Hitler was right in exterminating the Jews. Where are the reasons for hatred?

Historians have many different versions of why World War II began. The only true fact remains that the culprit of these bloody events was Nazi Germany, headed by Adolf Hitler. His biography has been rewritten many times. If you carefully and thoughtfully study the life of the Fuhrer, you can see and understand why Hitler did not like Jews and many other peoples. One reason is the idea of ​​racial superiority. Adolf believed that all inhabitants of the Earth should be divided into three types. He considered the true Aryans to be the superior race. These were the best representatives of humanity. Hitler prepared them for the role of rulers of the world. In second place were the Slavs. A race that was only fit to do the dirty work. According to the tyrant, the best role that the Slavs were capable of was slaves. Jews, gypsies and other peoples were considered the lowest of the races. They had no place in this hierarchy. All these people were subject to destruction.

After the First World War, the German economy experienced difficult times. She was in a very difficult situation. But despite this, banks flourished. It is noteworthy that the owners of almost all such institutions were Jews. For Hitler, this state of affairs was simply unacceptable. He also believed that the blame for Germany's defeat in World War II fell on the shoulders of Jews and capitalists. Historians are of the opinion that Adolf’s sick mother died after an unsuccessful operation. This procedure was performed by a Jewish surgeon. There is no documentary evidence of this fact in the archives, so the assumption is highly doubtful. This statement does not inspire confidence also because the woman had cancer. And in the 30s, medicine was not at such a high level as it is now. The doctor's fault here may be minimal.

The Fuhrer blamed the Jews for all mortal sins. In his opinion, they were to blame for the emergence of the Bolsheviks, the revolution in Russia, and so on. One of his goals was the destruction of all capitalists. Historians also have a version about Hitler’s illnesses. According to her, a Jewish prostitute infected him with syphilis. The disease was incurable, and this only increased hatred towards this nation. Throughout his life, Hitler met Jews. Even the teacher at school, who brought humiliation and insults to little Adolf, was also a Jew. Eva Braun's father-in-law is also Jewish. Even before the wedding, a promise was made to give a lot of money for the daughter as a dowry. True, that’s where it all ended. This fact only increased Hitler's confidence that the Jews were a deceitful and selfish race that had no right to exist.

Having entered the war, Germany needed lightning victories. In order to conquer the whole world you need to be confident in your abilities. That is why the Fuhrer exterminated thousands of Jews to instill confidence in the hearts of the soldiers. Hitler's army saw this as great power. They understood that only in their power were the lives of entire nations. This had a more than positive effect on the morale of the soldiers. Among the many versions you can choose any one. Also, any of the versions can either be proven or unscrewed. Almost all historians agree on one thing - Adolf Hitler was an unbalanced and even mentally ill person. Everyone around the Fuhrer notes his unsociability and aggressiveness. He was always very harsh and reserved. In the eyes of all people, he will forever remain that monster who exterminated entire millions of people without even flinching. People will never know why Hitler didn't like Jews.

For almost a century, historians have been haunted by the question of why Hitler did not like Jews. Moreover, the hatred was so strong that he even tried to wipe them off the face of the Earth, every last representative. Probably, the resentment must be very old and serious if a person devoted his whole life to such a task.

Hitler's childhood

First, let's deal with childhood of the future leader of Nazi Germany:

• It was not so cloudless and prosperous.
• No one had heard of any tolerance at that time.
• Sometimes things were called by their proper names.
• Sometimes they simply blamed all their problems on representatives of national minorities.
• Human life was not valued that highly.
• Basic human rights were declared much later.

In such conditions it is difficult to adopt something good. Our consciousness is structured in such a way that it receives the main information during childhood, and later uses this data as a basis for making further judgments.

So there is no doubt that The foundations of Hitler's hatred of the Jewish population began to form at a young age.

Persecution of Jews

Also played a role attitude towards Jews in society. The fact is that they represented not only a national, but also a religious minority:

1. Forced to wander around the world, people did not have their own homeland.
2. In the new lands, thanks to their intelligence and perseverance, Jews often occupied leading positions and lived quite prosperously.
3. Certain areas were completely occupied by Jews; representatives of other nationalities survived from them one way or another.
4. In a sense, the first migrants in history deprived the natives of their “living space.”
5. This was especially noticeable during the crisis years, when inflation, unemployment and poverty occurred.
6. But at the same time it was necessary to blame someone else for their troubles.
7. The first ghettos for Jews appeared in Italy in the Middle Ages.

Hitler did not “fell from another planet”; while living in Germany, he witnessed some of its worst times. He had the opportunity to listen to speeches and speeches in which speakers blamed Jews, communists, British and many others for all the troubles.

However, it is difficult to say that dislike was present exclusively towards the Jewish population. The era was characterized by a number of revolutions and the creation of many new political movements. So everyone had reasons to hate everyone, there were enough differences in ideology. Already it was not necessary to be of a different nationality or faith.

Hitler's youth and adulthood

Even all this taken together cannot make a person fiercely hate all representatives of another nation. Many researchers claim that the roots of the problem lie in the very origin of Hitler. Like, his father himself was a Jew and there are already two options.

1. Either Adolf was embarrassed by this fact and experienced complexes due to the persecution of the entire people.
2. Or the father was a cruel tyrant who beat his mother, and maybe even the little Hitler himself.

But even that doesn't explain manic desires to destroy an entire nation.

Why did Hitler exterminate the Jews?

Entire extermination camps were created because:

• Hitler hated Jews.
• He created the whole concept of “higher” and “lower” races. From "Aryans" and "subhumans".
• According to Adolf's theories, representatives of the “lower” were subject to complete extermination.
• The German leader saw the Jews as a threat not only to Germany, but to the whole world.
• In his opinion, this people was going to first enslave the Germans, and then take on all other nations, using Germany as a springboard for their actions.
• According to Hitler, by exterminating the Jews, he was trying to save the world, create a fairer economic system, and prevent incest.
• Considering the cunning and resourcefulness of the Jewish people, it was in total destruction that he saw the only path to a final solution to the Jewish question.
• Most of all, this looks like the banal revenge of an offended person.
• However, it is difficult to seriously analyze the motives of a person who is reasonably suspected of insanity.
• An adequate person raised and “ignited” the masses with an idea, and then sent millions of Jews to the oven, and tens of millions of Germans to slaughter? Sounds a bit dubious.

If you have been even slightly interested in the biography of Hitler, you probably know that he never visited a concentration camp in his life. Why? No one can explain, but it’s a fertile topic for conspiracy theorists.

Reasons for hating Jews

From Hitler's point of view, his dislike of Jews explained:

1. The love of this people for acquisitiveness. Adolf believed that in any situation the Jew sought benefit for himself, not paying attention to the boundaries of morality.
2. Their high position in society. Persistence and mentality allowed representatives of this people to achieve good results in all matters related to finance.
3. Higher standard of living for Jews compared to Germans. In times of crisis, the average Semitic lived better than the native German.
4. The embitterment of Adolf himself towards the whole world, due to the collapse of all plans and the horrors seen in the war.
5. The desire to see oneself in the role of “savior of the world” who will eliminate the global threat.

But there may be a reason V something else:

• Origin of Hitler.
• His childhood years.
• Resentment and conflicts with representatives of Jewry.
• Failures on the personal front.

Still not precisely defined time period, in which Adolf became so angry with all the children of Israel. Historians suggest that this happened in the first years after demobilization from the army.

More than 70 years have passed since the death of the Fuhrer and it is no longer so important why Hitler did not like Jews. More importantly, his personal grudges ultimately resulted in tens of millions of deaths. And mostly they were not Jews at all.

Video about Hitler's hatred of Jews

In this video, the rector of St. Petersburg State Agrarian University, historian Viktor Efremov will tell you why Hitler began to dislike Jews, where, in his opinion, this hatred comes from:

The Holocaust is the systematic persecution and mass extermination by the Nazis of Jews, Gypsies, Poles, the mentally ill and other people considered inferior according to the concepts of “racial hygiene”. The beginning of the Holocaust is associated with the rise to power of Adolf Hitler in 1933, and the end with the end of World War II in 1945. The word "holocaust" comes from the ancient Greek "burnt offering." In the Jewish tradition, the events of 1933–1945 are usually called the Shoah, translated from Hebrew as “disaster”, “catastrophe”.

1. How many people died during the Holocaust?

There is no exact figure, but most often they say about 5 or 6 million killed. The number is based on a comparison of the Jewish population before and after the war and is confirmed by most studies. It also appears in the verdicts of the Nuremberg trials and is named by the head of the Gestapo department, Adolf Eichmann.

When was the last time you saw Eichmann? - At the end of February 1945 in Berlin. He said then that if the war was lost, he would commit suicide. - Did he then name the total number of Jews who were killed? - Yes, he spoke very cynically then. He said that he would jump into his grave with a smile, because he was especially pleased to know that he was responsible for about 5 million people

From the transcript of the interrogation of Dieter Wisliceny, Eichmann's assistant, at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg on January 3, 1946

There is no complete list of victims by name. The Israeli Holocaust memorial complex Yad Vashem has collected personal information about 4.5 million victims.

6 million is 30% of the total number of Jews in the world who lived at the beginning of World War II, and 2/3 of the pre-war Jewish population of Europe.

2. Why did the Nazis exterminate Jews?

Germany emerged from the First World War defeated and disappointed. Under the Treaty of Versailles, the country lost a tenth of its lands, almost its entire army and navy. Cash payments to the victorious countries led to economic crisis and poverty. To ordinary citizens, all this seemed unfair. The Nazis took advantage of the discontent. They came to power by playing on the desire of the Germans to return to the pre-war greatness of the German Empire.

German writers and publicists sang the heroism of the soldiers and blamed the weak rear for the defeat. And the Jews, who allegedly spread defeatist sentiments. Jews were portrayed as the culprits of all the troubles in Germany.

The ideology of National Socialism was built around the theme of the historical struggle between the Aryan and Semitic nations. It was believed that the goal of the Jews was to seize world domination, which, accordingly, was a threat to Aryan domination.

The theory fit into the doctrine of eugenics - the science of combating the degeneration of the human gene pool, popular in those years in Germany. The first German textbook on genetics spoke of the existence of “worse” people with low levels of mental development, who reproduce much faster than the “highest” representatives of humanity. Not only Jews, but also the French, Gypsies, and Slavs were considered inferior. As well as disabled people and homosexuals.

3. What is Kristallnacht?

“The Night of Broken Glass,” or “Kristallnacht,” was the name given to the pogrom of Jewish shops and businesses in Germany and Austria on November 9-10, 1938. This was the first mass act of physical violence of the Third Reich against Jews, and it is also called the beginning of the Holocaust.

Official propaganda presented the pogrom as a spontaneous riot. In fact, the operation was planned by Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, and carried out by storm troops subordinate to the regime.

The reason for the pogrom was the murder of the German diplomat von Rath in Paris by 17-year-old Jew Herschel Grynszpan. Grynszpan took revenge for his parents deported to Poland (“Zbonshchinsky incident”). In his farewell letter, he wrote: “I must protest so that the whole world knows about it.”

The authorities prohibited Jews from putting out fires and demanded compensation for all damage caused by the pogrom. The fine to the Jewish community (officially compensation for the death of von Rath) amounted to 1 billion Reichsmarks. For comparison, the budget of the Third Reich for 1938 was 99 billion Reichsmarks.

The Holocaust became a “branch of the national economy” that brought enormous profits. Between 1933 and 1938 alone, as a result of the expulsion of Jews and the "forced Aryanization" of businesses, Jewish families lost half of their assets - 6 billion Reichsmarks.

Yuri Kanner

In November 1941, a law was passed according to which all movable and immovable property of Jews in Germany and abroad was confiscated in favor of the Third Reich. “According to the international organization Claims Conference, the total value of Jewish property stolen by the Nazis ranged from 215 to 400 billion dollars in terms of 2005 prices,” says Yuri Kanner.

4. Why didn't the Jews leave Europe when they were persecuted?

In July 1938, US President F. D. Roosevelt convened the Evian Conference to decide how to help Jewish refugees fleeing Hitler's regime. Of the 32 countries that took part in the conference, only the Dominican Republic gave consent to the entry of a large number of emigrants. Other countries said they had already done everything possible and, citing their own internal problems, refused to revise migration quotas.

The conditions for Jewish migration to the United States were so strict that 1,244,858 quotas remained unused.

Between 1933 and 1939, 404,809 Jews emigrated from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia. By 1943, the number of refugees had increased to 811,000. Under the Kindertransport program, Britain allowed 10,000 Jewish children without parents to enter the country in December 1938. But the St. Louis liner, carrying 937 Jewish refugees, had to return to Europe after Cuba and the United States refused to allow them to disembark. This event was called “The Voyage of the Doomed.”

5. What does the phrase “final solution to the Jewish question” mean?

In government documents, the Nazis often used code or neutral words to disguise what was actually happening. For example, SS officers called the extermination of the disabled population in the ghetto “actions,” and deportation to death camps “relocation.”

“Final Solution” is another euphemism that implies the mass extermination of the entire Jewish population of Europe. Adolf Hitler first used this phrase in 1919 in a letter to one of the commanders of the German army. It was actively used at the Wannsee Conference of 1942, where the Nazi leadership decided how to organize the mass deportation of Jews to death camps.

6. Why did the Nazis create ghettos?

In 1939, Hitler proposed isolating Jews in fenced-off city blocks. This was another way to ruin the Jewish population and create a source of cheap, essentially slave labor.

The first Jewish ghettos were created in Nazi-occupied Poland in late 1939 and early 1940. The largest Warsaw ghetto in history appeared in November 1940. Formally, it was created to protect the non-Jewish population from infectious diseases that Jews allegedly carried. 113,000 Poles were evicted from the area declared a quarantine zone and 138,000 Jews were resettled there.

In total, according to various estimates, from 800 to 1,150 ghettos were created in the lands occupied by the Nazis. They held at least 1 million people. The ghettos were overcrowded, people were starving, suffering from cold and disease. Attempts to smuggle food from outside were punishable by execution. When moving to the ghetto, you were allowed to take only personal belongings with you.

7. How were concentration camps different from death camps?

Concentration camps were primarily prisons and penal servitudes. The first concentration camp was created in 1933 in Dachau; initially political prisoners and enemies of the Nazi regime were sent here. Since 1938, after Kristallnacht, people began to be sent to concentration camps only for their nationality.

In 1941, the Nazis began building camps specifically designed for the mass extermination of people. There were six of them in total. The first death camp was Chelmno. Three more, Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka, were built as part of Operation Reinhard, the code name for the Third Reich's government program to exterminate Jews and Gypsies. The largest camp is Auschwitz.

In the death camps, people were shot, poisoned with exhaust gases and Zyklon B gas, and lethal medical experiments were performed on them.

According to holocaustchronicle.org

The extermination of Jews was carried out using an industrial method. Zyklon B gas was supplied to Auschwitz by Degesch, which received 300 thousand marks of profit from this. Physically strong prisoners were forced to work. The average income from the labor of one prisoner was 1,631 Reichsmark. All the victims' valuables were selected and carefully accounted for. In Auschwitz, 1,185,345 men's and women's suits, 43,255 pairs of shoes, and 13,694 carpets were discovered. 2,000 tons of women's hair were found at the Schaeffler textile factory. They served as material for fabric from which work clothes were made.

Yuri Kanner President of the Russian Jewish Congress

8. Were Jews exterminated only in camps and ghettos?

No. In the territories captured by the Nazis, Einsatzgruppen, or “death squads,” operated—military reconnaissance groups and mobile extermination squads. In Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland and the USSR there were four of them - groups under the letters A, B, C, and D.

The Einsatzgruppen hunted down the “enemies of Nazism” - Jews, gypsies, communists, members of the resistance movement. They were arrested to be moved to a ghetto or sent to a concentration camp. Or they were driven into mines and ravines, and then shot. Sometimes the Sonderkommandos were equipped with gas chambers - machines with devices for poisonous gas.

By the spring of 1943, the Einsatzgruppen had killed 1.25 million Jews and hundreds of thousands of other “enemies.” One of the mass executions took place in the town of Babi Yar in the northwestern part of Kyiv. According to various estimates, from 1941 to 1943, from 33 to 200 thousand Jews, Gypsies and prisoners of war were shot here. The executions were carried out by Sonderkommando 4A.

9. Did the Germans know about the extermination of the Jews? What about other countries?

The Nazis deliberately incited racial hatred. Everyone knew about boycotts and pogroms of Jewish stores, discrimination, and the existence of the ghetto.

But information about concentration camps and especially death camps was not disclosed; mass killings as part of the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” were strictly classified. The camps were camouflaged, and the participants in the operations received strict instructions to keep everything in the strictest confidence. However, the information went beyond the camps. Those living nearby saw trains with people arriving and smelled burning bodies.

Since the summer of 1941, British intelligence had been intercepting secret German police reports. The British Prime Minister stated in August 1941:

German troops are literally killing hundreds of thousands of people. We are present at a crime that does not even have a name.

Winston Churchill

Polish resistance member Jan Karski infiltrated the Warsaw ghetto and the Izbica Lubelska ghetto in 1942, whose prisoners were sent to death camps. When he returned, he met with the heads of Great Britain and the United States to report personally what he had seen. His words were treated with distrust - information about living conditions in the ghettos and death camps was considered exaggerated.

In December 1942, the Allies issued a declaration condemning the extermination of the Jews. But no action, including an increase in the migration quota, was forthcoming from Great Britain and the United States.

11. What is denazification?

At the Potsdam Conference in 1945, the leaders of the countries that won World War II determined a new political and territorial structure for Germany. The principle of the “four Ds”, according to which the post-war life of the country was to be built, presupposed demilitarization, democratization, decentralization and denazification, that is, the cleansing of society and political institutions from Nazism.

The USSR, Great Britain, the USA and France divided Germany into zones in which they pursued their policies. Denazification in the British and American zones proceeded smoothly. Each adult German filled out a 130-point questionnaire, based on the answers to which the degree of his guilt was determined. Without a mark on filling out the questionnaire, they did not issue food cards and did not hire people. 25 million questionnaires were completed. Some 248,000 people were laid off from public employment and business.

In the Soviet zone, denazification was more severe: 520 thousand people were removed from their posts, 150 thousand former Nazis were exiled to special NKVD camps, 17 thousand were convicted by a military tribunal, 25 thousand people were deported to Poland.

In total, approximately 245,000 people were arrested in the three zones. Of these, 100,000 were released already in 1947.

12. Who are the Righteous Among the Nations?

All non-Jews who unselfishly risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust are given the title of Righteous Among the Nations under the Israeli Holocaust Remembrance Law. The Garden and Alley in the Jerusalem memorial Yad Vashem are dedicated to the righteous.

The most famous Righteous One is Oskar Schindler, a German businessman from Krakow who saved about 1,200 people. An employee of the Warsaw Health Department, Irena Sendler, took 2,500 children from the Warsaw ghetto. Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg prevented the destruction of the Budapest ghetto before the advance of the Red Army.

The title of Righteous One was awarded to 197 Russian citizens. These are only those cases of heroism that Yad Vashem is aware of. Now there are 6 people left alive.

13. What is Holocaust revisionism?

Revisionism, or Holocaust denial, is a movement whose supporters deny the mass extermination of Jews by the Nazis during World War II. Revisionists try to prove that gas chambers and death camps did not exist, government documents attesting to the Holocaust were forged, and the number of victims was inflated. The thesis is often put forward that the Holocaust was invented by Jews to extort money from Germany.

Holocaust denial is promoted by neo-Nazis as a way to rehabilitate Nazism and absolve it of blame for the deaths of millions of people. This movement is supported by some Arab states that dispute with Israel over territory.

Revisionism does not find support either among professional scientists or among states in general. Laws specifically prohibiting public denial, downplaying, approval or justification of crimes committed by the Nazis have been passed in 18 European countries. A UN resolution condemning any denial of the Holocaust was supported by 103 states in 2007. The Holocaust is one of the most documented and studied events in history. Many German government documents, films and photographs, memories and memoirs have been preserved - both from the Nazis and from their victims. There are at least 200 thousand scientific monographs on the Holocaust; more than 100 thousand works have been published on the Auschwitz concentration camp alone.

Adolf Hitler is behind the worst genocide in modern history. On his orders, millions of Jews were killed in gas chambers. Others died in concentration camps from hunger, hard work and disease.

This baffling chapter in German history left our reader Line Krüger wondering why Hitler hated the Jews so much.

Hitler created Nazism

According to historians, to find the origins of Hitler's hatred of Jews, one must understand his ideology. Adolf Hitler was a Nazi.

CONTEXT

Rising anti-Semitism in Europe

Europe's Jews are in danger

Anti-Semitism: exacerbation of the disease

Nazism is a National Socialist ideology developed and described by Adolf Hitler in the Mein Kampf manifesto, published in the mid-1920s.

In his manifesto, Hitler wrote:

— the world consists of people of different races who are constantly fighting with each other. It is the racial struggle that drives history;

- there are higher and lower races;

- the superior race will be in danger of extinction if mixed with the inferior ones.

The white race is supreme

“Hitler considered the white Aryan race to be the purest, strongest and most intellectual. He was sure that the Aryans were superior to everyone,” explains Rikke Peters. And he adds: “He hated not only Jews. This applied to both gypsies and blacks. But his hatred of Jews was especially strong because he saw them as the root of all evil. The Jews were the main enemies."

Historian Karl Christian Lammers, who studied the history of Nazism at the Saxo Institute at the University of Copenhagen, adds:

Hitler did not have mental illness

After World War II, many speculated that a man who, like Hitler, was responsible for a terrible genocide, must be mentally ill.

Rikke Peters argues that there is no evidence that Hitler was crazy or suffered from some kind of mental illness that made him hate Jews.

“There is nothing to suggest that Hitler was mentally ill, although he is often portrayed as a madman in constant delirium. You could say he had a manic and paranoid-narcissistic personality type, but that doesn't mean he was crazy or mentally ill."

But although Adolf Hitler did not suffer from mental illness, there is no doubt that he was an aberration. A psychiatrist might diagnose him with a personality disorder.

“Hitler was evil. He was a master at manipulating people and also had poor social skills. But this does not make him mentally ill. In Hitler's life, everything that normally gives meaning and weight to existence was missing - love, friendship, study, marriage, family. He didn’t have an interesting personal life outside of political affairs.”

Antisemitism was rampant even before World War II

In other words, Hitler's personality can be described as deviant and dissocial, but this is not the only reason for the hatred of Jews that led to the genocide.

The German dictator was only part of a long-term general trend. At that time he was far from the only anti-Semite. When Hitler wrote his manifesto, hatred of Jews, or anti-Semitism, was already quite common.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, Jewish minorities in Russia and Europe were discriminated against and persecuted, says historian Claus Bundgård Christensen, a lecturer at Roskilde University.

“Hitler was part of the anti-Semitic culture in Germany and other European countries. Many believed that the Jews had a secret global network and were seeking to seize power over the world.”

Rikke Peters adds:

“It was not Hitler who invented anti-Semitism. Many historians note that his hatred of Jews resonated with the population because Jews were already persecuted in many countries.”

Nationalism led to anti-Semitism

The rise of anti-Semitism correlated with the spread of nationalism across Europe after the French Revolution of 1830.

Nationalism is a political ideology where a nation is perceived as a community of people with the same cultural and historical background.

“When nationalism began to spread in the 1830s, Jews were like a speck in the eye because they lived all over the world and did not belong to one nation. They spoke their own language and were different from the Christian majority in Europe,” explains Rikke Peters.

Conspiracy theories about a secret Jewish desire for world domination flourished among Christian nationalists in many European countries.

False protocols fueled speculation

The theory is based, among other things, on some ancient texts called “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”

These protocols were created at the end of the 19th century by the intelligence service of the Russian Tsar Nicholas II; in form they were similar to a real Jewish document.

According to these protocols, there really is a worldwide Jewish conspiracy to seize power. The Tsar of Russia used the Protocols of the Elders of Zion to justify his persecution of the Jews, and many years later, Adolf Hitler did the same.

“Hitler believed that the Jews actually had a global network where they sat and pulled the strings in an effort to gain world domination. He used false protocols as a means of legitimizing genocide,” says Klaus Bundgaard Christensen.

German Jews were integrated into society

However, Jews were part of German society when Hitler wrote his manifesto in the 1920s.

“German Jews were perfectly integrated into society and considered themselves Germans. They fought for Germany in the First World War, some were generals or held high public positions,” says Rikke Peters.

But Germany lost the war, and this defeat added fuel to the anti-Semitism of Adolf Hitler and his supporters.

“In World War I, Hitler was a soldier of the Bavarian regime. After the war, he blamed the defeat and subsequent unrest in Germany on the Jews. He said that the Jews had stabbed the German army in the back,” explains Karl-Christian Lammers.

The economic crisis benefited the Nazis

In the 1930s, Germany, like the whole world, plunged into the Great Depression. This economic crisis caused huge unemployment and social ills.

During this time of crisis, an anti-democratic Nazi party in Germany was formed - the National Socialist German Workers' Party, which was led by Adolf Hitler from 1921.

“Many Germans supported Nazism because they hoped the new political system would create better living conditions. At that time, Hitler's racial theory was presented only in Mein Kampf, and until 1933 party members knew little about racial hygiene. It was only after Hitler seized power in 1933 that anti-Semitism and racial theory began to play a prominent role in public life,” says Karl-Christian Lammers.

In the 1932 elections, the National Socialist Party and the German Communists together won a majority of the votes. Adolf Hitler demanded to be made chancellor and took this post.

The population was incited against the Jews

With the rise of the Nazi Party to power, Adolf Hitler and his associates began to spread anti-Semitic ideas among the population. There were campaigns that portrayed Jews as inferior and a threat to the Aryan race.

It was proclaimed that Germany is for the Germans, and the purity of the Aryan race must be preserved. Other races, especially Jews, must be separated from the Germans.

“Hitler managed to turn most of the German population against the Jews. But there were also people who protested his brutal attacks on the Jewish minority. For example, many believed that on Kristallnacht the Nazis went too far,” says Klaus Bundgaard Christensen.

Hatred of Jews remained unchanged

During the evening and night, many Jewish cemeteries, 7.5 thousand shops owned by Jews, and approximately 200 synagogues were destroyed.

Many Germans decided that the Nazi Party had overstepped its bounds, but Jew-hatred continued to spread. In subsequent years, Adolf Hitler and his supporters systematically sent millions of Jews to concentration camps and exterminated them.

“During the Second World War, the policy of the National Socialist Party changed in some areas, but hatred of Jews remained unchanged. The destruction of the Jews and the creation of a non-Jewish Europe was a measure of success for Hitler and other members of the party elite,” says Klaus Bundgaard Christensen. “Even at the end of the war, when it became obvious that resources had to be saved, the Nazis continued to spend money on concentration camps and sending Jews there.”

Adolf Hitler is an extremely controversial personality. For us, he is known primarily as the leader of the Nazis, who tried to destroy humanity, and if not for the brave Russian soldiers, he probably would have accomplished his plan.

Despite the fact that we all associate him with a dictator and invader, his life was extremely interesting and at the same time very confusing, since many facts from his biography are very contradictory.

One thing we know for sure is that the great dictator hated the Jews and destroyed them in huge numbers. It is known for sure that many of them died not on the battlefield, but in concentration camps from starvation or in gas chambers.

The first persecution of the race began in 1935, when the Nuremberg Racial Laws were adopted, according to which all Jews were deprived of civil rights (at that time, Adolf had already been appointed Reich Chancellor or, if translated into Russian, head of government). In 1938, the first mass action of direct physical violence against Jews took place on the territory of the Third Reich.

Versions of Hitler's hatred of Jews

First and the most common version is that the very idea of ​​Nazism in Hitler’s understanding implied the division of nations into these three groups. This is a completely reasonable version, since it is no secret that Hitler was a fanatic of his cause.

“Performing in front of his soldiers was akin to making love for him,” adherents of this version are sure, which is also not without logic. To see this, you can watch one of the recordings of Hitler's speech.

Second version is that Hitler’s people, a considerable number of whom, as is known, were pumped up with drugs and special medications, were bloody, they practically did not feel pain and wanted only one thing: to kill.

An order to leave as many people as possible (after all, the more slaves, the better) could greatly undermine the authority of such troops, which would lead to a significant weakening of the army due to the loss of the “elite” and, most likely, to riots of these madmen. It turns out that they had to give them someone to tear to pieces. These doomed were the Jews and Gypsies.

Third version implied fear. Hitler's fear of danger. According to the version, Hitler was afraid that the people of one of these nations could destroy his great army. There is no reasonable evidence for this version.