution is possible. That of course never happens. So, Hitler uses popular frustrations to come to power. He uses the Great Depression to come to power. He presents himself precisely as a German nationalist who is going to get the German economy going, who is going to bring Germans inside the borders of Germany.
He actually just wants to manipulate their attachment to Germany—to toss them out into this struggle, which will purify them and so on.
Delman: You have this leader of a major power. In your view, could a leader who thinks this way ever be rational? Could they understand cause-and-effect and cost-and-benefit? So clearly he was politically rational, or he was means-ends rational. Whether he could see the world in an entirely rational way—there I would say no. You can create this fictional world in which you live, and which guides you and which allows you to move forward.
In fact, it can even be a source of your success. They were mainly thinking about the future revolution, which would be possible once the war got started. The huge Wehrmacht [German army] makes sense as an instrument to destroy other armies. The SS makes sense as an instrument to destroy other states. He built up this new capacity to impose a racial worldview on other countries.
I mean, what happened to German Jews was dreadful, but German Jews were not actually killed in significant numbers in prewar Germany. The total is a couple hundred. Jews could only really be killed once Hitler got himself out of the box of Germany and used this German racial power that he created over the six years to wipe out other states. Sure, there was lots of anti-Semitism in, for example, Vienna, but the Jews of Vienna were murdered in Belarus.
Why is that? To carry out mass killing, it had to first create this zone of anarchy out in the east and then physically take the Jews and send them out there. Delman: You mention that Nazi Germany was not the only anti-Semitic regime in power at the time—Poland, Hungary, and Romania were all governed by anti-Semitic regimes.
Jews ranked among its leaders and supporters. Other historians respond. Zimmermann notes that historians and laypeople alike have become suspicious of new revelations and documents about Hitler, in particular those relating to Hitler as a youth and young man, both because there have been cases of fraud in the past and because of the challenges of corroborating information.
Dina Kraft Feb. Get email notification for articles from Dina Kraft Follow. Play audio.
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