8 Insane Reasons Why Hitler Wanted to Exterminate Jews
According to a historian, religion didn’t play any role in all this.
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In various discourses, historians tried to find out the actual reasons behind Hitler’s hate against the Jews that resulted in the horrible event of the Holocaust.
However, many of them are suppositions and hear-says that cannot form the basis of Hitler’s extreme hate against the Jews. But Hitler’s political manifesto “Mein Kampf” explains much of his philosophy of nationalism, economy, world politics, and most of all, hate against the Jews.
Although antisemitism shaped much of his political thought and, to say, his whole life, he didn’t invent the hate against the Jews at first. Jews have been a long-persecuted nation in the whole of Europe since the Middle Ages — mostly for religious reasons.
Hitler didn’t invent an anti-Sematic ideology
As said earlier, Hitler was rather new to the ideology of antisemitism, and it was a centuries-old phenomenon.
The Christians have looked down upon Jews since the Middle Ages, and they believed the Jewish faith was obsolete and an aberration and needed to be quashed. The Jews were forcefully converted to Christianity, or sometimes they were lulled into the fold of Christianity.
This practice can be seen in one of Shakespeare’s plays, The Merchant of Venice, where the Jewish merchant, Shylock, was offered to accept Christianity and the Duke would return his second share property to him earlier confiscated by the law of Venice. The dominant reason for the hatred of the Jews in the Middle Ages was religion.
But modern times discarded the importance of religion and substituted it with the ideologies of races, classes, and nationalism. As the 19th century was tumultuous and the idea of the nation-states got currency all over Europe, the Germans also viewed the Jews as a different nation.
This view also put those Jews in danger who accepted Christianity but were Jews by bloodline. As Hitler was a staunch supporter of the nation-state and nationalism, he only hated the Jews because of their bloodline and not for their religion.
Hitler was not anti-Semitic from the start
It is unknown why and when Hitler developed anti-Semitic feelings, but as per his book Mein Kampf, he termed his hatred against Jews as a long, arduous, and personal struggle.
However, according to some historians, after analyzing the Mein Kampf, he developed hate against the Jews when he was working as a painter in Vienna (1908–1913).
But one thing is clear; he was not anti-Semitic from the start as Samuel Morgenstern, a prominent Jew from Vienna, was the faithful buyer of his paintings. During Hitler’s stay in Vienna as a painter, he was rather introduced to an anti-Semitic ideology.
A Jew doctor did not save his mother, Klara Hitler
Another theory suggests that Hitler’s hate against the Jews was formed because Eduard Bloch, a Jewish physician, couldn’t save his mother, Klara Hitler when she was suffering from breast cancer in 1907.
It was too late when Klara was diagnosed as the cancer was incurable in the last stage. However, at the insistence of Hitler, Dr. Bloch treated her with a quasi-experimental process, in which he gave her the doses of iodoform for over a month.
This exposed her to excruciating pains that made Klara scream all the time. When she died after a month of treatment that further put her in pain, Hitler thought that the medication killed her, hence vowed to take revenge on Jews. But this idea is also debunked by historians as he helped Dr. Bloch escape to America.
Mufti Amin al-Husseini of Jerusalem’s idea of burning Jews
Recently, Israel’s prime minister Netanyahu claimed that Mufti Amin al-Husseini, who was Jerusalem’s grand religious leader from 1921 to 1937, advised Hitler to burn all the Jews.
According to Netanyahu, Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews but to expel them from Germany. Hence, Husseini expressed his ideas to Hitler that Jews would come to Palestine and claim land here if expelled from Germany.
Hence, Hitler sought suggestions to which the Husseini recommended to “burn them.” However, Netanyahu’s claim was disregarded by the world community, so he backtracked on his statement and said that the “responsibility of Hitler and the Nazis for the extermination of six million Jews is clear to fair-minded people.”
German nationalism formed his anti-Semitic views
Two Austrian politicians, who were German nationalists, immensely influenced Hitler’s thinking about nationalism and politics.
Georg Ritter von Schönerer (1842–1921) was the first politician who formed his views of staunch nationalism. Ritter believed that Germans must expand their Empire to the German-speaking regions of Austria and Hungary and that Jews should be denied full-fledged German citizenship.
Karl Lueger (1844–1910), who was the Viennese mayor, taught Hitler that social reforms and antisemitism could take Germany to the heights of economic and cultural prosperity. Even Hitler praised Karl Lueger in his book Mein Kampf that he was “the greatest German mayor of all times.” After coming into power in 1933, Hitler practiced their ideas actually and launched his policies against the Jews.
Hitler blamed the Jewish community for Germany’s defeat in World War I
Hitler experienced a poison gas attack in a battle in Belgium in WWI that led to his admittance to a military hospital.
The attack was severe, and he couldn’t see properly. He was wounded and still lying in his hospital bed when he heard the news of German surrender. The news hurt his national feelings to the core and tumbled him into deep emotional pain. Even he wrote about this as “everything began to go black again before my eyes.”
However, he was not alone in this. It was hard for every German to swallow the defeat. Whether it’s a myth or not, the Germans had to find a scapegoat for the lost war, and they put the blame on the Jews, Communists, and the Social Democrats.
In those days, the “stab-in-the-back legend” got currency, and many Germans believed that they wouldn’t have lost the war on the battlefield if the Jews hadn’t betrayed them at the home front.
However, the German Government investigated the matter and found that it was propaganda against the Jews because thousands of Jews fought in the war for their homeland. Otto Frank, a Jew who fought in the Battle of the Somme in 1916, was one such example.
Radicalization of Hitler’s thoughts against Jews
After the defeat in WWI, Hitler’s hatred for the Jews grew. He openly ranted against the Jews and was promoting the cause to expel all the Jews from the German territories.
His country’s successive political and social development radicalized his views about the Jews. According to sources, in August 1920, he compared Jews to germs and stated that disease could not be cured unless its causes were destroyed.
He further said that unless the Jews are removed from among us, their influence will not disappear. This thought grew over time and cemented into his permanent psyche. That’s why, in the 1940s, he unleashed his terror of burning and exterminating them all from German society.
Hitler’s idea of Pure Germans
Hitler’s idea of nationalism blinded the reasons that led him to believe that the Germans are the superior race in the world and that all other races, especially Jews, belong to an inferior race.
His belief in populations’ high and low races led him to believe that even Slavic people were inferior and meant to be dominated and ruled. But his ideas didn’t stop here.
He applied his thought practically and felt that the Germans could only remain pure if they removed all other races and people with disabilities such as physical and mental or those who have incorrigible criminal behavior from German regions, Jews being the primary target.
Once Hitler came to power, these ideas led him to kill millions of Jews and other people he deemed unfit for pure German society. Hence, the horrible event of the Holocaust occurred that left a mark on the face of history.
Wrapping it up
Hitler might not have been a difficult man as a human is good by nature. But certain circumstances might have led him to take such gruesome actions as many kings and leaders did in history. As Hitler described in his book Mein Kampf, there were reasons for that.
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