What were Hitlers motivations?

Answer 1

There is disagreement among historians about Hitler's motives and none of the sugigestions is entirely satisfactory.

Until the 1960s it was widely assumed that from a fairly early age Hitler was rabidly and obsessively antisemitic and drew up a master plan for the extermination of the Jews by 1925 at the latest. There is no sound evidence for this view and it is at odds with the Nazi policy, until August 1941, of bullying Jews in Germany and many occupied countries into leaving Germany and areas under German control.

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Some people look for a single devastating experience as a boy or young man, but one needs to be cautious about psychohistory. When his mother died of Breast cancer in 1907 he wrote a letter of thanks to the Jewish surgeon who had treated her. This suggests that he wasn't rabidly antisemitic at that stage.

(What Hitler writes about his early life in 'Mein Kampf' is unreliable. It's a piece of Propaganda and for a politician trying to project a mission, it wouldn't have looked too good if he'd changed his opinions and attitudes).

Ian Kershaw, in his biography of Hitler, suggests two possible sources for Hitler's rabid antisemitism: (1) a growing belief, among hardline German right-wingers, towards the end of World War 1 and afterwards in conspiracy theories claiming that there 'Jewish subversives' at work wrecking the homefront; (2) he found that ranting against 'Judeo-Bolshevist' conspirators brought him wild applause in the beer halls of Bavaria, and that this became part of his stock-in-trade.

Hitler's style of leadership encouraged increasing extremism. Though a very successful orator, he was in many ways a chaotic and lazy leader with few leadership qualities. (See Ian Kershaw's biography). He ranted like crazy, and then let those under him try to work out the details of policy. As a result, they competed with one another to try to guess what Hitler 'really wanted'; and each interest group tried to become more extreme than the others. Hence the rapidly increasing extremism (radicalization) of Nazi policy. He then picked picked out various plans presented to him and rejected others.

Hitler allowed the terror apparatus under Himmler (a fanatical racist and believer in 'Judeo-Bolshevist' conspiracy theories) and the able and assiduous Heydrich to become an extremely powerful interest group and lobby, second only to the regular armed forces.

Until August 1941, official policy was to bully German Jews into emigrating to countries beyond Germany's sphere of power. In a few cases Jews from occupied countries were allowed to leave (if they could find somewhere to go, which was extremely hard). However, the invasions of of 1939-41 added vast numbers to the 'Jewish problem' that the Nazis created for themselves.

Clearly, there was a change in Nazi policy, some time between September and Deecember, 1941.

In Poland the Nazis forced the Jews into ghettos. Almost everywhere in Germany and German-occupied countries the Jews were increasingly excluded from society and were often unable to earn a living. This turned them into a multiple problem in the eyes of the Nazis.

The terror apparatus had all kinds of poorly thought out and unrealistic schemes for 'resettlement in eastern Europe'. In practice, this meant occupied Poland, but many of the German administators there complained bitterly about the 'impossibility' of using Poland as a dumping ground for ever increasing numbers of so-called 'undesirables'. Hitler and this henchman then 'thought the unthinkable' ... Given their blind hatred of the Jews they were increasingly willing to commit genocide. Time and again, Hitler said he wanted this area and that area cleared of Jews and would not ask later how it had been done.

Obviously, this is a 'functionalist' view and runs counter to the notion that Hitler had a master plan for the Holocaust from about 1925 or even earlier. Lest there be any misunderstanding about it, responsibility lies with Hitler. He ranted and raved about the Jews as 'Bolshevists', as part of a 'world conspiracy' allegedly trying 'to destroy Germany'. He bears responsiblity for his style of leadership, which encouraged the growth of the terror apparatus.

However, none of these explanations is in itself entirely satisfactory, and more recently some historians, including Ian Kershaw and Yehuda Bauer, have tried to synthesize the key hypotheses.

Hitler was a devotee of conspiracy theories to the effect the 'the Jews' were seeking world domination.

"The basic motivation [of the Holocaust] was purely ideological, rooted in an illusionary world of Nazi imagination, where an international Jewish conspiracy to control the world was opposed to a parallel Aryan quest. No genocide to date had been based so completely on myths, on hallucinations, on abstract, nonpragmatic ideology - which was then executed by very rational, pragmatic means."

Yehuda Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust, New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002, p.48. (Quoted in Wikipedia article on the Holocaust, accessed 31 March 2009).

Whether Hitler took such notions altogether seriously or used them partly for the purpose of propaganda is, however, another matter. Certainly, the view of the Jews as dangerous, diabolically cunning schemers did not accord with the Nazi view of them as an inferior race.

Other historians, such as Arno Mayer are more inclined to see the Holocaust as part of a wider campaign to rid the world of what the Nazis called 'Jewish Communism'.

For a detailed study of the origins of the Holocaust, see:

• Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution : The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939 - March 1942, Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press, 2004.

Answer 2

Hitler's motivation was to create the perfect Aryan race. He wanted Germany to be powerful again and he thought that the Jewish people and western Europeans were inferior to the German's. Another possible reason was that his mother died when he was a young boy and her doctor was Jewish, so some people believe that, that is possible along with the other things.

Answer 3

To rid the world of Jews, Gypsies and Blacks.