Nevertheless, only a small proportion of the Jews were communists. This idea of 'Jewish communism' was to have awful repercussions in the war with the Soviet Union that started in The population and prisoners-of-war were treated brutally by the Germans. Hitler viewed the world as an arena for the permanent struggle between peoples. He divided the world population into high and low races. The Germans belonged to the high peoples and the Jews to the low ones. 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.
In , a German woman in her late 80s, elegantly dressed and wearing large gold-rimmed glasses, sat down for a videotaped interview to share her memories of Adolf Hitler as a young man. Until now, the consensus among historians has been that it came to the fore only after World War I, as Thomas Weber, a German historian and Hitler biographer, notes in a new article in The Journal of Holocaust Research. Jews were blamed for the conditions under which Germany agreed to end the war, as well as for the economic ruin and political upheaval that followed.
In fact, her interview Weber came across the transcripts of the interview conducted by Karl Hoeffkes, a German author and collector of personal accounts of the Nazi era, when a publisher and editor he knows, Wieland Giebel, shared it with him this past July.
The transcript was part of a manuscript of a forthcoming book based on transcripts of interviews conducted by Hoeffkes of 1, people, among them perpetrators and victims, who had direct access to Hitler and had also been interviewed by Hoeffkes. 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.
Snyder: So in the Nazi case, you have a leader who is much more radical than his population, right? In Poland, you have something like the opposite situation. So everyone was stuck where they were. The Poles are thinking in terms of states. The Nazis had this ecological vision, this anarchic vision, which the Polish just did not have, and it was not very widespread in the Polish population either. And you can see this precisely on the question of Israel, because the Nazis are against Israel on the grounds that it will become some kind of center of Jewish world power, whereas the Poles are enthusiastically in favor of Israel because they think that building states is a perfectly normal thing to do.
Has the world really moved that far from believing that Jews, or Jewish entities, control the world? And what I worry about is that we are to some extent repeating this. There was a first globalization that starts in the s. Things seem to be going pretty well—you know, Victorian theories of progress and so on, lots of global commerce, Suez Canal, Panama Canal. All these things which seem to be building one world. I worry a little bit now about, just very generally, that with the financial crisis; with the instability in the Middle East; with the Chinese economy tanking; with Russia breaking all the rules in Europe; and with people in Russia, in Europe, in North Africa more freely expressing anti-Semitic views—I worry a bit that we are tilting towards some kind of anti-globalization where the Jews, or somebody else, could become the explanation for why things are going wrong.
Snyder: This gets back to the disturbing fact that a worldview can lead you to successful actions even if the worldview is completely unreal. So, Hitler invades the Soviet Union, partly on the logic that the Soviet Union is a Jewish state, and therefore it will collapse on the first blow.
In those days, Vienna had a mayor who was very anti-Jewish, and hatred of Jews was very common in the city. At the end of the war he, and many other German soldiers like him, could not get over the defeat of the German Empire. The German army command spread the myth that the army had not lost the war on the battlefield, but because they had been betrayed. Hitler bought into the myth: Jews and communists had betrayed the country and brought a left-wing government to power that had wanted to throw in the towel.
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