If there’s a list of history’s most infamous villains, Adolf Hitler is at the top. He’s the poster boy for antisemitism, the guy who turned mass murder into an industry. Though he hated a lot of people, he was uniquely obsessed with Jews. He believed that only he could solve the “Jewish problem,” and his solution was deadlier than anyone could have imagined.
Antisemitism had poisoned Europe for centuries, but even the most hardened Jew-haters hadn’t envisioned total annihilation. Not until Hitler. By the time he was done, one-third of the world’s Jews were gone.
Why did Hitler hate the Jews with such a consuming obsession?
Enlightenment and Assimilation
Europe had never been particularly good to its Jews, but by the time Hitler was born, Jews had mostly left their ghettos in Western Europe and were participating in public life. The Enlightenment had taught that all human beings were born with a natural right to life, liberty, and property – even Jews.
Before the Enlightenment, Jews had been treated as complete outsiders, a foreign and corrupting community with no rights and no recourse. As Enlightenment ideas spread through the continent, Western European Jews did their best to assimilate. Whether they lived in Germany, Austria, or France, Jews attended universities, served in the army and the government, wrote bestselling novels, made art, and did research. From the outside, they looked and lived just like everyone else.
Hitler’s Early Indoctrination
But Europe’s antisemitism was deeply rooted, and never fully went away. That is where our story starts, with a young Hitler picking up a newspaper and reading about the Jews.
Even as a kid, Hitler had been drawn to politics, and he had some strong opinions. The Austro-Hungarian Empire, which was in power at the time, was multi-ethnic and multinational, but not everyone was happy about the state of affairs. Hitler soon fell in love with German ethnic nationalism, the idea that all ethnic Germans should unite under one banner.
This vision of a united Germany left no room for ethnic minorities, especially not Jews. Nationalist papers openly referred to Jews as “lice,” “the lowliest of all peoples,” and “the abomination of the human race” – rhetoric that the young Hitler swallowed without a second thought.
Even in enlightened Europe, antisemitism was alive and well.
Vienna and Volkish Ideology
At 18, Hitler moved to Vienna, hoping to become an artist. To a small-town kid with big-city dreams, Vienna was like an electric shock – bustling, cosmopolitan, and full of dangerous ideas. The city was a battleground where modernity and tradition collided head-on. The government tried and often failed to crack down on the pornography and immorality that seemed to be everywhere.
From Sigmund Freud‘s theories of sexuality to Gustav Mahler‘s operas to Gustav Klimt‘s erotic paintings, Hitler came to Vienna to make art but found himself disgusted by what he viewed as the city’s degeneracy, which he blamed on Vienna’s Jewish artists and intellectuals. Modernism was overtaking traditional values, and the open exploration of social taboos like sex, poverty, prostitution, violence, and alternate forms of government terrified conservative thinkers.
Everywhere Hitler looked, he saw a conspiracy to destroy all that was pure, noble, wholesome, and German.
At the same time, Hitler fancied himself an artist, but good art requires bravery, open-mindedness, and a willingness to challenge convention — all of which his art lacked. Hitler’s paintings were technically proficient but stiff and soulless. When he applied to the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, he was rejected twice.
Broke and aimless, he took to wandering the streets, where for the first time, he came face to face with religious Jews. These traditionalists looked nothing like the modernists he blamed for Vienna’s moral decay, but they were just as alien and threatening to the honest, hardworking Volk (folk) of his beloved Germany.
True, Hitler had been born in Austria, but he’d always idolized the Germans on the other side of the border. By his teens, he was fully immersed in the Völkish ideology – a toxic mix of racism, romanticism, and German superiority.
Karl Lueger and Jewish Scapegoating
This pseudo-scientific populism was all the rage in Hitler’s Vienna, helped along by the city’s antisemitic mayor, Karl Lueger.
Lueger was a contradictory figure; on the one hand, he had many Jewish friends who vouched for his generally decent character, and he never passed any anti-Jewish laws. In fact, he counted Jews among his confidants and advisors, even appointing a handful to public positions.
At the same time, his political platform was built on populist scapegoating. He needed someone to blame for the city’s moral decline, and Jews were a convenient target. They were shapeshifters who could be made to fit any charge: communist or capitalist, practitioners of an alien religion or pornographers and prostitutes, and always outsiders.
Hitler had found his hero. It would be an exaggeration to say that Lueger normalized antisemitism in Vienna, because it was already in the air. But his political savvy and public-speaking talent electrified the young Hitler. Lueger was a man who understood PR, a stirring orator with a knack for political theater and whipping up crowds with a well-chosen word.
Whether or not he was sincere, Lueger’s grandstanding offered Hitler a blueprint for how to seize and wield power effectively. In his hands, antisemitism wasn’t just a feeling, but a tool and a platform that unified and inspired decent Volk to take back their city from the capitalists, communists, pornographers, and modernists destroying their traditional Volkish values.
World War I and Germany’s defeat
Hitler might have started putting Lueger’s lessons into practice much earlier, if not for World War I.
As a volunteer in the German army, he spent the latter half of his twenties carrying messages to and from regiment headquarters. Though he usually wasn’t on the front lines, he was temporarily blinded by a mustard gas attack and sent back to Germany to recover. That meant he had front row seats at the starvation and hopelessness of the home front, images that would haunt him for the rest of his life.
Hitler never returned to the battlefield. By the time he recovered, the war was over, and his beloved Fatherland had lost. He couldn’t believe it. He had been awarded two iron crosses for bravery, and half his regiment had given lives or limbs to the cause.
As far as he was concerned, the military had done everything right. The soldiers had been brave. The strategy had been sound. Like many Germans, he believed that traitorous politicians had stabbed the ordinary people in the back. They had surrendered, hypnotized by bad actors who exploited Germany’s weakness for their own dark ends.
Who were those bad actors? They were social democrats, communists, and Jews. Hitler either didn’t know or didn’t care that 100,000 Jews had served loyally in the German army. It was much easier to blame the misery all around him on outside influence.
Misery was everywhere in post-war Germany. The empire had fallen, and various groups jockeyed to fill the power vacuum, with deadly results. Socialists and communists duked it out, often violently. For many Germans, including Hitler, it seemed clear that someone was behind all this upheaval. Someone was infecting Germany with the virus of communism. Someone had forced the German government to sign a profoundly humiliating treaty, which made an already devastated Germany pay reparations to all parties involved.
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
Humiliated Germans didn’t have to look far for a culprit, especially one cast as a shadowy enemy taking pleasure in Germany’s collapse. By 1919, German translations of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” were popping up everywhere.
A few years before, a Russian journalist claimed to have found the minutes of a series of secret meetings of a shadowy Jewish group called the Elders of Zion. Each chapter meticulously noted the various methods that the Elders employed to take over the world. Of course, when you’re in a secret cabal, you definitely write down every detail of your evil plans and leave them around for anyone to find.
The plans listed in the text included: seizing control of the banks, the media, the schools, world governments, and enslaving all non-Jews and destroying all other religions in order to rule the world.
For anyone who needs to hear this, the text of the Protocols was a fabrication: There is no Jewish plot to take over the world. If there were, the Jewish people would be too busy arguing with each other to actually put it into action.
Hitler didn’t see himself as a madman consumed by an antisemitic conspiracy theory. In fact, as Rabbi Raphael Shore explains in his book, “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Jew?”, it would be both inaccurate and unsatisfying to merely dismiss him as a lunatic.
At the core of Hitler’s hatred was a deeply developed worldview that positioned Jews and Judaism as the antithesis of everything he valued and cherished. Above all else, it was this tension between Judaism and Hitler’s values that lay at the heart of his hatred.
All his other accusations about Jewish domination, Jewish pornography, Jewish Marxism, or capitalism or alienists, were merely window dressing, useful embellishments to a much deeper animus.
“That is the accepted approach that almost everybody considers to be true without ever giving it much of a second thought,” Shore explained. “The parallel that goes along with that is that Hitler was a complete madman with no coherent thinking in his brain and ideology. He was just a megalomaniac psychopath, and all that together is why it all happened.”
Shore noted that Germany had a reputation as the most intelligent, sophisticated, academic, and logical country in the world. It was where people went for the best education.
“How a madman with no coherent ideas could have whipped up an entire country to commit a genocide on a minority group and spend so much of their energies without any coherent ideology behind it, on the surface is illogical, it doesn’t hold any water,” Shore said. “The reality is that Hitler had an incredibly coherent ideology, a consistent, systematic ideology. Not only that, it wasn’t even his original ideology. He called himself a rational antisemite. He distinguished himself from emotional antisemites because he had a coherent ideology.”
On its face, calling Hitler’s antisemitism “rational” seems a little nutty. How was a blind hatred of a single group rational in any way?
Ethical Monotheism vs Social Darwinism
Hitler hated the Jews because he viewed the world in an ideological battle for the core ideas that Western civilization should maintain and believe in. If the one that he didn’t believe in was successful, then that would be the destruction of humanity.
Hitler viewed himself as the man who was going to bring the correct ideology into the world for the sake of humanity. For Hitler, the bad ideology was the Jewish ideology.
He believed that the ideas brought into the world by the Jewish people, such as the human concept, humanitarianism, loving your neighbor, equality, human rights, peace on earth, the brotherhood of all mankind, and ethical monotheism, would destroy humanity.
Hitler found a way to warp scientific theories into twisted social “truths.” Natural law was the only law that mattered. If natural law dictated the survival of the fittest, then so should society.
What he thought would save humanity was the idea of social Darwinism, AKA might makes right. He believed that, just as the animal kingdom is governed by the survival of the fittest and natural selection, so was the rule for mankind.
But equality and peace on earth oppose those ideas. Survival of the fittest means you have a hierarchy, and those beneath you on the hierarchy should be wiped out. You don’t help the poor, the weak, and the sick. You get rid of them. You allow them to die so that the species or the nation can continue to thrive.
To Hitler, individuals were worthless unless they were strong, which meant that human beings had no inherent worth on their own. The sick, the weak, the underdog, they were worthless to the survival of the Volk, unworthy of even being alive.
But someone had inverted these natural laws. Someone had taken the pure and holy rules of nature and softened them. Why else would society care for the sick, poor, and weak? It had to be a plot, a conspiracy to weaken and enfeeble the strong, pure, muscular Volk.
Hitler knew exactly who was behind it. The Jews had brought this “sickness” into the world. They’d introduced the dangerous idea that all human beings had inherent worth, with their outlandish claim that every person was made in the image of God.
For Hitler, this corruption of the natural order extended to the Jews’ very existence. By rights, they should have disappeared long ago. Yet despite their statelessness, their weakness, their dispersal all across the corners of the world, the constant attempt to wipe them out, here they were, alive and kicking, free to unleash their dangerous ideas on the world.
Hitler’s ideas about Christianity
But why would ordinary people, the majority of whom were Christian, even listen to a guy who was raging against ideas that were explicitly biblical?
“Hitler was careful. He was against Christian values, Judeo-Christian values, so he explained in his private discussions that he thought Christianity would die a natural death, and that it was not really something that Germans naturally adhered to. It’s a foreign ideology brought on by the Jews,” Shore explained. “But he saw it dying, all the way from the emancipation in Europe. Christianity was losing its grip on Western civilization, and it was fading. So he didn’t talk too much to Christians, the ones who were serious about it, about how he’s gonna destroy Judaeo-Christian values. He was careful about that.”
Hitler had learned from Lueger that desperate people are easy to manipulate; all it takes is a speech, a slogan, and a target for their anger. It’s much easier to believe there’s a global conspiracy arrayed against you than it is to accept that sometimes things just suck.
The German Workers’ Party
For the next couple of years, Hitler refined his ideology and his political skills. He remained in the army at the end of World War I, eager for a purpose. There was plenty of work for an intrepid soldier in postwar Germany, like spying on far-left groups.
World War I left a power vacuum in Germany that all sorts of people were desperate to fill, but the Army was most concerned about communists taking over. They sent Hitler to spy on the German Workers’ Party, which they thought was a Marxist group.
Despite its name, it wasn’t Marxist at all. The German Workers’ Party was ultranationalist, Volkish, and anti-Marxist, and very, very antisemitic. Hitler was entranced. Even though he was supposed to be a silent observer, he found himself speaking so passionately and eloquently in the meeting that the group’s founder invited him to join.
Two years later, he was the group’s new leader, having booted out the old founder, and he decided it was time to rebrand as the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, or in short, Nazi. The party started small and marginal, but Hitler had no intention of staying on the fringes. Soon, the party had its own newspaper, where it put out calls to young men looking for a purpose.
Young men quickly signed up. By 1923, the Nazis had their own paramilitary wing, 3,000 members strong. Their first act was to try to overthrow the government. The coup failed, and the story should have ended there – a blip in Germany’s chaotic history, a weird memory of the time a bunch of fascist goons tried to take over the government – but that’s not what happened.
Time in prison and Mein Kampf
Instead, Hitler found himself in front of a very sympathetic judge. Technically, he had committed treason, so the judge outlawed his party and sentenced him to prison. It was in prison that Hitler wrote his magnum opus, “Mein Kampf,” a poisonous treatise explaining why Jews were a threat that needed to be eliminated.
Less than nine months into his sentence, Hitler was released. Almost immediately, he got the old band back together. A decade after his attempted coup, he was elected the Chancellor of Germany. A decade after that, his Final Solution was in full swing.
Resistance to hatred
It’s easy to call Hitler crazy, to pretend he was just a madman. But there was a method to his madness, a reason for his hatred.
Understanding those reasons is important because you can’t fight what you can’t understand. Whether you’re Jewish or not, if you believe in love and compassion, in the sanctity of life, in the divine spark inside each human being, you’re already resisting Hitler and his twisted ideology.
You are proof that he lost, that hatred will always lose.
If you are Jewish, Roma, disabled, LGBTQ+, or from any of the other groups Hitler tried to destroy, take a moment to savor the fact that he failed. Your existence is defiance, a light keeping the darkness at bay.
