So one of our readers asked us this question the other day. How did Hitler get the idea that there was a massive Jewish conspiracy in the world? What kept Jews from “Blending In” during WWII? It seems to me that persecuting Jews was something the Nazis really believed in and that it was not entirely opportunistic scapegoating. Holocaust was supposed to remain a secret so it was not for propaganda, not to mention that killing off potential slaves is a terrible policy even for a completely amoral movement. Now, it is also obvious that a global Jewish conspiracy doesn’t in fact exist. What made Hitler and the others believe that it did exist?
ANSWER
There are a number of issues for Jews just “blending in”, which broadly speaking worked differently in Eastern and Western Europe.
In Western Europe, maltreatment of Jews was mostly incremental. The Nazis didn’t start mass murdering people right out of the gate (though it was clear that things were going to get bad for the Jews, and people did openly speak in the ’30s of the possibility of Jews being killed en masse, albeit not on the scale it actually occurred). First, citizenship was revoked, certain rights were rolled back, Jews were de-integrated from society, etc. Eventually you got things like the famous yellow stars. The penalties for pretending not to be Jewish were pretty steep, and being killed for being Jewish wasn’t an immediate threat. Additionally, records were used over time to make it difficult to hide Jewish lineage. While Jews “passing” would’ve been relatively easy in Germany, the environment pre-war made it an unlikely choice.
In Eastern Europe, the Germans essentially rolled in followed by killing squads and created ghettos in cities. However, there were a couple of issues. First, you did have some of the same effect as in Western Europe, where people feared the Germans finding them unregistered more than they feared what’d happen if they didn’t. Creating ghettos and killing everybody wasn’t announced.
In Kiev, for instance, Jews were told that they had to assemble with their possessions for resettlement a few days after the occupation began–anyone violating the order would be shot. But upon their arrival, they were all shot in a ravine at Babi Yar–only a few who managed to slip away survived. While some Jews might’ve feared what would happen, the prospect of being hunted down was present, and culturally speaking restrictions on Jewish residence in Europe wasn’t exactly a new phenomenon.
Additionally, in Eastern Europe much more than western, Jews weren’t very integrated. It’d be a dead giveaway if someone could only speak Yiddish (which would’ve happened in rural areas, though most people could probably converse in the local language) or couldn’t find non-Jews to vouch for them or couldn’t document a name that wasn’t Jewish.
In all these cases, the penalty for trying to “pass” was death, and the Nazis had whatever historical records were available to hunt down those who tried.
However, some people did. While it was difficult to do it, among the millions of Jews some were bound to try it, and some succeeded. I know a woman (this anecdote is illustrative, not a source) who survived the war as a girl in a Belgian orphanage. It was assured that there was no documentation tying her to being Jewish, and by all appearances she was just a young girl who was abandoned.
A better-known example is the French village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, which sheltered thousands of French Jews (and others escaping Nazi persecution). Note that France had an integrated Jewish community (so people could “pass”) and didn’t have the incremental persecution increases in Germany, so there was more incentive to try to avoid the Germans figuring out you were Jewish at all. It required a organized effort, and lots of forged documents–if you mysteriously had no record of birth in the local church, the Nazis wouldn’t just shrug and move on.
So in short, you’d have to decide way in advance to pass in Germany, and it’d be difficult to in Eastern Europe. In either case, the incentive to hide being Jewish wasn’t immediately apparent, but the risks of it were.
Now coming to your second part of the question, How did Hitler get the idea that there was a massive Jewish conspiracy in the world?
This is a huge question about which there have been virtually whole libraries full of books been written. In the following I’ll try to give a somewhat simplified and condensed run-down of the “Jewish Conspiracy” trope.
To completely understand this one, we actually need to start with modernity itself. The Enlightenment and the onslaught of modernity following its earlier thinkers but especially the French Revolution had a profound impact on the thinking of the 19th century. With God being out of the game as the factor upon which the course of history and the legitimacy of power could be rested, discursive pressure formed to find new explanations for why the world was the way it was, why the people in it were different from each other, and what gave political power and order its legitimacy.
To solve this conundrum, various people formulated different answers. One you might be familiar with was Marxism, in the sense that Marx posed that the underlying force of history was class conflict and the legitimacy of power ultimately derived from the ownership of the means of production (simplified version here). But another and for this question very pertinent answer was also found in Social Darwinism. Social Darwinism wants to apply the concepts of survival of the fittest and natural selection to society and politics. In the age of the rise of nationalism, which saw nations resp. the according races as the actors in the historical process (like Marx viewed classes), the theory of Social Darwinism was combined with the theory of races as the historical actors and created what in essence became the völkisch ideology.
Now where do the Jews fit into and what does this have to do with some sort of alleged conspiracy, you might be asking. Well, in the tradition of völkisch thought as formulated by thinkers such as Gobineau and Houston Steward Chamberlain races as the main historical actors were seen as acting through the nation, the latter being basically their tool or outlet to compete in Social Darwinist competition between them. The Jews thought of as a race had no nation – seen as their own race, which dates back to them being imperial subject and older stereotypes of them as “the other” – but were a “race” that acted internationally rather than nationally. In order to be able to compete within the racial conflict them having no nation were seen as acting in a conspiratorial manner. Chamberlain e.g. made them out to be the controlling parasites behind political action and order that was seen as anti-national such as the Catholic Church or the Habsburg Empire. The anti-Semitism that formed here in the later stages of the 19th century is in effect a ideology of conspiracy, alleging a Jewish conspiracy in order to weaken their racial competitors.
The clearest example of such a way of thinking can be found in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a political treatise produced by the Tsarist Secret Police at some point in 1904/05 that alleges to be the minutes of a meeting of the leaders of the Jewish world conspiracy where they discuss their plans to get rid of all the world’s nations and take over the world. Despite these protocols being debunked as a forgery really quick, they had a huge impact on many anti-Semitic and völkisch thinkers in Europe, not at least for some in the Habsburg empire such as Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels and others which were most likely read by the young Hitler.
The whole trope of the Jewish conspiracy as formulated by völkisch thought took on a whole new importance with the end of WWI, the Bolshevik revolution, and the subsequent attempts at revolution in Germany and elsewhere.
The defeat of the Central powers were seen by many of its soldiers and ardent supporters not as a military defeat but as a “stab in the back.” The way the war ended in Germany with revolts of soldiers and the deposition of the monarchy by Social Democrats was the foundation for this myth that in essence revolved around Germany not being defeated by the Entente but by the enemies within. The trope of the enemy within being Jews and leftists had been brewing for a long time (see the Jew count of the German army in 1916/17) but really came to the forefront with the defeat. What followed compounded this further. The violence of revolution and counter-revolution as well as the treaty of Versailles lead to many völkisch inclined thinkers and political actors believing that Germany’s defeat and the subsequent peace terms could only be explained by a concerted act of the Jewish conspiracy leading to internal enemies stabbing Germany in the back, threatening the very German way of life through Bolshevism and preparing the Jewish-Bolshevik takeover of Germany by making it defenseless through the Versailles treaty.
Democracy seen as faulty and antithetical to the German racial character and communism as an essential anti-national movement were both shunned by these völkisch ideologues and explained through a concerted effort by a conspiracy of the anti-national “race”, the Jews. This was the very core idea of völkisch thought and of Nazi Weltanschauung. In the end, for Hitler and many of his followers it was the only way to explain the state of the world because it hinged on this Social Darwinist, ultra-nationalist view of history being a history of races competing for power and supremacy.
Sources:
- Chrisoph Dieckmann: Jüdischer Bolschewismus 1917 bis 1921. In: Fritz Bauer Jahrbuch 2012.
- Johannes Rogalla: »Jüdischer Bolschewismus« Mythos und Realität, Dresden 2002.
- Robert Gerwarth: The Central European Counter-Revolutionary: Paramilitary Violence in Germany, Austria, and Hungary after the Great War.
- Andre Gerrits: Anti-Semitism and Anti-Communism in Eastern Europe.
- Peter Pulzer: The rise of political anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria.
Thanks for the info, but you can no longer teach the actual history of this. It was erased. Every version is simply an opinion, and most are just fan-fictions.
Judaism is not a race. lol. Never has been. To simply write down in a book that you are a chosen people or a race doesn’t supersede the fact that your origins are arabic/anatolian.
What I have learned from various renditions:
Most all media at the time in Germany was owned and operated by people who practiced Judaism. Changes in social atmosphere led to the removal of media providers that were viewed as obscene or disagreed with the new nazi germany. When power shifted, the nazi-controlled government sought control of many of the businesses that were ran by jewish citizens. The majority were jewish owned, thus the stigma and blind hate that thrived.
Nazi germany’s goal was to be a pure nation, and to be the best nation on earth. To accomplish this, every aspect that was not aligned to the goal was eliminated.
This escalated to the point where the entire demographic and all viewed as obscene were ordered to leave the nation or be exterminated. Much effort was put into easing this transition in germany. The government paid to have the unwanted people relocated in israel or elsewhere (non germans, gays, gypsies, criminals). Jews were even given guaranteed employment upon relocation. The majority of these unwanted people refused, thinking the shift in power would never lead to mass killings. They were wrong.
The actual history is no longer taught to young people, because everyone played dirty in the war. They are only told Germany was evil and killed 6 miliion people. Russia killed nearly 5 times as many during that time and no one cares. USA killed 5 times more of the native people on their continent, and we celebrate it. (US Gov’t paid for ‘dead injuns’ up until the early 1900s) What does this mean? When you publish the history books, you get to choose the heroes and villains.
tl:dr – Nazi-controlled Germany ordered certain races, religions, and lifestyles to leave Germany in order to purify their homeland. The German people chose this (not one man ordering it). The vast majority of people ordered to leave ignored the order and were killed or imprisoned. Then the ‘allied nations’ stole every piece of technology that the Germans had developed. The history was colorfully rewritten as a story of Judaism victimization. It was so thoroughly done, that even saying or comparing something to ‘Hitler’ is taboo and often a fallacy in argument. German was the second most common language spoken in the US prior to WW2.
He won’t be remembered for leading humans into the atomic age, nope. He was just an evil mad man that personally killed 30 million people. (A number that is still printed in textbooks.)
(Skip to present day) If you are a young adult, you can sit back and watch as your species wipes the ancient culture of Islam off the face of earth because of resources, war profits, and mass psychology conditioning. (leaders rely on their people to be united in fear against a single enemy – just like christianity preaching fear instead of love)
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Your as ignorant as the people your preaching against. I know the world isn’t black and white morality. World War 2 wasn’t a war like that is was a war of humanity vs. Inhumanity. You paint Adolf Hitler as a tragic hero…when in actuality he was a idiot.” He led us into the atomic age” is such a stupid belief. The atomic age was apart of the cold war-a 44 year conflict filled with fear,paranoia,and oppression and it could of been the last war on Earth had it went hot. You say Judaism victimization like its a bad thing. Thousands of innocent people were killed like dogs! These were children, mothers, fathers, world war 1 veterans, teachers, brilliant minds, future leaders and scientists, brothers, sisters, and doctors. The people gassed in the gas chambers could of future leaders who could of brought peace to the world, doctors who could of found cures for aids and cancer. Whole families were killed and even babies and children- who didn’t even understand why they were boarded up in trains and sent to a camp with scary looking skeleton people or why their german friends stopped playing with them.millions of Innocent people were killed for…for what? For the world can be divided up between two superpowers. Even the millions of Chinese who were killed by Japanese didn’t deserve to be killed like that. Sure the US might of killed natives and had racism and slavery but atleast we didn’t hoard them up into rooms and gassed them to death! As for the Soviets….they were equally bad, but they were on our side
And by the way, Christianity doesn’t preach hatred towards Islam. Neither does Islam preach hatred to Christianity and there are no “Cultures of Islam”. You say humanity and human species alot in your comment, yet I know for a fact that you have no love your species!
*You’re
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Had Hitler won World War II, what would be different in the post war world? Here are a few examples:
1 – No USSR (the Soviet government murdered millions of its own people during its 70 year reign – to study this topic read the writings of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn; Hitler would have liberated the USSR, though taking large parts of its Western region for lebensraum, “living space”)
2 – No cold war (because there would be no USSR)
3 – No Communist Eastern Europe/Iron Curtain (when WWII ended, Eastern Europe fell to Communism – this was part of Stalin’s spoils of war)
4 – No Red China and Mao’s subsequent killing of 40 – 60 million Chinese (the USSR created favorable conditions for Mao’s Communists which ultimately led to Mao’s victory over Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists in 1949, thus if no USSR, no Mao victory)
5 – No Communist North Vietnam (both the Soviet Union and Red China aided Ho Chi Minh)
6 – No Communist Cambodia and Pol Pot’s slaughter of 2 million Cambodians (Red China aided Pol Pot)
7 – No dividing Korea into North Korea & South Korea (the allies split Korea after WWII ended, with North Korea becoming Communist… another of Stalin’s spoils of war)
8 – No Communist Cuba (given the previous, what support would Castro have had in the 1950’s?)
9 – No Communism anywhere (Hitler was the world’s most fervent anti-Communist)
10 – Liberalism & multiculturalism wouldn’t dominate Western ethos (both are Jewish creations and both have always been heavily promoted/advanced by Jews; thus if no Jewish influence, then no liberalism and no multiculturalism… at least certainly nowhere near the degree we see today)
11 – No Cultural Marxism and no political correctness (these are social engineering “tools” which came out of the Jewish think tank known as the Frankfurt School)
12 – No third world immigration into Western nations (Jews wouldn’t be in power positions to craft and force through liberal immigration laws; Jews are responsible for each Western nation’s liberal immigration policy, as most were orchestrated by the World Jewish Congress)
13 – No depraved filth on TV, in movies, etc. (because Jews wouldn’t run Hollywood)
14 – No widespread pornography (Jewish lawyers and Jewish activists were the main challengers of anti-obscenity laws, under the guise of “Freedom of Speech”)
15 – There would still be prayer in public schools (Jewish lawyers were instrumental in banning prayer in public schools under the guise of so-called “separation of church and state,” something that appears nowhere in the U.S. Constitution)
16 – No man-hating radical feminist movement (Jews such as Betty Friedan, Sonia Pressman, and Gloria Steinem, among others, were the key drivers of radical feminism)
17 – No Israel and all the problems it has brought the USA and the immeasurable misery it has wrought on the Palestinians
18 – Jews would be living in Madagascar (perhaps) and would be carefully monitored (Madagascar was one place Hitler considered as a Jewish homeland)
What the jews did to Germany
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3l-ii-SKF8
“Judea Declares War on Germany! Jews of all the World Unite! Boycott of German Goods! Mass Demonstrations!” – These were all headlines in the Daily Express on March 24, 1933.
“The Israeli people around the world declare economic and financial war against Germany. Fourteen million Jews stand together as one man, to declare war against Germany. The Jewish wholesaler will forsake his firm, the banker his stock exchange, the merchant his commerce and the pauper his pitiful shed in order to join together in a holy war against Hitler’s people.” – Daily Express, March 24, 1933.
“Each of you, Jew and Gentile alike, who has not already enlisted in this sacred war should do so now and here. It is not sufficient that you should buy no goods made in Germany. You must refuse to deal with any merchant or shopkeeper who sells any German-made goods or who patronises German ships or shipping…. we will undermine the Hitler regime and bring the German people to their senses by destroying their export trade on which their very existence depends.” – Samuel Undermeyer, in a Radio Broadcast on WABC, New York, August 6, 1933. Reported in the New York Times, August 7, 1933.