Why did Adolf Hittler kill the Jews?

Hitler had attempted to distract the attention of the German public from his blatant take-over of the government by a fire in the Reichstag, which was blamed on the "Bolsheviks." This did not fire up the German public's indignation, so he simply reverted to blaming the Jews for all of Germany's problems. This was far more successful a tactic.

Once the war was underway, Reinhard Heydrich and Adolf Eichmann came up with the plan to exterminate the Jews. Undestand that i am not at all attempting to excuse Hitler for what happened--it happened with his approval. In 1942, there was a conference, the Wannsee Conference, chaired by Heydrich, at which a plan was developed to exterminate all of the Jews in Europe. Adolf Eichmann was actually an organizational genius, although he was also, of course, a murderous and amoral racist. Heydrich chose Eichmann to implement "the final solution." Heydrich was assassinated by the Czech underground in 1942. Eichmann escaped after the war, but Elie Weisman finally located him in Argentina in the 1950s. The Mossad kidnapped him in 1960, and he was tried in Isreal, and executed in 1962.

Heydrich was very close to Hitler, well before the war. Heinrich Himmler set up a secret National Socialist counter intelligence unit in 1931, then crucially important because the Nazis had not taken over the government. Heydrich was tagged to run this bureau. There are plausible assertions that Hitler gave serious consideration to making Heydrich his successor. Heydrich chaired the Wannsee Conference because he wanted to make clear to all the German officials assembled, whether members of the SS or not, that the extermination of the Jews, "the final solution," was a strategic necessity, and that the cooperation of all officials was required. Whether or not this was Hitler's brainchild or Heydrich's it would be hard to say--however, Heydrich was a truly brilliant individual, an accomplished violinist and a superb athlete. In every respect, he was superior in accomplishment to Hitler. It is reasonable to assert that Heydrich brought Hitler around to the idea of the extermination of the Jews, and is considered plausible by many, although not necessarily all historians.

Don't ask me though, what the justification for these monsters was for the contention that the extermination of all the Jews of Europe was a "strategic necessity." There was certainly no military justification, and, by 1942, no political justification for the policy.

He was a nut job.

He was misunderstood and a vegatarian, he had no other choice.

By the way, many Europeans over thousands of years have hated, oppressed and killed Jews. No other instance exists of an attempt to exterminate them. Why Hitler or Heydrich decided they all needed to die, no one can really say. Oceans of ink have been expended on the topic. Thousands of books, literally, have been written about Hitler and his pathology. I don't think you'll ever find a definitive answer.

He may have a mother problem and since his mother is thought to have been Jewish, he hated all Jewish people.

Antisemitism long had been a feature of the European - particularly but by no means exclusively German - social mindset see: On Jews and their lies, written by Martin Luther in 1483. Hitler's antisemitism stands out unambiguously in his Mein Kampf, and in speeches and letters of his predating that. 1n a 1919 letter, he wrote
In this attitude, he was by no means alone, the theme was widely endorsed and strong popular sentiment held Jews responsible for Germany's humiliating defeat in WWI and for economic woes due in fact to the global depression of the 1930s.

Given his own feelings and the social climate of the Germany of the times, antisemitism provided a powerful rally point, making it easy to whip up public support for Hitler's agenda, which centered on establishing Germany as the pre-eminant power on The Continent. Adjunct to Hitler's other aims, what became the "The Final Solution" began to evolve in 1933 with Hitler's rise to power. Over the next 5 years or so, the plight of Germany's Jews became increasingly dire. Ever more restrictive laws were passed, shutting Jews off from German society, depriving them of business and educational opportunities, stripping them of property and inheritances, disenfranchising them, and heaping on them a mounting list of rights from which they were exempted. Vandalism and physical attacks directed against Jewish infrastructure and Jews grew in frequency and intensity, ignored by the authorities and encouraged by Nazi harrangues at meetings and rallies. Over the '35-'38 period large numbers of Jews did emmigrate, more tried but were unable due to increasingly stringent immigration requirements being imposed by nations throughout the world, and many, many more either lacked the resources necessary or believed the horror could neither get worse nor last.

Initially, the idea was forced emmigration, moving the Jews out of Germany. However, increasingly restrictive general immigration controls enacted by many nations (by no means singling out Jews or any other group), largely in response to the economic pressures of the ongoing global depression, rendered deportation an unviable option in the matter of ridding the Reich and its anticipated conquered territories of Jews.

Perhaps the final trigger was the outcome of the Evian Conference, a 31-nation conclave convened at the request of then-US-President Franklin Roosevelt in 1938 to come up with a answer to the plight of Jewish refugees worldwide. The conference accomplished little apart from confirming the reluctance of the world's major nations to accommodate an influx of any sort of refugees, Jews or otherwise, but Jews in particular. Though a motion to adopt a resolution condemming Germany's treatment of Jews was proposed, it failed on introduction, never having been given a chance to pass (not to say had it actually gotten out of committee it had a chance of passing anyway).

Hitler saw this as a green light not only to continue but to intensify his anti-Jew agenda. In late 1938, Nazi thugs and hangers-on perpetrated what now is known as Kristallnacht, a wave of unimagineable anti-Jewish violence and horror which swept German cities, leaving Jewish shops, businesses, schools and temples in ruins, many burned to the ground, and the streets sparkling with the shards of broken glass which gave the night of hateful outrage its name.

Camps for the containment of uprooted Jews long had been established by the time of Germany's September 1939 attack on Poland, and as territory fell into German hands, so too did the Jews living in those territories. The camps' populations swelled beyond the bursting point, and as the war progressed, with seemingly unending German conquest, the swelling stream of dispossessed, forcibly relocated Jews came to overwhelm the Nazi's capability to manage; not only was it impractical to expand existing "resettlement camps" or to build new ones, administering the camps and providing even what little food and care the unfortunate captives were afforded was seen an inconvenient, unnecessary burden on Germany's economy and resources.

In Poland and later in Russia and elsewhere in the East, as the German Army swallowed tens of thousands of square miles of territory, death squads - Einsatzgruppen - had been formed, initially to deal with intelligentsia, political figures, other community leaders, partisans, and above all else anyone connected with the Communists. Drawn largely from SS units independent of Army control, with a few local Nazi sympathizers here and there as well, these thugs were nothing short of uniformed murderers operating under the direct command of the SS. With the exponential increase of dispossessed, displaced Jews brought on by the successes of the German Army, the practice of executing Jews in place, more or less, as opposed to transporting them to the already strained resettlement camps further and further to the rear as the Army pressed forward, came into vogue - an efficiency measure. Even though the number of death squads was increased dramatically, it became clear the sheer volume of Jews being confined to ghettos or herded into makeshift interim "retransport camps" pending "disposition" called for other measures.

In early 1942, as mentioned earlier by Set, a conference of SS and civilian political leaders was held at Wansee to lay out the "Final Solution". Lasting not quite an hour and a half, essentially during which Heydrich and other high-ranking SS officers dictated what amounted to the plans already drawn up and approved at the highest levels of Hitler's Nazi machine, while Nazi-installed politicians squabbled over who's Jews were to be dealt with first, the conference's product was the Wansee Protocol, certainly one of, if not singulary THE vilest documents with which humankind has disgraced itself throughout history.

Though not documented at Wansee, construction of the death camps was well under way, and mass executions already were being conducted, primarily using exhaust fumes from internal combustion engines as a death agent, disposing of the murdered victims' bodies in open pit mass graves, layers of chemicals being spread over the corpses to hasten decomposition and reduce the stench of decay while the huge pits were filled over a matter of days, covered back with earth when they had reached capacity and new pits opened. Even this was not efficient enough to handle the rising tide of victims. Research and expirimentation in the interest of streamlining the process shortly came up with the cyanide gas chambers and the production-line crematoria which served in several locations till the end of the war, murdering thousands of people a day, every day, month after month after month.


Now for the short answer - Why did Hitler kill the Jews? Simple; because the world, not wishing to get involved, refusing to address the reality it preferred to not face, sat aloofly by, doing nothing about the problem untill it was far too late to do anything.

I think the detailed replies above give a very good idea of how the holocaust came about but why were Jews chosen?

It is actually not just Jews who were deported and/or exterminated. The Roma (gypsy) people, homosexuals and political elements which did not agree with the Nazi regime also faced the same fate.

I am well aware that the vast majority were Jews, however, and have become painfully aware of the suffering encountered by reading Primo Levi, visiting Dachau and working on a project in Switzerland aimed at ensuring that assets deposited by victims of Nazi persecution find their rightful inheritors.

There is a fundamental human trait which identifies "belonging" and "oustiders". In situations where resources or opportunities are constrained (e.g. depression in Germany between WWI and WWII) the pressure to look after one's own tribe and look at other tribes as being a hinderance to this is often seen.

The conflicts one sees now in the Middle East, whether between Muslim Hizbollah and Jewish Israel; or Sunni and Shia Muslims in Iraq are equally typical of this "us and them" attitude.

The Jewish community in Germany at the time was very deeply integrated into society but retained separate identity of community and religion. Therefore, when a scapegoat was sought, this "tribe", being quite different from the "aryan" German people which the Nazis sought to promote, was selected.

The rest is a tragically successful, horrificly scientific, meticulously documented and gut-wrenchingly engineered process of destruction of a people.

freedom4free,

Am I correct in assuming that you don't want to hear any of these well presented responses above, and that you are waiting for "support" from "members of the International Jewish Conspiracy society" ?

Jews have been persecuted, on and off, by Christians in Europe for centuries. What made Hitler's persecution different was its efficiency. Hitler and many of his top men were Catholics. They were doing what had been done for nearly a thousand years. The Jews were always the boogiemen, the scapegoat when things went sour.


SOURCE
I found if odd that Mel Gibson, in his anti-Semitic remarks, blamed the Jews for all the turmoil taking place in the Middle East today. I guess he isn't honest enough to put the blame where it belongs, on the Christians. If the Christians had practiced what Christ preached (Mat. 7:12) the Jews would never have needed to find another place to live. But centuries of persecution and the aversion Europeans had for Jews led them to seek their old homeland.

It's probably a conglomerate of reasons, Set and timberlandko both giving detailed explanations of one facet of it. But I feel, in response to Setanta's remark at the end of his first reply, that there was indeed a strategic layer to it, which timberlandko already touched.
Remember, this policy also fell in line with the ideology of extreme nationalism, which is of course the core of fascism. By advocating the existence of an superior race, an Ubermensch, which Hitler and his Nazi thugs of course equated with the Arian blond/blue eyes human strain, he automatically placed those not of this racial type in the category of inferior. This broad group conveniently held several 'races' which occupied countries the Nazi's wished to conquer, if not just for their Lebensraum.
Jews, as aleady pointed out, have long born the hatred and misogeny of Europeans. It is, IMHO, one of the more tragic flaws of the bible, that it so clearly outlines that the jews were responsible for crucifying Jesus. With that as an excuse to the christian Europeans, a host of superstitions (which touched such areas of Jews cannibalizing on innocent Chriatian children), and the fact that jews were easily identifiable by adhering to their own culture, and in working in professions (largely because other professions were denied to them) such as merchant and banker, which made them at least get the outward appearance of money grubbers, the hatred of said Europeans found jews as their victims time and time again.

In Germany, particularly after the end of World War I, a disturbing(and untrue) theory circulated that the jews had backstabbed the German war effort, which resulted in the defeat. This was quite believable, seeing as how the battle was not waged on German soil, and because the army leaders took care to keep spirits high by giving false, positive reports about the war effort to the homefront. At the end of WW I, with an untenable situation, the army to realized they could not win, and they withdrew from the government, which meant new, civilian, leaders were elected. They were forced to sign their surrender, and so it seemed to the germans that they were betrayed into surrendering from a war they were winning. The crushing debt and depression that followed in the years of the Weimar republic did nothing to soften the undercurrent of hatred circulating around.

The Nazis used this hatred as a means to get to power. It was in part this ideology, that led to the deportation and extermination of such undesirables as minority groups(gays, gipsys, handicapped), racially inferior people (in particular the jews of course) and rebels (the resistance and political insurgents).

It is useful to understand the place of Jews in the world of Europe and the Med over the course of the two millenia of the current era. The original "Jews" of the middle east were actually the Aramaic Semites, who were the effective merchant middle class of the middle east at the time of the rise of the Persian empire. The Aramaic merchants spread throughout the region, and the Jews provided them with a religious creed (most Aramaic Semites became confessional Jews) while they learned commerce and financial managment from them. Soon, the Aramaic merchants were spreading confessional Judaism throughout the middle east, and, later the Greco-Macedonian kingdoms which followed in the wake of Alexander's conquest and death at a young age. The political instability of the region actually aided both the commercial enterprise of the Aramaic-Jewish merchants, and their spread of Judaism as well--there was no central, over-arching authority which either effectively regulated trade, or imposed a religious doctrine. Aramaic became a lingua franca of the region, and was the language of Palestine in the time when Jesus is alleged to have lived. The Aramaic-Jewish merchants spread Judaism throughout the region, and across the Oxus River into central Asia, reaching as far as China. Centuries later, the Nestorian Christians would follow in their footsteps, also reaching China. At the time of the rise of Mohammed, most Arab Semites who were not "pagan" were confessional Jews.

The rise of the Roman Empire simply facilitated the spread of Jews and Aramaic merchants, the latter no longer necessarily distinguishable from the Jews, to outsiders, at least. Alexandria became an important center for Jews, for the obvious commercial reasons. The Greeks were very successful merchants, as well, more on the sea than on the land as was the case with the Aramaic-Jewish merchants. The size of the Jewish community in Alexandria and its commercial power is shown by the nearly constant conflict between Jew and Greek in that city, reaching the point at which both communities appealed to the Emperor Claudius, who felt compelled to take a hand to intervene and establish peace in the city. Both because of the Jewish community and the Greek community in Alexandria, the city became an important Christian center in the first centries of this era, far more significant in terms of influential scholars and church fathers than Rome or Constantinople. As Christianity spread outward from that city, the Jewish merchants followed behind, and began to spread in Europe as they had previously not done. There was no love lost between the Romans and the Jews, and although they were not targeted for persecution, they were not encouraged to spread in the empire, and were at many times prohibited from residing at Rome.

But the rise of Christianity gave the Jews an entre into European society. Christians professed (often with hypocritical falsity) not to practice usury (the lending of money at interest), and so the Jews provided a very valuable service in the form of financial management and the accumulation of investment capital. Additionally, their increasingly ubiquitous presence in Christian societies made them useful as a means for the exchange of credit intruments. The early Muslims had no particular prejudice against Jews (they considered Jews and Christians errant, but not pagan, and therefore almost all Sunnis and most Shi'ites had no axe to grind with the Jews), and often Jews and Christians were welcomed into their communities because they possessed skills and practiced professions not common among Muslims. In many cities, special neighborhoods were set aside for them--this was, of course, often a case of isolating a despised population, and Muslim leaders were not above using pogroms against Christians and Jews for their own political ends. But by and large, before the 1948 establishment of the state of Israel, Muslim leaders found Jews useful as intermediaries with Christian nations, and they were often protected by Muslim leaders. In the city of Fez in Morroco, a city founded by and for Muslims, the Jews were put into a special neighborhood, which was guarded to protect them from the tribesmen.

But that special place in the Christian and Muslim worlds also made the Jews vulnerable. In the first thousand years of this era, Europe was terribly fragmented. There was, effectively, no England, no France, no Germany, no Italy, no Spain and no Russia. Poland was the first rationalized nation in Europe, and the effect was actually to encourage Jewish settlement there. But if the princling of a small German state, or the local baron in France or England or Italy got heavily into hock with the local Jewish merchants, he could readily eliminate the onus of his debt by encouraging a pogrom agains the Jews, or expelling them from his domain. They would be back soon enough, because for that first thousand years, they were the nearest thing to bankers which existed in Europe. Eventually, Kings took up the practice--the Jews were expelled from England on more than one occasion by a King who owed them more than he wished to pay up. Even local merchants could profit from the technique, by stirring up the ignorant to attack Jews when their own debts (the debts of the Christian merchants) exceeded their willingness to pay.

The Venetian Republic regularized the advantages which accrued from the exploitation of Jewish commercial contacts, and crucially because they were so useful in trading with the Muslims of the Levant, from which were acquired the spices of the East, the gem stones of India and the silks of China. Jews could move much more comfortably and freely between and within Christian and Muslim socities than Christians and Muslims could between and among one another. The Doges at Venice therefore set aside an island as a residence for the Jews--the Island of Ghetto. The word ghetto came to mean any segregated neighborhood for the Jews. As Jews elsewhere in Europe fled pursecution, they increasingly came to Venice and settled on Ghetto, and poverty, overcrowding and disease rose, despite the best efforts of the Doges and the community leaders among the Jews. Eventually, of course, ghetto came to mean any crowded and impoverished neighborhood.

So the Jews in Europe by the simple practice of their successful commercial activities inspired a love-hate relationship with the Christian Europeans. They were valued for the commercial and financial advantages they conferred, and especially their primitive banking functions, but were despised for that same reason. It was convenient and advantageous for leaders in Christian Europe to keep anti-semitism on the simmer, because that allowed them both to control and isolate the Jews, and kill them or turn them out altogether when the financial situation became too embarrassing. Probably the major reason that there was never any attempt to exterminate the Jews of Europe in the first 1500 years of this era was because for as despised and abused as they were, they filled a crucially valuable place in society. With the rise of the Fuggers in Germany, and then the Lombard bankers in Italy, though, that usefulness began to wane. By the time of the Protestant Reformation, the days in which the Jews would be valuable, even while despised and oppressed, were numbered. Catholic and Protestant soon had enough on their hands with slaughtering one another, and the Jews were largely overlooked, although in vast territories such as Poland before the partition, where the population was almost exclusively Catholic, and the nobility chronically impoverished from their own extravagance and mismanagement of their estates, the old equation of needing and hating the Jews continued--and the pogroms against the Jews continued as well.

By the time the Reformation was sorted, and nation-states began to arise in Europe, there was sufficient "liberalism" that no government would actively oppress the Jews, or encourage attacks on them. By then, of course, Jews were as much Englishmen, Frenchmen, Germans, etc., as their neighbors. But two thousand years of racial and religious hatred would not go away, and it was this which the National Socialists were able to so effectively exploit.

Must say there are some very smart people on A2K, really thoughtful answers, great work, thank you all.

More interesting questions:

Why did people let Hitler kill Jews so long before doing anything about it?

Did the majority of the German population knew about the concentration camps? Did they know what they were being used for?

Also how did the Nazi's manage to force 6 million+ people without the rest of the world really noticing?

It is my impression, from what I have read, that the world didn't know what was going on. If reports came out they were probably not believed as nothing like this had happened in the past. Certainly nothing like this happened in WW I and that is what most everyone would compare this war with.

The German people had no idea this was happening. This was kept secret and many Germans were shocked when they discovered this after the war.

As for Jews being rounded up the story is they were being sent to camps, something like we did to the Japanese in America. Why would anyone suspect mass murder and genocide? What was the precedence?

Life is a learning experience. Prior to WW II few would have believed that a civilized nation like Germany would stoop to such behavior. Today we know better. Humanity has learned from this experience.

freedom4free.

"Knowledge" requires motivation on the part of the potential "knower".

Just as you are not really interested in knowing the horrific details of the holocaust, it suited many Germans in the post depression years to remain blinkered and believe the Nazi de-humanization propoganda about "inferior races being sent to work camps". At the same time, the eyes of Western governments were focused on Stalin as the "real" threat, against which Hitler appeared to be a problematic yet viable deterrent. (parallels with Saddam Hussain show history repeats itself)

As usual, you ask these questions as a platform for your skepticism. If you really wanted to know the details, there are shelves of learned books on the subject showing the diabolical efficiency with which victims were fooled until it was too late for them. Perhaps all skeptics such as yourself should be forced to view the solid two hours of concentration camp footage shown wthout break at the Nuremberg trials. Many of the Nazi prisoners shielded their eyes, and many of the press couldn't take it and left the room.

Yes, and their blood in on your hands, this act was so horrific (as you put it) so maybe you should just go and kill yourself ?

Palestinians had nothing to do with this, why are they taking revenge on them ?

There is no doubt in my mind that 4F4 doesn't want to know or believe the truth. But i responded because other people read these threads. However, one part of his typical, snotty cynicism should not be brushed aside.

That is the question about why the other nations of the world "let" it happen. Of course, to a certain extent, there was nothing they could do short of "pre-emptive" military action to invade Germany--and that was a technique which their own populations would not have tolerated. It is not possible to understand that without understanding what Europe suffered in the Great War, and the extent to which the populations of all European nations, "winners" and "losers" had been scarred by the experience, and determined to prevent another war and to prevent militarism. Only among the Germans, with their "stab in the back" myth and the mythic belief in the invincibility of their military, and the childish, pouting resentment that the world did not recognize the excellence of their culture and the "justice" of their cause--was there a thirst for militarism and glory in war. The rest of Europe worked to reduce armament, to outlaw poison gas and aerial bombardment, to reduce the size of warships, and the size of fleets.

The rest of the world didn't want a war, and was not prepared to deal with Germany militarily. There was a much more dispicable aspect of this all however. The world knew that Jews were being horribly abused, and put into camps. Assuredly, no one anticipated the nightmarish horror of the death camps and the "final solution"--nothing like that had been known before. But people knew German Jews were in trouble--and not only did they do nothing, they failed to do what they could. Jews who sought refuge in other nations were turned away. People outside Germany took the opportunity to profit from the misfortunes of the German Jews, and the seizure of their property and their assets.

From the very beginning of the state of Israel, in May, 1948, the Zionists there violated their solemn engagements, and stole from and brutalized the Arabs living in Palestine. They have continued to do so to the present. The rest of the world turned a blind eye, and in the early days, even applauded the "heroic" Israelis. The reason is not hard to understand--when the Jews of Europe needed the rest of the world to help save them, the rest of the world turned their backs. So, when the Arabs were crying out for help, and those who victimized them were Zionist and surviving European Jews, the rest of the world turned their backs again--motivated by their guilt at having done so when the lives of millions of European Jews were in the balance.

The rest of the world did nothing seventy years ago, which in large measure explains why we have the situation we have today in the middle east, because the rest of the world again did nothing when the state of Israel was founded.

The member f4f will attempt to use such a position for his anti-semitic propaganda, of that i have no doubt, as i have no doubt that he is anti-semitic. But i do not oppose the existence of the state of Israel, and simply recognize what the motivating factors were of the members of the United Nations in 1948, and the supporters of Israel ever since. The solution cannot come with the destruction of Israel, but it cannot come either with unquestioning and uncritical support for Isreal. And you can bet your bottom dollar that the strongest motivation for this member to have started this thread is to attempt to undermine the position of the Israelis--not be he gives a damn for the Palestinians or the Lebanese, and not because he gives a damn about justice in the middle east. He's an anti-semite, plain and simple, and that is his prime motivation in half or more of his threads.

Hold on, fresco!

I don't think there's f4f is denying that the holocaust took place, merely that there was widespread knowledge about it.

Propaganda was rife (I've visited Dachau and can read German) and I think many German people genuinely beleived that there were work camps "to the East" which were used.

This was (at first) the case - then the idea and construction of Destruction camps ("Vernichtungslage") began - and the likes of Auschwitz/Birchenau were not known by many to be killing factories.

I am horrified that the few who did know were able to live with this knowledge but it seems they did - and did not tell others in a way which was widely accepted or believed. That's what a totalitarian regime feeding propaganda does to a people.

KP

Hi kitchenpete,

You need to read up the f4f thread history to know where he is coming from. His position is not one of denial. its one of "deflation" on the grounds that "International Zionists" are "over-using" the holocaust to brow-beat their opponents with. His usage of terms like "his problem with the holocaust" and "an interesting question..." speak volumes about his intent.

I issue the challenge . Let him take this opportunity to deny his interest in rekindling the infamous liable of an "International Zionist Conspiracy".

Indeed. How about it, f4f--let the other shoe drop. It's not like you to play coy...