What policies did Hitler publicly advocate for with regard to Jews, both before and after obtaining political power?
What glimpses, if any, of a genocidal impulse would Jews in the Weimar Republic have been able to detect from Hitler?
Kill them.
Is that a direct quote?
In the first party manifesto the Nazis said that Jews could not be citizens of Germany. It also advocated for deportation of non-citizens. Before the war nazis advocated rounding up Jews and deporting them to Africa or South America.
It’s not hard to find quotes
Or this little gem from Mein Kampf(1925)
Ok, I’m convinced. Hitler was very anti-semitic. :eek:
Moderator Note
Leo Bloom, this is in no way a useful GQ answer to the question posed in the OP, especially as the first response. No warning issued but restrain yourself from facile answers in the future.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
I haven’t read it, but I understand he was pretty explicit in Mein Kampf. It’s not like he or the party hid their agenda. But then, times were different before WWII and the Civil Rights movement showed why racial discrimination was a “bad thing”.
Mein Kamp was explicitly anti-semitic (he had an Austrian background), but I don’t remember anything much in the way of explicit policy. Certainly the ‘final solution’ wasn’t canvased (nor even the interm solution).
The natural understanding of his anti-semitism was that he was advocating something along the lines of the “14 points” and the post WWI Treaty of Versailles: separation along ethnic lines, but with Jews treated as a separate ethnic group. (Perhaps as happened to Germans in the Sudetenland?)
I don’t know to what extent this natural and widespread understanding was reflected in his explicit public policy: I’ve read Mein Kampf a long time ago (in translation, not very well written), but not his speeches (which I understand were very good after somebody else started writing them).
I am currently reading Eric Larson’s “In the Garden of Beasts”, which is a historical recounting of the american ambassador to Germany prior to WWII. I believe the book was put together from 1) diaries of the ambassador and his family members, 2) historical research.
So far, there are descriptions of pretty flagrant discrimination of jews: can’t hold certain jobs, can’t do this, can’t do that. There is mention of “camps” more like “get them out of the populace”, but not outright genocide. Kind of like those “political realignment” type detentions. If anything, the sentiment seems more like “get out of Germany” than “we’re going to exterminate the entire ‘race’”.
It’s a pretty fascinating, as well as disturbing depiction of the era. I would highly recommend the book if you’re interested in this period.
I just finished reading Hitler and I by Otto Strasser. In it, he has a whole chapter devoted to the book’s origins, etc.
Anyway, he mentions a 1927 dinner with a bunch of party big shots including Goering and Goebbels. He was wowing them with quotes from the book. Turns out that none of the others had read it.
The original draft by Hitler, taken down by Hess, was a complete mess. A minister rewrote and rewrote it but it’s still unreadable. During the night of the long knives this minister had to be killed, like the old memory hole concept (along with Otto’s brother).
Throughout Hitler’s political career he repeatedly said the most awful and vile things about Jewish people. Even in his final testament he couldn’t let it go. As to what he was going to do about “the Jewish question” in public he was vague. There will be no more Jews in German. Europe will be rid of them. He knew that explicitly talking about starvation, gas chambers, etc. would hurt him. But anything short of explicitly describing the “how” was fair game.
This is a very strange quote:
Hitler had no choice but to invade Poland! The Jews made him do it! :dubious:
I gather what he meant was that he expected to be able to take back the previously German areas of Poland (i.e. those areas Stalin did not take) with no more hassle than when he helped himself to Sudetenland and attached Czech areas. He was shocked, nay, SHOCKED! when England and France decided the invasion meant war. That obviously proved that they were the ones who wanted war to serve their nefarious puppet masters.
Well, yes. The pretext used by the Nazis for invading Poland was that Poland attacked them first. (Almost nobody believes this nowadays, since there is evidence that the “Polish” attack was a false flag operation by Germany. But this was not widely known by most Germans at the time, or if it was, it was risky to admit it.)
While Mein Kampf was widely distributed, as said, it was very difficult to read, so not many People figured out Hitler’s policies from it.
The second Problem seems to be that Hitler himself, along with the rest of Nazi leadership, wasn’t sure from the start what policy exactly he wanted. Just as the zionists themselves, starting in the 1890s, were unsure whether to return to Israel; establish (by buying up) their own seperate state somewhere else (Africa or Australia or similar) or Assimilate completly into European countries, so Hitler and the Nazis agreed on Jews being the root of all bad things, but unsure what the proper solution was: put them in camps? make them non-citizens and Exile them from Germany? Kill them as final solution?
If looking not just at public speeches, but at the edicts by Hitler’s government, at first, he wanted to Strip Jews of political and financial powers, so laws banning Jews from certain professions, and “nationalizing” companies + factories were passed, but Jews could leave Nazi Germany (if they had a visa for elsewhere).
As the years went on, however, Hitler became paranoid that letting Jews leave and live elsewhere meant that they still could cause harm, e.g. Jews in USA influencing politics towards Nazi Germany. One example is the Reichskristallnacht: while orchestrated and aided by the state, the official reason given was the assassination attempt on a German Diplomat by a Jew in France.
So the official policy went from “take their Money and kick them out, then we are rid of their influence” to “as Long as they are alive anywhere on the globe, they will plot against us, so we must kill them all” partly because of how People (Jews and non-Jew foreigners) reacted to this policy.
(Based on a thick book - title escapes me right now - where a historian did collect and examine hundreds of official declarations and correlated them with Events, to Show the back-and-forth of Hitler and other high-ranking Nazis on this very issue).
And to Point out: even at the Wannsee conference Wannsee Conference - Wikipedia in 1942, where the Final Solution = killing them all was agreed upon, the Nazis present agreed that this could not be spoken of publically, and went so far as using coded language during the talks, making sure that the protocol was not clearly outright advocating murder.
So even after years of Propaganda, they viewed the General german public as disagreeing with blandly stated killing of Jews.
That most camps, especially the Vernichtungslager (killing camps, as different from the Work camps, where People could even return in the beginning) List of Nazi concentration camps - Wikipedia were in the East - not only because there were more Jews (stereotypical Eastern Orthodox Jews) there; not only because the Population was more anti-semitic than in the liberal cities of main Germany; but also because they were far removed from the average German citizen. Any rumors about what happened out in the East could be dismissed, because look, in Dachau People went for 3 years and came back, and they were real criminal murderers there, too, so how bad could it be?
Disguising the gas as shower baths in the camps might have been to stop riots from Happening, or might have been to make things easier for the camp guards: that’s why the Nazis experimented with methods of mass killings other than Shooting, they found out that too many officers were negativly affected by Shooting hundreds of unarmed civilians at length.
Although Hitler never publicly announced that he was exterminating the Jews, many Germans claim that the public at large knew what was really happening. The task was enormous and required the efforts of a lot of people.
I’ve heard the other claim: it was very easy to not know definitely if one didn’t want to know.
Yes, a lot of people were involved - in making lists of jewish citizens, passing laws, driving trains to bring Jews into Ghettos (which had existed for centuries before), driving trains from ghettos to camps - nowhere did it say “all this will end up with killing these people”.
If you read the (controversial) eye-witness account of Gerstein Kurt Gerstein - Wikipedia about how he tried to inform the Vatican and other countries about the genocide against the Jews, and wasn’t believed;
if you read the autobiographies of Jews leaving Nazi Germany and going on odyssees because other countries didn’t want to take them in, not believing the stories of killings (and harbouring enough anti-semitism themselves that “hordes” of Jews were unwelcome)…
if you take into account that all media under the Nazis was state-controlled, listening to BBC was a crime punishable by prison for listening to enemy propaganda - and how would the average citizen know that BBC was telling the truth and not simply propaganda of their own (especially given how much of WWI propaganda by the Brits against Germany was indeed lies?) - then any rumours the average citizen heard about what really happened far away in the East to the Jews could be brushed off as distorted rumours, not truth.
I’ve read the autobiography of Gersdorff, who was part of the Kreisauer circle of resistance Rudolf-Christoph von Gersdorff - Wikipedia and he describes that he saw the true horrors of what the SS special commandos did only when he was transferred to the Eastern front, where mass shootings did happen. When he had a few days off and saw his wife in Berlin, she told him of how the Jews had been transported away from Berlin, that there had been rumours, but nobody knew anything for sure. That, together with what he had seen of both military incompetence by Hitler, and war crimes against civilians, in the Eastern Front, convinced him to break his oath and try assassination.
For comparision, how many US citizens knew/ believed/ cared about illegal imprisonment and torture of “foreign muslims” in Abu Ghraib and Guatanamo? And that’s in a age with internet and newspapers having access, unlike that time period.
SFAIK the BBC did not broadcast claims that the Germans were rounding up the entire Jewish population for the purpose of systematically murdering them. Claims about this had reached the British authorities, but they were mostly regarded as dubious, propagandistic or simply incredible.