Why did Hitler hate Jews?

+32 votes
asked Feb 6, 2018 in Culture & Society by Khory (870 points)
edited Apr 17, 2018
I got into a debate with the History Club the other day about the Third Reich. From all the arguments about Hitler’s conquest and the holocaust, it just occurs to me that Hitler really hated the Jews for reasons I don’t know of. I asked my colleagues, but none of them could really give a conclusive answer. So why did Hitler hate Jews anyway? Racism?

3 Answers

+26 votes
answered Jan 12, 2019 by Arlene (670 points)
edited Jun 13, 2019

There are plenty of theories on why Hitler hated Jews so much. One of the most popular theories and possibly the closest one to the answer is that Hitler is simply a racial extremist.

To him, Germans are the superior master race, the Aryans. Let’s begin with a quick history lesson on the Nazi party efforts for the racial dominance. On February 24, 1920, when the Nazi party was first started as the German Worker’s Party, they declare ruling based on racism in the first public meeting, as their political agenda, devised by Hitler himself. Racial purity is demanded in German, that it is their fate one day to rule over the inferior races. These inferior races include the Roma and African blood, but especially harsh on the Jews, claiming them to the poisonous. His issue of the party “25 Point Program” specifically stated that “No jew, therefore, may be a member of the Nation.”

On 18th July of 1925, Hitler found himself in prison, for treason after his failed power seize of 1923. That gave him enough time to think and wrote the infamous Mein Kampf. The mind of the madman was outlined in the document, his racial ideas that saw all the world’s problems through the history as the conflict between the various races over sovereignty. Thus, the antisemitic envisage a conquest of the world, the Slavic to be enslaved by the Germans, then the annihilation of the Jews. No one is sure of where his hatred over Jews exactly came from; many historians portray him to have lived a life of being overshadowed by the Jews. It became his mission to remove all the Jews from Germany.

+7 votes
answered May 14, 2018 by Charisma (1,110 points)
edited May 5, 2019
I have another theory to why did Hitler hate Jews. I think Hitler didn’t really hate the Jews, the Jews were merely a scapegoat for the Nazi. They put all the blame on the Jews for the responsibility of losing the First World War and the precedent economic slump. With a common enemy, they shifted all the attention of the crisis and channeled it all on the fact that the Jews caused it. The solution? Banishment from the society, forcefully, from the face of the Earth. As to why people would believe in the Nazi’s agenda, it’s probably due to desperation and powerful propaganda all around at the time. Propaganda is one hell of a weapon. Anti-Semitism has existed for a long time and if we assumed that Hitler was a masterful politician, he would feed this existing hatred on the people, giving them a powerful common goal to work at.

What is most interesting about the assumption that Hitler was indeed an effective politician is that what he was doing makes sense in from a desperate economic standpoint. The fastest way to get out of the crisis is to mass-produce weapons and militarize the country, opening jobs for people and stimulating the failing economy, then taking over someone else’s economy success by invading other countries. He gave the people a reason to fight, a reason to continue living, deceiving them through false hope and ideals.

His antisemitic extremism doesn’t really make sense too, on one single occasion saving a Jewish from a death sentence, Ernest Hess, Hitler’s only friend in his regiment days. His whole family was given a special protection from the Nazi. Shouldn’t his hatred cloud his judgement over friendship? Not saying that we should look at him at a lighter way, that he only did what he should have for the future of his people. He was still a dictator, the head of the world’s worst empire, one of the minds behind the Second World War. And in his ruling, he set his people against the Jews, to see his twisted ideals come true.
–1 vote
answered Feb 27, 2018 by sprog (120 points)
edited Apr 8, 2019
How about this?

Hitler didn't hate the Jews any more than any other German. Most Germans disliked Jews because the Jews were perceived to be more loyal to international Jewery  than to Germany. An easy way to ingratiate himself with the electorate was to sympathise with grass roots anti semitism.

My evidence for this?  I grew up surrounded by Polish ex servicemen who had fought honourably and heroically against the Nazis. To a man they didn't trust  Jews. Why would Germans be any different?

Just the way it was
Welcome to Instant Answer, where you can ask questions and receive answers from other members of the community.
...