The Roots of Hitler's Anti-Semitic Worldview

By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

I recently presented a paper on Nazi Germany’s de-legitimization of Europe’s Jewish population as a prelude to the Holocaust.

Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933. The Nazi seizure of power was carried out step-by-step through the first half of 1933, each step disguised as a seemingly legal act.

Everything was completely legal and in conformity with statute and precedent. Hitler governed by executive decree, a form of government that was subject to no checks or balances.

Issuing from the government, these laws had the appearance of legitimacy, yet they had transformed the country into a dictatorship.

What lay behind Hitler’s incredible animus towards the Jews? 

When the Nazis came to power, Jews made up less than one per cent of the population in Germany. But the Nazis regarded them as a vast, powerful, and deadly threat. Hitler viewed the world as poisoned by the “Jewish” idea of human equality. 

Political and religious systems had all been used by the Jews to achieve dominance over more naturally powerful peoples. They were the makers and enforcers of a corrupt planetary order.

Hitler was convinced that without a proper sense of urgency, Germany would be eventually defeated, dominated, and very likely destroyed by the Jews.

Influenced by the tsarist forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Hitler contended that there was a worldwide conspiracy of Jews to overthrow the German race, annihilate its culture, and render it impotent before its enemies. All Jews everywhere, no matter their political views, were part of this vast plot.

The Jews constituted the greatest threat to Germany’s racial purity and fighting spirit, asserted Hitler, and thus to its capacity to wage the eternal struggle needed to sustain and expand Germany’s population and vanquish its rivals. He claimed that they were a “spiritual pestilence,” worse than the Black Death. The only way to remove this plague was to eradicate it at the source.

Germany’s mission, he declared, was the conquest of lebensraum (living space) in the east, which could only be achieved at the expense of “Judeo-Bolshevik” Russia. This depended on overcoming its own decadence by breaking with democracy and purging itself of racial enemies. 

This Manichean world view, a world-historical struggle and apocalyptic-like global campaign, led to the burning of books, anti-Jewish legislation, expropriation, promotion of emigration, and also extensive efforts to “purify” art, science, legal thought and language from assumed Jewish influences. It would eventually culminate in genocide.

Think of SS troops sending clearly helpless old Jews to Treblinka. Can anyone be any less harmless? But they were, in Hitler’s mind, merely the “surface” embodiment of a worldwide conspiracy, one that remained headquartered in London, Moscow, Washington, and other capitals, and was trying to destroy Germany and all “Aryans” in a world war. They were a poison to a civilization's political and spiritual “health,” something Hitler was fixated on.

It was this kind of metaphysical racism which made Hitler’s policy against the Jews distinct from other forms of state sponsored killing, whatever the relative number of deaths. 

The war against the Jews was of greater importance to Hitler than the war against the Allies. Even when it was being lost, Hitler refused to allow redeployment of the trains rolling to the death camps, though they were needed for the war effort. 

And when the trains finally did stop running, because the Russians were about to overrun the mainly Polish-based camps, the SS troops were not redeployed to stave off the Russians. Instead they were ordered to take their captives on the road in what became the final phase of the so-called Final Solution to the Jewish Question: the Death Marches. 

More than 250,000 concentration camp prisoners died in this way shortly before the end of the war. Many of them were murdered by German civilians. The killing had to continue at all costs. Killing Jews was more important than military objectives. 

The so-called “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” was pure ideology put into murderous practice. Destroying the Jews -- every man, woman and child -- was a metaphysical imperative. All Jews, anywhere and everywhere, would have to be eliminated so that the world could survive. For the Nazis, this was an absolute existential necessity. Such was the madness.