Hitler's practical reason for killing the Jews

[IMfez]

Growing up in the US, I learned that Hitler killed the Jews and other minorities because he was an evil person and needed a scapegoat.

However recently I got to talk to a German guy who made a more practical case for Hitler’s actions, one that seems more sensible in reality anyways.

He told me that because the Jews were traditionally banned from work and forced into banking and finance, they grew quite wealthy as the world changed and those industries became exceptionally profitable.

The anti-Semitic attitude in much of Europe had class undertones. People didn’t like the Jews, not because of religious differences but because they were wealthy and controlled so much.

Hitler capitalized on this public perception and also used it as a reason to capture significant Jewish assets needed to fund an expansionary war.

Can someone who understands European history offer a second opinion and tell me if this is an accurate account?

[UDS]

It is true that for significant periods of time in many places in Europe Jews were banned from owning land and/or from entry into various trades, professions or guilds. All of those restrictions had fallen away long before Hitler’s time, but it does help to explain over-representation of Jews in certain professions, particularly foreign trade and banking. And this did result in a visible class of significantly wealthy Jews with international connections. This certainly wasn’t true for Jews as a whole; this wealthy group was quite small, but highly visible, and it was a stereotype that played into (and was played up in) antisemitic notions.

It’s not the case that wealth seized from Jews played a significant part in funding the Nazi war effort. The entirety of the German economy from 1933 ownwards was directed to funding Nazi expansion, and from 1939 the Nazis also systematically plundered the economies of countries they occupied for the same purpose; assets seized from Jews formed a tiny, tiny part of what the Nazis needed, and took, for this purpose. And in any case they could have seized Jewish assets without also murdering their owners.

[naita]

“Would Europe have been as anti-semitic if the Jewish minority had a higher proportion of working class to upper-middle class?” is close to too hypothetical to answer. There are no similar, but less well-to-do groups to use as a comparison.

We can however infer something from the general hatred of “other” running through all of nazi ideology. Since Hitler saw no room for Slavs in the expanded German Reich it stands to reason there would have been no room for even less conspicuous Jewish minority.

“But what if anti-semitism never arose because Jews were much less conspicuous right from the start?” Well, unless they converted to Christianity and ceased to be a visible minority they’d always be a convenient scapegoat, and we’re beginning to approach a point where we’re asking “Would the Nazis have gone after the Jews if they hadn’t been Jewish?”

[nani]

Not all Jews of the time were wealthy. Particularly in Eastern Europe, there were many, many poor and peasant Jews. This includes many of the people persecuted who only had some Jewish ancestry or who had converted to Christianity or were non-practicing. Many of the minorities the Nazis persecuted were also not wealthy. Furthermore, most wealthy people were not Jews.

Even though the Nazis did gain from stealing Jewish assets and using slave labor, they also diverted vital resources to their ghettoization and slaughter that were needed for the war effort. On the whole, I don’t think they came out ahead, even before you consider that they got completely overrun by war’s end.

Hitler was not practical in general and his persecution of the Jews in particular was not practical. Yes, anti-semitism at that time owed a lot to many factors in different areas, including class issues, but I don’t think the German guy’s account is accurate.

[Latro]

@nani

Not all Jews of the time were wealthy. Particularly in Eastern Europe, there were many, many poor and peasant Jews.

For the poor jews a different tack was used.
Espescially the eastern Jews, the public encountered in the streets, were seen as dirty, loud and very untrustworthy hagglers.

Propaganda blew this existing image up to hate proportions and revulsion, comparing them to street rats.
From this viewpoint, the wealthy jew was just a more successful haggler, that insidiously had managed to infiltrate the better circles of society.

[Slithy_Tove]

I’m calling bullshit on your German guys assessment (and am just this side of calling it just this side of what I’ve heard older Germans say “the Jews started the war.”) There were plenty of non-Jewish German bankers and businessmen, and Hitler didn’t kill them and confiscate their assets. In fact, he kissed their asses. “Put me in power and you’ve seen your last stike. Fat war contracts and slave labor, and to sweeten the deal, Jewish assets at (crematory) fire sale prices!”

It was race warfare, not class warfare.

[Walton_Firm]

I’d say Wagner also needs to be mentioned here. He is known mostly as a composer and opera author today, but he was actually considered one of Germany’s major intellectuals and philosophers in his time, and one of his main themes was “what does it mean to be German”. And in that context, he frequently brought up the Jews as the “anti-Germans”: he saw Jewish culture as the exact antithesis of what he believed German culture should be. He was an anti-Semite obviously, but a very erudite and unfortunately a very influential one.

In fact, in the infamous Nazi phrase “Endlosung der Judenfrage” (final solution to the Jewish problem) the term “Judenfrage” was a reference to Wagner’s writings, although Wagner probably did not have genocide in mind but only cultural assimilation.

Hitler and the Nazis were big fans of Wagner. So when they rose to power on a platform based on nationalism and us-versus-them politics, they didn’t just pick a scapegoat/out-group randomly, and they did not merely capitalize on random generic anti-Semitism among the general population. They were working with an existing model, which Germans at all levels of society would have been already familiar with, in which the Jews were presented as the fundamental opposite of positive German values, and their removal was necessary for Germany to flourish.

That still doesn’t quite explain why they felt it necessary to murder them on an industrial scale, rather than just steal all their valuables and deport them to Madagascar (that was actually an alternative plan which the Nazis seriously considered for a while). But there was a bit more going on than just “we need a common enemy to rail against, and these guys will do nicely.”

[Latro]

@Slithy_Tove

It was race warfare, not class warfare.

I would say that both views circulated freely.
The ‘forced into banking’ meme is also still alive and well.

[spifflog]

Are the two mutually exclusive?

He was evil, and the Jews as a community were somewhat easily identifiable as a unique group and somewhat successful.

I think we find those who’s station in life (for want of a better term) looking for scapegoats all the time. This applied to Germans in the 20s and 30s and many Europeans at the turn of the 20th century.

And I think we find this in the Middle East today where unemployment is high, and prospects are poor for angry, bitter young men.

[Steken]

It’s… Complicated.

German anti-Semitism, generally, had many sources, many roots – religious, nativist, financial, etc. Hitler, politician that he was, exploited them all.

The Holocaust, specifically, was most likely sparked by… Well, that’s complicated too. In this interview, which I quoted in another thread just this morning, the German historian Hans Mommsen speaks of “cumulative radicalization of the anti-Jewish measures” through Germany’s resettlement plans for the occupied territories in the East, 1941-1942. Referencing the work of another German historian, Götz Aly, he writes that, amongst other things,

the program to resettle the Volk Germans who came from the Baltic states and from Volhynia, later on from Bessarabia, too, played a significant role. The resettlement program functioned as an indispensable impetus to intensify the deportation and ultimately the liquidation of the Jews living in the annexed parts of Poland and the Generalgouvernement.

This is key. The “leading perpetrators” - Eichmann, Globocnik - “originally spent about 80 percent of their work on resettlement issues and only 10 percent on the ‘Jewish Question’.” But the plans failed, the worst of the worst got their will, and

after the resettlement initiatives failed almost completely, the liquidation of the Jews became something like a compensatory task and the implementation of the Holocaust was finally all that was performed of the far more comprehensive program of ethnic cleansing and re-ordering of the east.

[Alessan]

Wait - I thought he hated the Jews because they were all communists. Now you’re saying that it’s because they were capitalists?

[filmstar-en]

Hitler regarded the Jews in Germany as political enemies, just he did German Socialists and Communists and passed laws through the 1930s steadily increasing the repression and imprisonment in labour camps.

Repression turned to annihilation in 1941 when Hitler attacked the Soviets conquering large swathes of territory. In order to suppress any organised uprisings, they began a campaign of extermination of all Jews and Communists in these occupied territories. Away from the Eastern front, the concentration camps were turned into death camps.

A religion like Judaism and a political ideology like Communism both had organised networks that could have posed a challenge to the Nazis in the occupied countries.

I guess the practical reason was the ruthless logic of total war: to completely eliminate an enemy, no matter that they were civilian.

[filmstar-en]

@Alessan

Wait - I thought he hated the Jews because they were all communists. Now you’re saying that it’s because they were capitalists?

Those in the west were regarded as part of an international conspiracy to undermine the German economy. Those in the east under the Soviets were regarded as communists. Both were regarded as enemies.

[BrainGlutton]

@IMfez

The anti-Semitic attitude in much of Europe had class undertones. People didn’t like the Jews, not because of religious differences but because they were wealthy and controlled so much.

From “Marrakech” (1939), by George Orwell:

When you go through the Jewish quarters you gather some idea of what the medieval ghettoes were probably like. Under their Moorish rulers the Jews were only allowed to own land in certain restricted areas, and after centuries of this kind of treatment they have ceased to bother about overcrowding. Many of the streets are a good deal less than six feet wide, the houses are completely windowless, and sore-eyed children cluster everywhere in unbelievable numbers, like clouds of flies. Down the centre of the street there is generally running a little river of urine.

In the bazaar huge families of Jews, all dressed in the long black robe and little black skull-cap, are working in dark fly-infested booths that look like caves. A carpenter sits cross-legged at a prehistoric lathe, turning chair-legs at lightning speed. He works the lathe with a bow in his right hand and guides the chisel with his left foot, and thanks to a lifetime of sitting in this position his left leg is warped out of shape. At his side his grandson, aged six, is already starting on the simpler parts of the job.

I was just passing the coppersmiths’ booths when somebody noticed that I was lighting a cigarette. Instantly, from the dark holes all round, there was a frenzied rush of Jews, many of them old grandfathers with flowing grey beards, all clamouring for a cigarette. Even a blind man somewhere at the back of one of the booths heard a rumour of cigarettes and came crawling out, groping in the air with his hand. In about a minute I had used up the whole packet. None of these people, I suppose, works less than twelve hours a day, and every one of them looks on a cigarette as a more or less impossible luxury.

As the Jews live in self-contained communities they follow the same trades as the Arabs, except for agriculture. Fruit-sellers, potters, silversmiths, blacksmiths, butchers, leather-workers, tailors, water-carriers, beggars, porters–whichever way you look you see nothing but Jews. As a matter of fact there are thirteen thousand of them, all living in the space of a few acres. A good job Hitler isn’t here. Perhaps he is on his way, however. You hear the usual dark rumours about the Jews, not only from the Arabs but from the poorer Europeans.

“Yes, MON VIEUX, they took my job away from me and gave it to a Jew. The Jews! They’re the real rulers of this country, you know. They’ve got all the money. They control the banks, finance–everything.”

“But,” I said, “isn’t it a fact that the average Jew is a labourer working for about a penny an hour?”

“Ah, that’s only for show! They’re all money-lenders really. They’re cunning, the Jews.”

In just the same way, a couple of hundred years ago, poor old women used to be burned for witchcraft when they could not even work enough magic to get themselves a square meal.

[RickJay]

Hitler’s worldview was based on unceasing and unending conflict on all levels. National conflict, racial conflict, ideological conflict, even personal conflict. To him, the human experience was one of more or less unceasing battle and so his job was to engage in war on all levels.

The Jews were - for, as reasons pointed out, a lot of reasons - one of his main enemies, at least in his mind, and so they had to be gotten rid of. Resettlement was a pipe dream, as it conflicted with the Hunger Plan. The idea that there was some compelling economic reason to slaughter them all is silly; there wasn’t a substantial state benefit to it, and it cost more than the benefits.

[tomndebb]

@IMfez

However recently I got to talk to a German guy who made a more practical case for Hitler’s actions, one that seems more sensible in reality anyways.

He told me that because the Jews were traditionally banned from work and forced into banking and finance, they grew quite wealthy as the world changed and those industries became exceptionally profitable.

The anti-Semitic attitude in much of Europe had class undertones. People didn’t like the Jews, not because of religious differences but because they were wealthy and controlled so much.

There are people who subscribe to the “Jews control the economy” belief, but there is no way that this explains the ongoing hatred of and persecution of Jews who have routinely been among the poorest of the people, with only a few merchants or bankers becoming wealthy.
Hatred of Jews is simply a specific expression of xenophobia–they are "other and so they are feared or hated.

EVERY other reason given for antisemitism is an after-the-fact attempt to put a “reason”, (read “excuse” or “rationalization”), to attempt to justify that hatred.

Sometimes it is put forth by the haters as an excuse for their hatred. Sometimes it is put forth by people hoping to excuse their “misguided” fellow citizens by putting forth a reason for their irrational hatred. However, all the “reasons” given–too wealthy, too poor/dirty/dishonest, various religious claims, whatever–have been ascribed to the hatred after it occurred. They did not actually cause the hatred. It gets a bit murkier in regard to the religious beliefs, but again, it was never a simple lack of belief that Jesus was God that caused the hatred; it was that being not-Christian they were clearly “other.”

@IMfez

Hitler capitalized on this public perception and also used it as a reason to capture significant Jewish assets needed to fund an expansionary war.

Jews, particularly in Germany, hardly held sufficient wealth to justify seizing their property as a “practical” reason to make them targets. (It would have been much simpler to do what Putin has done and simply invent crimes for specific wealthy people, confiscating their property while allowing the rest of the people to contribute to the economy through their taxes.) Beyond that, an awful lot of the confiscated property either was destroyed or was hoarded in private collections by Nazi leaders and never made it into the general coffers of the German government.

The story you were told was vaguely plausible, but it not supported by facts.

[Malthus]

Indeed.

There was no practical benefit to the Nazi war machine for exterminating the Jews (and other targets, like Roma, Slavs, homosexuals, etc.).

Looking at the matter, purely for the sake of argument, with the POV of a completely amoral realist, the “benefits” were far, far outweighed by the “drawbacks”.

There were really only two practical benefits:

(1) Stealing the victim’s possessions for Nazi use; and

(2) Making an example of terror to inspire fear and obedience in others.

Compare with the serious drawbacks, these are minor benefits:

(1) Loss of the working and earning potential of the victims (the Nazi use of death camp inmates as slave workers was an utter failure) - loss of millions of workers at a time when Germany was facing a serious manpower shortage made no sense;

(2) Use of scarce infrasturcture to ship millions of victims around to the camps - at a time when every railway car was needed for the war;

(3) Loss of their own scientists - Jews were heavily represented in German science and European science generally, the Nazis lost their services - in many cases, to their enemies (many who worked on the Manhattan Project were Jews driven out of Europe by the Nazis) - had the Nazis survived longer, they may well have been nuked by bombs made possible by Jewish scientists they themselves exiled - not to mention killing many who could have been made to contribute to the Nazi war effort; and

(4) Use of Nazi troops to supervise and enforce the terror.

In truth, the Nazis would clearly have been far better off without their extermination policies - but then, they would not have been “Nazis”.

[Steken]

@IMfez

Hitler capitalized on this public perception and also used it as a reason to capture significant Jewish assets needed to fund an expansionary war.

I have never heard the claim that the Nazi state seized Jewish funds to fund the war effort, but I have heard the claim that, once the war got started, it plundered the occupied territories at least in part to maintain a high standard of living for the average German civilian back home. Hitler didn’t want the average German housewife to “feel” the war; if she did, she might turn against it.

Götz Aly has spoken of a “state sponsored campaign of grand larceny,” which initially “kept the regime afloat and maintained the standard of living,” but eventually became “the driving force behind the regime.” Adam Tooze, a British scholar, has taken this idea even further. Somewhere or another - my notes on the matter are a bit messy - someone has summed up their differences like so:

Whereas Aly paints Nazi war and plunder as a work in progress, essentially snowballing, Tooze argues that plunder and conquest, though justified by ideology, were the driving forces behind Hitler’s plan for waging war and had been his intention since the seizure of power.

[Marley23]

I’m having trouble swallowing the words “practical reason.” Historical German anti-Semitism is complex and the Nazis exploited it in multiple ways for multiple reasons, but there was no practical reason they wanted to kill Jews (and other groups) beyond the fact that they thought those people needed to be killed. It was actually a very impractical policy that hindered their war effort by killing off people who (in theory) could have helped them, not to mention the cost of building and running the camps and rounding up victims, the soldiers who were stationed at the camps instead of participating in the war, and so on.

[ZPG_Zealot]

@Walton_Firm

I’d say Wagner also needs to be mentioned here. He is known mostly as a composer and opera author today, but he was actually considered one of Germany’s major intellectuals and philosophers in his time, and one of his main themes was “what does it mean to be German”. And in that context, he frequently brought up the Jews as the “anti-Germans”: he saw Jewish culture as the exact antithesis of what he believed German culture should be. He was an anti-Semite obviously, but a very erudite and unfortunately a very influential one.

In fact, in the infamous Nazi phrase “Endlosung der Judenfrage” (final solution to the Jewish problem) the term “Judenfrage” was a reference to Wagner’s writings, although Wagner probably did not have genocide in mind but only cultural assimilation.

Hitler and the Nazis were big fans of Wagner. So when they rose to power on a platform based on nationalism and us-versus-them politics, they didn’t just pick a scapegoat/out-group randomly, and they did not merely capitalize on random generic anti-Semitism among the general population. They were working with an existing model, which Germans at all levels of society would have been already familiar with, in which the Jews were presented as the fundamental opposite of positive German values, and their removal was necessary for Germany to flourish.

That still doesn’t quite explain why they felt it necessary to murder them on an industrial scale, rather than just steal all their valuables and deport them to Madagascar (that was actually an alternative plan which the Nazis seriously considered for a while). But there was a bit more going on than just “we need a common enemy to rail against, and these guys will do nicely.”

I think Martin Luther and his influence on German Protestantism should also be mentioned here. Luther was extremely anti-semitic. Martin Luther and antisemitism - Wikipedia