Anti-Semitism

The earliest firm evidence of Hitler's antisemitism dates from 1916, when Hitler was aged 27, so stories about early experiences in his life should be treated with caution.

Hitler believed that the Jews were involved in a great conspiracy to control the wealth of Europe and to dominate and destroy the German or Aryan people. Whether that belief was the basis for his hatred or was a result of it is not something I think can be determined.

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The reasons most commonly given are that Hitler believed that the Jews:

1. Were Communists (and that Communism was a Jewish political philosphy).
2. Had deliberately caused Germany to lose World War 1 by wrecking the home front in Germany itself.
3. Had caused the Great Depression.
4. He believed a bizarre conspiracy that claimed that the Jews were planning to dominate the world.

The first of these views - of the Jews as Communists - was also widespread in many other countries, including Britain and the U.S. However, most people elsewhere seem to have taken this with a pinch of salt and certainly didn't get so worked up about it.

As for the conspiracy theory that the Jews were trying to dominate the world, Yehuda Bauer summarizes it neatly as follows:

"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).

Obviously, there is something nutty about such notions, but there is no evidence that Hitler was clinically insane.

In the interwar period (1918-1939) it was perfectly acceptable to express racist, ethnic, religious and cultural prejudice loud and clear, both in Europe and the U.S. Most German Jews did not take the Nazis' antisemitism particularly seriously before 1933. Almost none had made any practical arrangements in advance to leave the country, for example.

Hitler's Jew-baiting was not particularly popular outside the beer-halls of Bavaria and a few other places and was not the vote-catcher that the above answer claims.

Please see the related questions.

Answer 1

Hitler did not "hate" the African race as a whole. He respected races that settled within the confines of their own countries (ex: africans in Africa, Germans in Germany, Russians in russia and so on). It was multiculturalism that Hitler despised. If an African lived on German soil, then Hitler would deport the party to their own country.

Answer 2

Adolf Hitler hated the blacks. He considered them sub-human and that's why he called them beasts. He hated homosexuals and anything else he considered unnatural under the sun. He hated gypsies because they were believed to commit incest. He hated the Jews because of his mother (his mother was very ill and she went to see a Jewish doctor and was turned away because she wasn't Jewish herself) and when he got turned away from a school he wanted to be in because he loved to draw and paint.

Answer 3

According to J. A. Rogers, Adolph Hitler declares in Mein Kampf Negroes are "half-apes." This is far from being the opinion of pre-Hitler Germany if one is to judge by the various monuments and pictures of Negroes in German museums and other public places...

...There were from 20,000 to 24,000 Africans in German from 1933-1945. Many of these Africans married German women and sired half African and half German children. They were called "Rhineland Bastards," others sired what they called "Illegitimate children," with German women, also called Rhineland Bastards. Many of these Africans sufferer the same fate as the Jews did during the Holocaust. Many African Americans serving as soldiers in world war II became POW's sufferer the same fate, as well as Africans from Senegal and other colonized French countries. So you can see brothers and sisters why I am angry as hell, everybody takes advantage of us and use us at their convenient. For more information, there is a book titled "German's Black Holocaust, by Firpo W. Carr, Ph.D.

The sterilization programs of Blacks were instituted by Germany's most senior Nazi geneticist, Doctor Eugen Fischer, who developed his racial theories in German South West Africa (now Namibia) long before World War I. In Namibia, Fischer claimed there were genetic dangers arising from race mixing between German colonists and African women.

There is photographic evidence of German genocidal tendencies in Africa. In 1904 the Herero tribe revolted against their German colonial masters in a quest to keep their land. It was a rebellion that lasted four years and led to the death of 60 000 Herero people - 80% of their population. The survivors were imprisoned in concentration camps or used as guinea pigs for medical experiments, a foretaste of things to come.

Hitler's Forgotten Victims shows that Germany's 24,000-strong black community were the number-one target for Hitler's sterilisation programme. Hitler's view on racial superiority did not develop in a vacuum. He was influenced by the work of the 19th century German zoologist Ernst Haeckel, whose views were based on distorted versions of Darwinism. He wrote of woolly-haired Negroes incapable of higher mental development.

The Nazis' obsession with racial purity and eugenics was provoked and intensified in 1918, following Germany's defeat in World War I. Under the terms of the peace treaty signed at Versailles, Germany was stripped of its African colonies and forced to submit to the occupation of the Rhineland. The deployment of African troops from the French colonies to police the territory incensed many Germans.

To many it was the final humiliation that began with their 1918 defeat in the World War I. Germans complained bitterly in newspapers and propaganda films about African soldiers from the French colonial army having relations with their women. As soon as Hitler reoccupied the Rhineland in 1936, he retaliated by targeting black people living there. At least 400 mixed-race children were forcibly sterilized in the area by the end of 1937, while 400 others disappeared into camps.

Stewart, M. Hitler & the Negro. 30 Mar. 2009 .
Hitler does not just hate black people but also anyone who is not the perfect race-(blond hair blue eyes)-Aryan race. Hitler believed that this race was the perfect human race although not having blond heir blue eyes himself...before world war 2 Hitler offered Briton to join his alliance because the British where seen as Aryan race to!

Hilter was the leader of the Natzi's who rounded up and through the Jews in concentration camps

Yes Hitler blamed the Jews for all of Germany's problems. Also yes gave the orders to put them into concentration, but Hitler did not give the order to kill the Jews. He left that in the hands of his trusted henchman

Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich. So technically Hitler himself did not organize the killing of all of those jews. He just authorized it.

No it wasn't, he just hated them because they were more advanced at the time. Their communities were far better than Germany.

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(alternative answer) Hitler never expressed a religious objection to Jews, he objected on purely racial grounds.

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Hating Jews (within the framework of a fanciful conspiracy theory) was part of Hitler's ideology.

Answer 1

In a foot note to his famous case study of Little Hans, Sigmund Freud theorized that the most deeply rooted psycho-dynamic cause of antisemitism was a reaction to the ritual of circumcision known as the Brit Milah.

Answer 2

Freud's conjecture is strange in view of the fact that hundreds of millions of Moslems, Africans and Westerners also circumcise.

There is no adequate rational explanation for anti-Semitism. A reason must be sought on a spiritual level.

Answer 3

Anti-Semitism began the same way that ethnic hatreds usually begin. People with territories that border one another become antagonistic towards each other. Anti-Semitism only became a unique violence targeted to Jewish individuals with no military or political standing in the Roman Empire when Christianity began to impose the blood libels on the Jews and found them guilty of killing Jesus Christ for eternity. Islam added to this by claiming that Jews were corrupt and perverted their teachings. Economic and social competition compounded the pre-existing religious grounds for Anti-Semitism and eventually became the dominant forms of Anti-Semitism.

The leaders of the Roman catholic church, in those times, were misguided about their views on Jews. It is therefore illogical to hold it agaisnt the current Roman Catholic church.

Another significant reason, in Vennice, was that Jewish money lenders charged interest. The Christians would lend money with no interest, which sparked conflict between the two

The business about lending money was two sided. Jews were permitted to charge interest. Christians were required not to charge interest. The result was that if a person wanted to borrow money, he could go to a Jew, who would charge interest, or try going to a Christian, who probably would not loan anything because he had no reason whatever to do so. And so the idea that Jews killed Jesus was spread by people with private axes to grind, but that reason, and others like it, were believed only by the gullible or hateful, and not everyone in the Middle Ages was either.

But Jews were not always hated, and were invited into some areas because of the known benefits their presence provided. Jews included a large number of teachers, doctors, scientists, philosophers, and other scholars. They were one of the groups in the middle ages that required their children to be literate. And so a nation or city could benefit from their presence.

King Richard the Lionhearted decreed that Jews would not be bothered in England. This decree was rejected by kings who followed, but Richard had reason to make it.

In some Italian cities, Jews were permitted to build walls around their neighborhoods in case the Christians of the city were threatening. This created the first ghettos.

Some countries allowed Jews to live in peace and kept them over the centuries. I believe Holland was like this for much of its history, and it benefited quite a lot from this. Spain was another area where Jews were accepted, and this went on until Isabella decided to extend the Inquisition to all subjects, an event that caused a long decline in the intellectual life of the country.

As a general rule people who hate a particular race, religion or creed do so because of fear or ignorance. It is also encouraged by people with an agenda against that group, using propaganda, half truths and lies. Hatred also underlies much violence in the world. If people stopped exerting so much energy toward hating people who are different, they might just have the energy to rebuild this world to be a happier place.

As specifically concerns the Europeans, for the longest period of time, Jews were the only "other" in European society and thus received the brunt of the us vs. them dialogue. Some important forms of Anti-Semitism in Europe are:

• Religious Anti-Semitism: The Jewish rejection of Christ and the Church, not to mention the allegations that Jews were Christ-killers was one of the most important causes of Anti-Semitism prior to the 19th century.
• Economic Anti-Semitism: Jews were forced by edict to work in very few fields and principal among them was banking. Therefore, Jews were often accused of being greedy and usurious because they made lemonade out of the lemons handed to them.
• Racial and Pseudo-Scientific Anti-Semitism: Jews, especially in the later modern period, were believed to be a weaker, inferior race than the true ethnic Christian and this could be "verified" through scientific observations.
• Ideological Anti-Semitism: By the power of the odds, Jews would be associated with radical or liberal movements in a minor fashion, however, rather than targeting those from the majority who were Communists of Anarchists, Jews who did these acts were labelled traitors.
• Cultural Anti-Semitism: Many Europeans thought Jews were "diseased" and would impact the social and moral fabric of society. This is similar to the accusations currently leveled at the Gay Community with just as much truth.
• Islamic Anti-Semitism: After World War II, many Muslims immigrated to Europe and brought ingrained Anti-Semitic beliefs with them, equating Jews to monkeys and pigs. While there are certainly European Muslim leaders (such as Tariq Ramadan) who argue that such things are un-Islamic, they persist.