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On January 27, 1945, a unit of Soviet soldiers approached the Auschwitz concentration camp. They drove through the main gate, where the words Arbeit Macht Frei were welded onto the wrought iron arch. Shortly after entering, they witnessed the remnants of what had been the world’s largest extermination camp. Only a few thousand prisoners remained in the camp. To eliminate witnesses, the SS officers had forced the majority of the prisoners on an exhausting march back toward the German Reich.
The Gas Chambers
Three kilometers from the main camp, the soldiers discovered another, even larger camp: Birkenau. The sight must have been horrifying for the Soviet soldiers. In perfectly straight rows, stretched across a vast area, stood barrack after barrack made of wood. Just days before, these barracks had been packed to capacity with Jewish prisoners. Between the barracks ran a railway track ending at a kilometer-long ramp. It was on this ramp that Jews from across Europe were herded off cattle cars and pushed in front of Dr. Mengele, who, with a simple hand gesture, decided their fate. A motion to the left meant survival, for a time, in the wooden barracks; a motion to the right meant death in the gas chambers.
The soldiers found the remains of these gas chambers, which the SS had blown up to destroy evidence. They found crematorium ovens with bone fragments mixed into the ash, and piles of emaciated, naked corpses heaped in enormous stacks, so large that bulldozers had to be used to bury them. They uncovered warehouses filled with the shorn hair of Jewish women, teeth with gold fillings that had been ripped from the mouths of corpses, and clothing from countless murdered Jews. Between 1,000,000 and 1,500,000 Jews perished in Auschwitz-Birkenau, which was just one part of an extensive network of extermination camps spread across Poland, where up to 6 million Jews were murdered. What was revealed in these camps was what the Nazis themselves called die Endlösung—the Final Solution to the Jewish question.
The Jew: Hitler’s Weapon
At the infamous Wannsee Conference in January 1942, where the operation Endlösung (the Final Solution) was formally coordinated, the number of Jews in Europe was estimated at approximately 11 million. By the time Germany lost the war, the Nazis had succeeded in murdering only 60–70% of Europe’s Jewish population.
From the perspective of a Nazi antisemite, the Jewish problem had not yet been fully resolved. This is evident in Hitler’s last will and testament. In the Führerbunker in Berlin, 24 hours before he and Eva Braun were to commit suicide, Hitler wrote that his successors should continue the relentless struggle against what he described as the poison of all nations: international Jewry. Above him, Berlin shook with the impact of artillery shells, and the Third Reich was not only brought to its knees but was in its final death throes. Yet, what preoccupied the dictator most was this: that the war against the Jews should continue and be won. A war, which, according to him, had not been won despite the murder of 6 million Jews. The Final Solution, he believed, was far from complete.
The Roots of Hatred
What could inspire such intense hatred toward a single group of people? What drives a regime to commit murder solely based on an individual’s belonging to an unwanted minority?
This was by no means the first time in history that Jews were persecuted. Since the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, which marked the beginning of the Jewish diaspora, Jews have been subject to oppression in ways few other groups have experienced. However, aiming for the total annihilation of all Jews was an attack so radical that the Holocaust cannot merely be compared to earlier instances of Jewish persecution.
It may seem impossible to explain what could lead to such genocide, but by looking back in time—before the rise of the Nazi movement, to when concepts like antisemitism and the “Jewish question” first emerged—we can gain insight into the factors that contributed to this tragedy. It was during this period that the prejudices and many of the accusations later used in Nazi antisemitism took shape. These biases and accusations are crucial to understand, especially when examining antisemitic propaganda in Nazi films.
Germany: A Beacon of Hope for Jews
Today, it may seem absurd that, at the turn of the last century, Europe’s Jews looked to Germany as a land of freedom, where they could live protected by laws and far removed from pogroms. Yet, around 1900, Germany was indeed the country where Jews appeared to have the best opportunities. A quick look across Europe at the time reveals that Jewish citizens enjoyed more rights and opportunities in Germany than almost anywhere else. No other nation offered as favorable a chance for Jews to integrate into society and achieve equal status as citizens.
Compared to many other European countries, Germany stood out as a beacon of hope for Jews living under the darkness of racism and pogroms. A particularly high-profile case in France—the infamous Dreyfus Affair—had cast an unflattering light on attitudes toward Jews in that country. The case involved a Jewish officer who had been unjustly punished for a minor offense in the military solely because of his religion. The French public was bitterly divided, and the ensuing debate revealed deep-seated antisemitism among many French citizens.
Conditions were far worse in Eastern Europe, where most Jews lived. In Tsarist Russia, a policy of forced “Russification” displaced countless Jews, driving them from their homes and forcing them to settle in barren territories. When it was discovered that a Jew had been involved in the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, a series of state-sanctioned pogroms was launched against Russian Jews. A year later, harsh laws were enacted against them. These laws barred most Jewish children from attending Russian schools and prevented their parents from accessing skilled jobs.
Protocols of the Elders of Zion
Presumably, in an attempt to justify the treatment of Jews, the Okhrana, the Tsar’s secret police, fabricated a forgery called The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. These protocols were presented as a secret plan outlining how the Jews intended to achieve world domination, supposedly devised by a council calling itself “The Elders of Zion,” a kind of Zionist combat organization. In these protocols, the so-called Elders of Zion described their strategy to undermine existing societies by employing various subversive methods such as alcoholism, liberalism, Nietzscheanism, anarchism, communism, utopianism, materialism, and even Darwinism. The Jews were accused of planning world wars and undermining the global economy, with one of their most terrifying weapons alleged to be pornography.
With these fabricated protocols, the Okhrana intensified their attacks, culminating in the violent Kishinev pogrom of 1903, where the Tsar’s police rampaged through the streets, killing every Jew they could find.
Antisemitism in Poland
Poland also faced significant antisemitism. The country was home to over three million Jews, most of whom belonged to the so-called Hasidic movement. These Jews were reluctant to assimilate into broader society and preferred traditional attire, including the kaftan, distinctive beards, and long sidelocks (peyes). This visible difference in appearance and customs contributed to strong antisemitic sentiments among large sections of the Polish population, who frequently attacked the Jewish communities.
These so-called Ostjuden (Eastern Jews) later became the focus of Nazi propaganda, which contrasted their foreign and traditional image with the assimilated, less conspicuous German Jews.
Bismarck’s Softened Stance
Compared to Eastern Europe, the situation in Germany appeared more promising. During Otto von Bismarck’s tenure, Jews were not excluded from public life as they were in the East. On the contrary, German society opened up, allowing Jews to participate at nearly all levels. However, this was not due to any newfound humanitarianism in the “Iron Chancellor” but was instead a political maneuver.
Bismarck, who played a pivotal role in unifying Germany, needed support from liberal factions in the Reichstag. These liberals demanded political and civil rights, including religious freedom, in exchange for their support. Among the liberal leaders advocating for minority rights were prominent Jewish figures such as Ludwig Bamberger and Eduard Lasker.
Modernization and Emancipation
Bismarck’s Germany became a society where traditional values were challenged. The rise of a modern, industrialized society displaced the altmodische (old-fashioned) world of the past. Urbanization surged, new social systems emerged, and Jewish emancipation followed. A new capitalist and liberal economy created opportunities for Jews to access positions previously closed to them.
Many young Jews seized these opportunities, moving into prestigious professions such as medicine, industry, law, scientific research, and culture. German Jews excelled in fields like philosophy, music, journalism, theater, and literature.
While these advancements improved the lives of German Jews, their visibility in modern roles also made them targets of suspicion. Many non-Jewish Germans began to associate the unsettling, liberal aspects of modern society with Jews, fueling a nascent antisemitism.
Zionism and German Jews
Despite periodic antisemitism, German Jews generally felt secure and integrated into society. This sense of belonging meant they showed little interest in Zionist movements advocating for a Jewish state. In contrast, the bloody pogroms in Eastern Europe spurred the rise of Zionism, led by figures like Theodor Herzl, who sought to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine or British East Africa.
German Jews, however, felt no need for a separate state, believing Germany to be their homeland. A Jewish member of the Prussian parliament even remarked, “Finally, after years of waiting in vain, we have arrived in a safe harbor.”
For many Eastern European Jews, however, Germany (and Austria) represented hope—a refuge from persecution and an opportunity for education and work. By 1900, thousands of Eastern European Jews sought refuge in Germany, some hoping to gain citizenship, while others used it as a transit point en route to America.
The Rise of Antisemitism
Although Germany, in many ways, resembled a promised land “flowing with milk and honey” for a persecuted people, there were signs that the “Jewish problem” was simmering beneath the surface. Bismarck’s push for industrialization and modernization caused a profound restructuring of German society, with harsh consequences for many.
Industrialization and mass production deeply affected the lower middle classes. Small traders and craftsmen, who had sustained themselves until then, faced overwhelming competition. They could not match the economic strength of factory owners or chain stores offering discounted goods. Many felt their economic and social status directly threatened by the modern society that was unfolding.
For individual merchants or craftsmen, the rapid advance of modernity must have seemed overwhelming, frightening, and incomprehensible. Businesses, often inherited through generations, suddenly faltered. The steady decline fostered hostility toward the creeping influence of modernity. This insecurity led to harsh critiques of the new Germany, with many seeking scapegoats. Protests often turned reactionary—against factories, new ideas, and anything modern. Thus emerged a litany of “anti-isms”: anti-industrialism, anti-capitalism, anti-liberalism—opposing everything new.
The Small Bourgeoisie’s Anger
This anger also targeted specific social groups deemed responsible for their plight. Who stood out more visibly as culprits than the Jews? The lower middle class associated Jewish progress with their own decline in the modern, industrialized society. Accusations surfaced: Jews exploited their newfound rights to undermine Germans. Some claimed Jews actively conspired to monopolize opportunities, forcing non-Jews into unemployment.
Jews came to symbolize all things modern, which the middle classes despised. Many yearned for a conservative revolution—a return to a “pre-Jewish” era when life was simpler and untainted by modernity and its supposed agents: the Jews.
When Germany felt the effects of the international economic depression of 1873, antisemites seized on this as proof that Jews were sabotaging the nation’s economy. As before and since, Jews became scapegoats.
From 1873 onwards, Germany saw a rightward political shift. Bismarck, no longer reliant on liberal/Jewish allies in the Reichstag, adopted a more conservative, Prussian agenda. His supporters launched sharp attacks on Jews and liberals alike. Bismarck, who once collaborated with Jewish socialist Ferdinand Lassalle, now denied ever having sought such alliances.
Meanwhile, representatives of the lower middle class, ravaged by economic crises, published inflammatory tracts against Jews. These writings significantly influenced the ideological foundation for Nazi antisemitism, reflected in films such as Jud Süss and Der ewige Jude.
Jews as a “Race”
In 1873, the failed journalist Wilhelm Marr coined the term “antisemitism” (blaming a Jew for his professional downfall). In his pamphlet The Way to Victory of Germanism over Judaism, Marr was the first to define Jews as a race. He claimed Jews had waged a racial war against Germans since time immemorial. With the liberal reforms of modern society, Jews supposedly dictated political and economic order, heralding the defeat of German society. This racial war, Marr asserted, was a life-or-death struggle: one race must perish for the other to prevail.
By framing Jews as a race, Marr enabled future antisemites to argue that Jewish identity was innate and immutable—encoded in blood rather than beliefs or culture. This shift made Jews appear uniquely threatening. Historically, Jews had been targeted based on religion and culture, but conversion could provide an escape from persecution. Marr’s redefinition precluded such an escape.
Marr’s ideas also opposed intermarriage, describing it as racial contamination threatening German purity. His conflation of Jewish identity with race inspired the Nazis, who adopted the idea of an existential racial conflict between Jews and Aryans.
Blood as the Marker of Race
Philosopher and economist Eugen Dühring expanded Marr’s ideas, arguing that blood differentiated races. He claimed Jews, as a parasitic counter-race, were inherently evil and unassimilable. Dühring’s assertion that racial purity must be preserved laid the groundwork for Nazi racial laws, such as the Nuremberg Laws, which criminalized relationships between Aryans and Jews to protect “German blood.”
These theories deeply influenced Nazi ideology, solidifying the belief in biologically distinct races locked in a mortal struggle.
The Nordic Peoples über alles
English-born Houston Stewart Chamberlain further shaped Nazi antisemitism. In 1899, Chamberlain published a history book positing an eternal racial war. He categorized Europeans as Aryans and elevated Germans and Nordics above all others. Aryans, he argued, were the natural “super-race” destined to vanquish “subhuman” Semites, particularly Jews.
Chamberlain’s ideas reinforced Nazi propaganda, portraying Jews as parasitic and alien while glorifying German racial superiority. His pseudo-historical framework became a cornerstone of Nazi racial ideology.
In fact, Chamberlain believed there were historical examples of how this war had always been fought. The Germanic tribes had once destroyed the Roman Empire, which had been infiltrated by the Jews, thereby freeing the Western world from the Jewish race. He believed that the Germans represented the (cultural) creative principle, while the Jews represented the destructive principle. Many of Chamberlain’s observations regarding the development of the Jewish race can be found in Hitler’s book Mein Kampf. Hitler referred to Chamberlain as the prophet of the Third Reich.
Some authors tried to give racism an appearance of genuine scientific credibility by introducing Darwinism into the picture. Just as only the strongest survive in nature, so it must also be between the races, the racists argued. This social Darwinism gained crucial significance in the Third Reich, not only in relation to the Jews, but also with respect to the inferior Aryans—i.e., the handicapped and mentally disabled.
The attacks from the German anti-Semites leading up to the First World War probably gained some followers among dissatisfied small traders, farmers, and craftsmen, but still, there was nothing to suggest that the situation for the Jews seemed to worsen. In certain professions, they still struggled to gain access, such as in the military and as professors at universities, but on the whole, the future had never seemed brighter for Jews in Germany than it did at the beginning of this century.
The Situation of the Jews After World War I
In the years following the defeat in the war, the Jews in Germany believed that the good times would continue. However, one factor that slowly began to make their hopeful expectations a shame was Hitler and the gradual rise of the Nazi party, from its first, embryonic formation in 1919 to its assumption of power in 1933.
In 1918, the imperial government had been overthrown, and an attempt was made to introduce parliamentarianism in the so-called Weimar Republic. In the constitution of the Reich, it was now made law that any position was open to German citizens regardless of religious or ethnic background. This opened the door for even more Jews to find employment in the rapidly growing commercial sector as lawyers. There were also major advances in science and education, which allowed more Jews to find work as researchers, teachers, and journalists. Even in public administration, more Jews were employed.
One thing, however, that is important to bear in mind is that one can in no way speak of Jews dominating any field of work, as the Nazis would later claim in their propaganda. They had simply become more visible as an alien group in these new prestigious areas of work. Only in very few cases did they hold more positions than would be representative of a social group that made up less than 1% of the German population. Similarly, economically successful Jews were also more visible than the rest of the economic elite.
Although it was only a marginal portion of the total Jewish minority in Germany who held influential positions, many of the farmers and small-town citizens, who themselves were threatened by the development of modern society, saw the Jews as representatives of capitalism and liberalism. The fact that a third of all Jewish taxpayers in 1933 earned less than 2400 marks a year, and that a quarter of the Jews in Berlin actually lived on public assistance, was completely ignored in this subjective view. When the Nazi movement began to sprout in the years following World War I, it, like their anti-Semitic predecessors, played on the fact that the Jews were seen as representatives of these modern ideas that contradicted all traditional German virtues.
The Antisemite Hitler and the Role of the Jew in Nazi Ideology
To understand Nazi antisemitism, it is necessary to closely examine the individual who, more than anyone else, influenced both the antisemitic propaganda of the Third Reich and the fate of the Jews: Adolf Hitler. It is particularly interesting for the analysis of the two antisemitic films that we look at in later chapters, as nearly all of the antisemitic ideas that he primarily expressed in Mein Kampf are almost exactly reflected in the films Jud Süss and Der ewige Jude.
Austria had, in many ways, undergone a similar development to Germany. The Habsburg emperor, Franz Joseph, was known for his Jewish sympathies and sought to create a Jewish-friendly climate. A significant number of Jews came to the country from the east and settled—primarily in Vienna. Franz Joseph attempted, among other things, to prevent the anti-Semite Karl Lueger from becoming mayor of Vienna, even though he had won the position democratically, partly because the emperor wanted to protect the Jews. But despite the emperor’s will to protect the Jews, antisemitism was indeed more prevalent in Austria than in Germany at this time, particularly in Vienna, where the young Hitler would soon make his entrance.
Adolf Hitler’s Childhood
Adolf Hitler was born in the German-Austrian border town of Braunau-am-Inn on April 20, 1889. He was born into a politically turbulent time, where the established order was under threat, and powerful popular forces were stirring. There was dissatisfaction with the Austro-Hungarian imperial rule, and movements were forming that wanted to overthrow the Habsburgs. Among them were the so-called pan-German movements. For many years, they had watched from a distance as “The Iron Chancellor” Bismarck had unified the fragmented Germany into a strong nation according to Prussian, militaristic principles. The pan-Germans believed Austria naturally belonged as part of a Grossdeutschland and should be quickly united with Germany. In their extremely nationalist worldview, they saw the multinational Habsburg state as a threat to Germanness, overwhelmed as it was by Slavs, Romanians, Hungarians, Croats, and Jews. Hitler’s father, Alois Hitler, sympathized with the German-national movement, the Pan-German Party, led by the rabid racist and ultra-nationalist Georg Ritter von Schönerer, and this likely shaped his son’s views. Later, during his school years at the Linz Real School, Adolf Hitler must also have encountered sectarian racism among teachers and students. In Linz itself, there were only a few Jews, and these were entirely assimilated, so the racism was primarily directed against Slavs. Hitler thus early on developed a deep hatred of the Habsburgs because he believed they had betrayed the German citizens and kept the borders open to immigration from the East. By the time of his first trip to Vienna, he was a pan-German, speaking with contempt about the Habsburg Empire and calling it a “living corpse.” After his father’s death, Hitler traveled to Vienna in 1907 to apply to the city’s Academy of Fine Arts. He was rejected. Instead of returning to Linz, Hitler stayed in Vienna, where he led a fairly miserable existence with odd jobs and often had to stay in men’s hostels.
It was in Vienna that Hitler had his first encounter with Jews, and where antisemitism began to seriously influence his thinking.
In a kiosk not far from where the young Hitler lived in 1908, he bought for the first time an obscure magazine called Ostara. Ostara propagated a strongly racist and antisemitic worldview. Hitler apparently became absorbed by the magazine’s rabid messages and began to buy Ostara regularly. He even sought out the publisher of the magazine, Lanz von Liebenfels, to obtain earlier copies. In the Ostara magazines, he found nearly all the ideas about blue-eyed, Nordic superhumans and the inferior races that would later appear in Mein Kampf and thereby in Nazi ideology and propaganda.
Godlike humans
Liebenfels was a former monk who claimed to have found a Templar knight’s gravestone in 1894, and this experience had led him to ideas about the blonde Aryan ideal. In his book Theozoologie (1904), he argued that the sick in society and the lower races should be castrated and referred to Aryan people as Gudemenschen (God-men). He tried to find justification for his theories in the Bible, claiming that Eve once had sex with a demon—thus creating the lower races. Today, the blood of the Aryan-Christian Gudemenschen was threatened by the lower races because they continually sought to impregnate Aryan women, thereby undermining Aryan heritage in the long run. Based on his thorough studies, Liebenfels gradually concluded that the only way to save the Aryan race was by sterilizing the lower races, subjugating them as slaves, and instituting state-controlled racial hygiene to ensure the regeneration of “Teutonic blood.” Among the sources, besides Liebenfels’ writings in Ostara, that inspired the young Hitler to adopt his pro-Aryan and anti-Jewish views were Marr and the racial theorist Arthur de Gobineau, who had been among the first to present race-mixing as the direct path to the destruction of the Aryan race.
Hitler himself claimed that he did not believe all these assertions at first. In the description of his time in Vienna in Mein Kampf, Hitler mentions that when he first read the antisemitic pamphlets, he dismissed the claims in the magazines as exaggerations. But gradually, he claimed, they opened his eyes to the fact that Jews were behind everything he hated most in the world. Whether it was modern art, liberalism, or pornography, it always had one common denominator: it was all created by Jews.
From that moment on, Hitler transformed into a fanatic antisemite. In any case, it is quite certain that the future dictator’s attitude toward the Jews took a definitive form at this early point in his life, one he never strayed from—it was a constant throughout his life, right up to his final testament, with the call to complete the “Final Solution.”
Hitler’s “Realization”
Hitler, with his newfound realization, came to view Vienna as a veritable “Babylon.” He recalled these years as a failed artist in the lower social circles of Vienna as his “early years of poverty, with disappointed hopes, a life of deprivation and humiliation,” where it sickened him to witness this:
“A conglomerate of races that the capital showed me, with its repulsive mixture of Czechs, Poles, Hungarians, Serbs, and Croats, and everywhere, humanity’s eternal bacteria – Jews and more Jews.”
In the early years of the century, Jews made up 8.6% of Vienna’s population, and they actually held a range of key positions in industry, trade, newspapers, and the arts. However, most of these Jews were just as German as Hitler himself, with some even being involved in pan-Germanic movements many years before Hitler was born. But there was also a significant portion of Viennese Jews who spoke and behaved like the so-called shtetl Jews. These were very orthodox Jews who lived in the same way as they did in Hungarian villages, wearing kaftans, speaking Yiddish, and distinguishing themselves sharply from the rest of the population in appearance and demeanor. In Mein Kampf, Hitler described his first encounter with a shtetl Jew:
“One day, while I was wandering through the inner city, I suddenly encountered a strange figure in a long kaftan with black locks. Is this also a Jew? was my first thought (…) I furtively observed the man, but the longer I stared into this foreign face and examined each feature, the more the question in my mind changed to another form: is this also a German?”
Hitler was repulsed by the outward appearance of these people and concluded that they bore no resemblance to ordinary Germans. On his frequent walks through the Jewish ghetto neighborhood, Leopoldstadt, he also saw things that must have shocked the already quite puritanical Hitler—not least the prostitution that flourished in the ghetto. Wild rumors also circulated at the time about the white slave trade involving German girls—a business, of course, in which Jews were said to be heavily involved. It is characteristic of Hitler’s anti-Semitism that, in his attempt to demonize Jews, he linked them to sexuality and promiscuity. Several years later, he would conjure an image of the Jew in Mein Kampf as a sex-crazed demon who only sought to destroy the Aryan race by corrupting it with his own offspring:
“The dark-haired Jewish boy lurks for hours, with satanic joy painted on his face, watching the unsuspecting young girl, whom he defiles with his blood, thereby robbing her people. With all means, he tries to destroy the racial foundation of the people he wants to subjugate.”
In Hitler’s world, the male Jew had a magnetic sexuality, which he used to seduce Aryan women—a theme we will explore further in the analysis of Jud Süss.
Hitler Makes the “Jew” a Scapegoat
Hitler believed that all this impurity and obvious lack of morality were expressions of the true nature of Jews. He thus succeeded in channeling a host of social problems onto a group of scapegoats. These social evils, ranging from prostitution and white slave trade to syphilis and racial degeneration, were, according to Hitler, no longer the burden of the Aryans but could solely be blamed on the Jews:
“Was there any form of filth or shamelessness (…) in which at least one Jew was involved? When one merely gently cut into such a boil, one would find—a small Jew, often blinded by the sudden light.”
And these little Jews, Hitler now believed, could be uncovered in everything he disapproved of. He didn’t like the liberal bourgeoisie and the capitalist forces in Vienna and found that a number of Jews were among the liberals and capitalists. He didn’t like intellectuals either and soon discovered a number of professors with Jewish names. Something similar occurred with the Austrian social democracy. Hitler hated social democracy because it supported democracy, Marxism, and class struggle, and opposed values he could identify with, such as nationalism. He also disliked the party’s internationalist stance. If there were to be a solidarity-based community, it had to be a national Volksgemeinschaft, where there was no class struggle, but rather racial struggle. He refused to join any trade union—not least because they always preached class struggle—and raged against the Marxism expressed in the social democratic meetings. Hitler thus concluded that workers were victims of a system that poisoned the people’s minds and exploited the masses for the system’s own sake. And who was behind this system if not the Jews? “Only knowledge of Israel gives one the key to social democracy’s hidden and real intentions,” as he himself formulated it.
In fact, the leader of the Austrian Social Democrats, Dr. Victor Adler, was Jewish, and for Hitler, that was sufficient evidence that social democracy was merely a tool in a larger Jewish conspiracy. He wove social democracy and, by extension, Marxism together with Judaism. He saw the social democratic leaders, such as Adler, Austerlitz, and Ellenbogen, as officers in a devilish conspiracy designed to seduce workers and then destroy Aryan civilization.
However, while Hitler distanced himself from Marxism and social democracy, he found his role models in other politicians. As mentioned, he could, like his father once did, subscribe to Georg Ritter von Schönerer’s anti-Semitism, German nationalism, desire for unification with Germany, and hatred of the Habsburgs. But von Schönerer also made mistakes, in Hitler’s view. For example, von Schönerer failed to address the masses and only spoke to certain parts of the bourgeoisie, and he used the Reichstag instead of the streets as a parliament. Furthermore, von Schönerer had failed to incorporate the social element, which could attract the voting masses that would otherwise support the left, into his nationalism. Von Schönerer focused on the middle class and neglected the masses.
Satanic Figure
The Jew was no longer a human being in Hitler’s mind. He had become a satanic figure endowed with infernal power and the embodiment of all evil, a being onto whom Hitler projected everything he hated, feared, and—perhaps—desired. The Jew was responsible for modernist trends in art, for pornography and prostitution, for the press’s anti-national critique, for the exploitation of the masses by capitalists and Marxists, and perhaps most significantly; for Hitler’s own failure to achieve anything in Vienna. The Jew was a Columbus egg in Hitler’s worldview. The Jew was not just part of the explanation; the Jew was the entire explanation for everything negative. In Hitler’s future Nazi Germany, banners would soon wave in the streets with the slogan Die Juden sind Schuld! – “It is the Jews’ fault!”
When the Nazis turned Jews into a biological race
But was there a “Jewish question”? Was the Jew truly an evil, omnipresent being who, in a blood frenzy, sought to gain power over the Aryans? The reality was that the Jewish question in countries like Germany and Austria was on the verge of disappearing in the years following World War I, as Hitler and the rising leaders of the National Socialist movement were finding their footing after the humiliating defeat in the war. It seemed, in many ways, that assimilation would soon be nearly complete. Jews were quietly blending into society, and it wouldn’t be long before it was impossible to distinguish them from the rest of the population. They still had Hebrew, Sephardic, or Yiddish-sounding names, but their clothing, appearance, and behavior were no different from anyone else’s. True, there was still an influx of Eastern Jews, who, as refugees, traveled over Galicia from Ukraine and other parts of Russia during these years, but this didn’t change the fact that the majority of Jews were more or less disappearing as a visibly separate group. They had even become so assimilated on nearly all social levels that Hitler and the antisemites were actually losing a clearly defined target for their hatred and their search for scapegoats to unite a fairly heterogeneous population. Therefore, it had become necessary for the antisemites to separate the Jews from the non-Jewish population and emphasize the differences between the two groups.
They did this by reverting to the ideas of the aforementioned race theorists and redefining Jews as a biological race. If Jews were a race, the individual remained a Jew even if he was highly assimilated. He could be as Christianized as possible at the baptismal font and wear Western clothing, but it wouldn’t matter: he was and remained a Jew. A slogan at the time went: Jud bleibt Jud – a Jew remains a Jew. The Nazi antisemites even went so far as to claim that the assimilated Jew was the most dangerous because he had camouflaged himself and could thus work uninterrupted to advance his race’s cause.
Hans Günther, a professor at the Institute of Hereditary Research in Jena, helped emphasize that there was a fundamental difference between the Jewish race and other races:
“It is not some ‘inferiority’ in the Jewish racial mixture that forms the core of the Jewish question, but its racially determined diversity, above all its racially-soulish foreignness within the racially distinct Western peoples.”
“Jewish women menstruate (too) early”
Some of the evidence Günther believed he could present to document the diversity of Jews was the physical characteristics that were peculiar to the Jew. He describes the typical Jew as 1.61 meters tall, with crooked legs, a round back, a tendency toward obesity and a double chin, and thick body hair. As for Jewish women, it was claimed that they menstruate earlier than European girls, and thus are more animalistic than the Aryans.
For an antisemite, it could seem confusing that Jews were immediately very different from one another and could, for example, occupy such different roles as capitalists and communists. How could it be, for instance, that some Jews, like the wealthy Rothschild family, were employers and wage repressors, sitting on capital in Wall Street, while other Jews, like the Bolshevik Leon Trotsky, were working to advance Marxism and class struggle? It might seem as though Jews were working against each other? It didn’t make sense. Not unless one identified Jews, both communists and capitalists, as members of a common race. They didn’t oppose each other at all. Outwardly, it seemed as though they were working toward different goals, but it was just a smokescreen: in reality, they were working together to achieve one common goal – world domination – albeit by different means. By rallying the working masses under the red banners, the Jews had managed to undermine the authority of the nations and trick them into submitting to the interests of the international Jewish bankers.
The Jew is to blame for all bad things
By claiming that Jews were cooperating across national borders, class lines, and ideologies, the Nazis could not only attack the Jews themselves but also all the phenomena in politics, culture, and economy that the Nazis opposed for various reasons. The Jew became a universal explanation for all the evils that had befallen German society: Bolshevism, capitalism, inflation (which made life even harder for the lower middle classes), the alienating modern society, modern jazz, and incomprehensible abstract modern art – everything was personified in the Jew. Antisemitism became a weapon. Propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels expressed this at a press conference in 1943: “… antisemitism is the most effective weapon we have. It must be used with great force.”
The Jew as a propaganda weapon
“The genius leader must have the ability to make different opponents appear as though they belong to the same category,” Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf and emphasized the necessity of uniting the people’s hatred against a single enemy. Just like Goebbels, Hitler was fully aware of the propaganda effect he could achieve with antisemitism. Had the Jew not existed, he once said, they would have had to invent him, for it is important to have a visible, not an invisible, enemy. Using the Jew as the enemy had the added benefit that propaganda could play on the fact that they represented both an external and an internal threat. There were Jews outside of Germany’s borders who, in a mighty conspiracy, were fighting to crush the German people. And they worked together with the German Jews, who were undermining society from within. Hitler believed it was necessary, in any revolution, to channel the masses’ feelings of hatred, and as a social group, Jews were the most suitable to attack. They were relatively defenseless in German society, and despite their successful assimilation, they could still be identified as a distinct group in society – especially if one emphasized their connection to the “Eastern Jews.”
The Jew was a relatively easy target, which one could fit into a stereotype. With stereotypical images, one could make complicated and perhaps self-contradictory contexts clear: the abstract could be painted with a single color, making it concrete, and thus suitable for mass suggestion. One didn’t need to use rational arguments but could appeal to emotions like irrational dislike, racism, etc. Therefore, there could be no doubt about the Jew’s depravity; it had to be the white man’s fight against the black.
Another reason Jews were an obvious target was that the roots of antisemitism, as mentioned, ran deep in the broad German middle class of small tradesmen and artisans. In Hitler’s view, this was a potential that had to be exploited:
“A fight against the Jews will be as popular as it will be useful (…) There are few Germans who have not been insulted in dealings with Jews (…) as soon as hatred and the fight against Jews really flare up, their resistance will be negligible. They cannot protect themselves, and no one will help them.”
The Germans Hitler and the Nazis wanted to attract were not only a specific group. As the name National Socialism reveals, the party covered both conservative values like nationalism and patriotism, as well as working-class values like socialism. When trying to win supporters from such internally conflicting groups to one party, the Jew proved to be well-suited to cover over this contradiction. To the conservative nationalists, the propaganda played on the Jews’ systematic destruction of traditional German values. It emphasized that Marx was Jewish, and that it was naturally Jews trying to turn Germany into a communist satellite state for the Soviet Union. To the workers, the Jew’s role in propaganda was the opposite. Now, the Jew was the capitalist exploiter, who only wished to press the German workers for labor and keep socialist ideas down at all costs.
By creating these different propaganda images of the “Jewish Bolshevik,” the “Jewish capitalist,” the “Jewish land speculator,” and the “Jewish chain store owner,” the Nazis opened up the possibility of targeting campaigns at very different groups. Antisemitism, in this way, was used as a link between capital and labor, between the farmer and the consumer.
