Why did Hitler target the jews for persecution?

Answer 1

Try this link. Earlier question and answer along the same line. http://www.faqfarm.com/History/WWII/11889 There is no clear answer to this question. If you examine Hitler's policies you will discover that he did not have much, if any, original thoughts. He simply chose thinking that had been done previously and put them all togeter in his Nazi philosophy. Both Poland and Russia were persecuting the Jews before Hitler was born. Anti Jewish feeling existed in nearly every nation, including America. The degree of discrimination varied, but the dislike was not uncommon. Some influences that MAY have influenced Hitler were ... 1. The Great War (WW I) for Germany started falling apart when the German sailors refused to make a suicide voyage against the British. This mutiny involved both Jews and Communists. 2. Hitler was anti-Communist, a type of government invented by a Jew - Karl Marx. 3. The German government that surrendered to the Allies (the Weimar Republic) had Jews in its leadership at times. 4. When a child falls off a bike it is not uncommon to see them kicking the bike, as if it was the bike's fault they had an accident. Likewise it was convient for the Germans to kick the Jews and blame them for Germany's defeat and surrender. 5. The Christian religions blamed the death of Christ on the Jews. One can see in The Bible the statement that the Jews demanded the death of Jesus, and said, "let it be upon our heads and that of our children." This became an excuse to abuse the Jews for more than a thousand years. It was not until the 1960's (I think) that the Catholic Church stated that the Jews were NOT to blame for the death of Jesus. (Their statement was based on the idea that Christ died for the sins of ALL PEOPLE, therefore ALL those that sin are equally a cause of the death of Christ! 6. Hitler not only objected to the Jews, but also to Christanity as well. While the belt buckles of the Wehrmacht had the words: "God is with us" written on them. Hitler's god was not the same as we think of. He was going back, in his thinking to the time of the Vikings, and the pre-Christian Germans. To the ancient gods of the Germanic people. He tollerated the Christians only because he was not powerful enough to oppose them. But if one investigates the thinking of the SS troops they will find no Christian thinking, but only those of the ancient times. Well that is a little. It is a long and complicated subject. I hope this helps, John hitler was probably very jealous of the jews. While he was homeless it was the jews who helped him.in fact hilter even had jewish -don't laugh- friends.besides at that time a lot of people persecuted the jews.i just dont know the exact reason why he went againt the people who helped him.or why he killed so many. Hitler first of all was a mentally sick demon, wither nobody knows it or not. He had a schizophrenia. That is a mental illness in wich you have anxiety problems and your mind can't function right. He also had a grandmother who was a jew. I think his self hatred drove him crazy. He had the power so he took advantage. He was a sick digusting demon. I'm 12 yrs. old and I realize this.

Answer 2

Answer 1

Hitler provided numerous rationales during that period as to why he believed that the Jews were worthy of being persecuted. However, the only person qualified to answer this question fully and accurately, without speculation, (Hitler) killed himself on April 30, 1945. Various contributors have stated that the following were some of the reasons that Hitler claimed to hate the Jews:

1) Superiority of the German People: Hitler believed that the Germans as a "race" of Nordic of peoples were superior in all ways to all non-German people. Since the Jews were not a Nordic people, Hitler reviled them (as he reviled the Romani, Slavs, and other ethnic minorities).

2) Decay of the German State: During the 1800s, Jews began to become more integrated in German National Life. They served in its government, its military divisions, and its industry. As was typical of Western Europe, the Jews had more of a hand in the higher echelons of government than their population percentage would account for. The Nazis saw this increasing Jewish percentage in the government as a slow takeover of German policy and a corruption of the German people. They contrasted the great victories under Bismarck with the depressing failure of World War I and noted how a much larger percentage of soldiers in the latter war were Jewish. There was also the sentiment than in the early 20th century, values were beginning to ebb (this is similar to current politics in the United States) and the Jewish integration in the German apparatus (becoming teachers, lawyers, doctors, etc.) was to blame for this recession of values as opposed to modernity as a process.

3) Nationalism: Germany was brought together under the Nationalist conception that all peoples with German culture, history, and language should be united regardless of which principality currently held control. The German self-conception also had an ethnic component, holding that the perfect German was blond and blue eyed. Regardless of the fact that the majority of Germans were dark haired, Jews stuck out like a sore thumb because they overwhelmingly had darker hair. In addition, the idea of a German Jew was still rather new and both Jews and non-Jews tended to see the Jews in Germany as being part of a vast Jewish network and that these Jews just happened to be in Germany. The Nazis capitalized on this cosmopolitan sensibility by claiming that Jews' allegiances were not to the German State, but to secret Jewish Councils organizing world events.

4) Economy: Whether it was true or not, there was perception among Germans and the Nazis in particular that Jews were wealthy individuals and had a higher per-capita income than the Germans. In many ways (because of the above two reasons) Germans felt that the Jews were "stealing" their money while they were poor and suffering. Adolf Hitler blamed the Jewish population for the social and economic problems of the era. A popular anti-Semitic belief was that Jewish families were shrewd and sought to control the wealth of a community at the expense of other members in the community. This being the case he thought that the world would be a better place if the Jews were no longer in charge of finance.

5) Pseudo-Science: The late 19th and early 20th century was filled with radical new ideas concerning Social Darwinism. It was believed by the Pseudo-Scientific community (which was rather in vogue) that different groups of people or races exhibited different emotional traits that were linked to physical differences. This led to the belief that Jews were corrupt and thieving by their irreversible nature and that they could not be "cured" and brought up as proper Europeans. This formalized Racial Anti-Semitism in Germany and made the situation much more dire for German Jews.

6) Heresy/Christian Anti-Semitism: Although not as much an issue in World War II as it may have been 500 years prior, Jews were still considered the heretics who murdered the LORD and Savior. This helped to justify Anti-Semitism as the Jewish comeuppance for their accepting of the Christ Bloodguilt. Jews were called Christ-killers by the Nazis, as they had by most Christian churches for centuries, and that was behind a lot of the hatred. This existed regardless of the fact that the Bible names the Jews as God's Chosen people first.

7) Hitler's Ambition: Adolf Hitler was very ambitious. His dream was to see Germany at the top. After the First World War he became more and more ambitious. He blamed the Jews for the misery and suffering of Germans. Moreover, he held Jews responsible for the loss of World War I. He claimed that they held high position and were very rich. This was one of reason for his hatred for the Jews.

8) Populism: Adolf Hitler's "hatred" of the Jews was one of the tools he used to convince the people of Germany that he knew the source of their economic problems and that he was the person who could correct the situation. He chose to use the long standing antisemitism in Germany to gain the people's support.

9) Anti-Semitic Childhood: When Hitler was studying Art in Munich as a teenager he was rejected from the academy he wished to attend and for some reason, he blamed it on the city's Jewish population. He was also brought up in an anti-Semitic family (at least some believe).

10) Foreigners: Hitler argued that the German Jews were not 'native' members of the country and should not be able to enjoy the benefits of citizenship. Their motives would be suspect as their loyalty was to something other than Germany. (Of course, this argument has been used against all minorities and is equally fatuous as concerns the Jews.)

11) Communism: Hitler alleged that the Jews were the primary supporters of Communists and thus also considered them in bed with his political opposition. (It should be noted that there is NO credible evidence the Jews were the main supporters of Communism, and this is yet another stereotype used by bigots for decades.)

Answer 2

Hitler persecuted the Jewish people because he had an illness called xenaphobia witch is the fear of foriegn people he belived that there was a "common race" (blonde hair blue eyes and German) he belived that the Jews did not fit that race therefor they must be killed and persecuted. hitler believed that the world should be only german, and people that have blonde hair and blue eyes even when he had brown hair. and he didn't only kill the jews, he killed other religions as well. He thought that all of the world should be a perfect place and every one should have blond hair and blue eyes. The Jews also had a different religion then Hitler. Christianity was what he wanted even if that meant killing 6 million people.

Answer 3

There is no real reason for that hatred that he had for the jews. There was jewish blood in his family so no one really knows.

Answer 3

The Jews weren't Hitler's only victims. He also killed real and imaginary communists and other political opponents, members of resistance groups, homosexuals, dissenting Christians, Gypsies (Roma), the physically handicapped and mentally retarded, Soviet prisoners of war, Jehovah's Witnesses, anti-Nazi clergy, trade unionists, and psychiatric patients. He did blame the Jews for his lack of acceptance twice to Vienna's Academy of Fine Arts as well as many other problems in his life. About 11 million people perished in the Holocaust, and about 6 million were Jews or of Jewish descent. He needed someone to blame, that the people would be easily convinced were the culprits behind all the Germans problems, Hitler was upset over the German losses from WW1 and the huge loss of land in the Treaty of Versailles. This is coming from a 14 year old look it up if you have to. That is why Hitler was such an evil genius.

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The first people to be sent to concentration were known political opponents of the Nazis. 'Outsider' groups such as homosexuals were also persecuted. The Jews were subject to a massive program of extermination and a total of about six million were murdered in the Holocaust. Hatred of the Jews was long standing in many parts of Europe. (America wasn't free of anti-semitism, either). The Jews were the traditional scapegoats. Originally, anti-semitism had been directed mainly against Judaism and its adherents, but from the 1870s onwards it became racial and ideological. The period from about 1870 onwards was one of rapid change (urbanization and a further wave of industrialism) and in Europe there was a severe economic depression from 1873-1879 (and arguably much longer). Racial anti-semitism seems to have had a particularly strong appeal to people and institutions that had real problems coming to terms with the modern world - groups ranging from small craft businesses to the lower ranks of the aristocracy. The Roman Catholic church also found the modern world a frightening place and spread conspiracy theories about alleged Jewish and Masonic plans for world domination.

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It was, above all, conspiracy theories about "the Jews".These had been circulated in Russia from about 1900-1917 by the Tsarist secret police. After about 1918 they also circulated increasingly in Western and Central Europe. After World War 1 there were all kinds of conspiracy theories circulating about the Jews. They were widely regarded as Communists and subversives. In Germany and Austria there was a widespread view (for which there was no evidence) that they had engineered the defeat of Germany.

There were also conspiracy theories claiming that the Jews were seeking to dominate the world.

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There is also the point that Nazis isolated the Jews so thoroughly as to make most of them economically useless.

Answer 4

Opinion

Hitler persecuted the Jews because he hated them. He blamed them for problems in his society. Throughout the 19th and 20th Century, several different societies and countries persecuted the Jews. The Jews and the Masons were blamed for gaining control of the country through their influence in business and banking. This was a way for people to put blame for bad government onto a group of people.

There was a period that Jews were persecuted in Russia and other countries. Hitler turned this distrust into a racists hatred.

The earliest firm evidence of Hitler's antisemitism dates from 1916, when Hitler was aged 27, so stories about early experiences in his life should be treated with caution.

Hitler believed that the Jews were involved in a great conspiracy to control the wealth of Europe and to dominate and destroy the German or Aryan people. Whether that belief was the basis for his hatred or was a result of it is not something I think can be determined.

Opinion

The reasons most commonly given are that Hitler believed that the Jews:

1. Were Communists (and that Communism was a Jewish political philosophy).
2. Had deliberately caused Germany to lose World War 1 by wrecking the home front in Germany itself.
3. Had caused the Great Depression.
4. He believed a bizarre conspiracy that claimed that the Jews were planning to dominate the world.

The first of these views - of the Jews as Communists - was also widespread in many other countries, including Britain and the U.S. However, most people elsewhere seem to have taken this with a pinch of salt and certainly didn't get so worked up about it.

As for the conspiracy theory that the Jews were trying to dominate the world, Yehuda Bauer summarizes it neatly as follows:

"The basic motivation [of the Holocaust] was purely ideological, rooted in an illusionary world of Nazi imagination, where an international Jewish conspiracy to control the world was opposed to a parallel Aryan quest. No genocide to date had been based so completely on myths, on hallucinations, on abstract, nonpragmatic ideology - which was then executed by very rational, pragmatic means."

Yehuda Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust, New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002, p.48. (Quoted in Wikipedia article on the Holocaust, accessed 31 March 2009).

Obviously, there is something nutty about such notions, but there is no evidence that Hitler was clinically insane.

Opinion

In the interwar period (1918-1939) it was perfectly acceptable to express racist, ethnic, religious and cultural prejudice loud and clear, both in Europe and the U.S. Most German Jews did not take the Nazis' antisemitism particularly seriously before 1933. Almost none had made any practical arrangements in advance to leave the country, for example. Hitler's Jew-baiting was not particularly popular outside the beer-halls of Bavaria and a few other places and was not the vote-catcher that the above answer claims.

Please see the related questions.

Opinion

Hitler like most Europeans did not like the Jews as a result of religious and cultural differences that had been ingrained for centuries. The Jews themselves did not endear themselves either by being racially insular. In any case many leaders who can get a better toe hold by vilifying a particular group will do so as it gives the average man in the street something to hate. He did the same with Gypsies various religious groups and the disabled. And it worked as a result of the fear he managed to spread he attained absolute control of Germany. There was also a lot of wealth confiscated which Hitler had use for. There is no clear answer to this question. If you examine Hitler's policies you will discover that he did not have much, if any, original thoughts. He simply chose thinking that had been done previously and put them all together in his Nazi philosophy.

Opinion

Both Poland and Russia were persecuting the Jews before Hitler was born. Anti Jewish feeling existed in nearly every nation, including America. The degree of discrimination varied, but the dislike was not uncommon.

Some influences that MAY have influenced Hitler were ...

1. The Great War (WW I) for Germany started falling apart when the German sailors refused to make a suicide voyage against the British. This mutiny involved both Jews and Communists.

2. Hitler was anti-Communist, a type of government invented by a Jew - Karl Marx.

3. The German government that surrendered to the Allies (the Weimar Republic) had Jews in its leadership at times.

4. When a child falls off a bike it is not uncommon to see them kicking the bike, as if it was the bike's fault they had an accident. Likewise it was convient for the Germans to kick the Jews and blame them for Germany's defeat and surrender.

5. The Christian religions blamed the death of Christ on the Jews. One can see in the Bible the statement that the Jews demanded the death of Jesus, and said, "let it be upon our heads and that of our children." This became an excuse to abuse the Jews for more than a thousand years. It was not until the 1960's (I think) that the Catholic Church stated that the Jews were NOT to blame for the death of Jesus. (Their statement was based on the idea that Christ died for the sins of ALL PEOPLE, therefore ALL those that sin are equally a cause of the death of Christ!

6. Hitler not only objected to the Jews, but also to Christanity as well. While the belt buckles of the Wehrmacht had the words: "God is with us" written on them. Hitler's god was not the same as we think of. He was going back, in his thinking to the time of the Vikings, and the pre-Christian Germans. To the ancient gods of the Germanic people. He tolerated the Christians only because he was not powerful enough to oppose them. But if one investigates the thinking of the SS troops they will find no Christian thinking, but only those of the ancient times.

Answer 5

Answer 1

Hitler was racist towards Jews and other minorities. He focused the resentment of the German people toward those of different cultures, in order to achieve power. Some of the more important reasons that he hated them were the following:

1) Decay of the German State: During the 1800s, Jews and other minorities began to become more integrated in German National Life. They served in its government, its military divisions, and its industry. As was typical of Western Europe, the Jews had more of a hand in the higher echelons of government than their population percentage would account for. Hitler saw this increasing Jewish percentage in the government as a slow takeover of German policy and a corruption of the German people. They contrasted the great victories under Bismarck with the depressing failure of World War I and noted how a much larger percentage of soldiers in the latter war were Jewish. There was also the sentiment than in the early 20th century, values were beginning to ebb (this is similar to current politics in the United States) and the Jewish integration in the German apparatus (becoming teachers, lawyers, doctors, etc.) was to blame for this recession of values as opposed to modernity as a process.

2) Nationalism: Germany was brought together under the Nationalist conception that all peoples with German culture, history, and language should be united regardless of which principality currently held control. The German self-conception also had an ethnic component, holding that the perfect German was blond and blue eyed. Regardless of the fact that the majority of Germans were dark haired, Jews and Gypsies stuck out like sore thumbs because they overwhelmingly had darker hair. In addition, the idea of a German Jew was still rather new and both Jews and non-Jews tended to see the Jews in Germany as being part of a vast Jewish network and that these Jews just happened to be in Germany. The same perception existed for Gypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses, and Communists. Hitler capitalized on this cosmopolitan sensibility by claiming that these people's allegiances were not to the German State, but to secret councils made up of these minorities that conspired against the German people.

3) Economy: Whether it was true or not, there was perception among Germans and Hitler in particular that Jews were wealthy individuals and had a higher per-capita income than the Germans. In many ways (because of the above two reasons) Germans felt that the Jews were "stealing" their money while they were poor and suffering.

4) Pseudo-Science: The late 19th and early 20th century was filled with radical new ideas concerning Social Darwinism, a movement that Hitler was a part of. It was believed by the Pseudo-Scientific community (which was rather in vogue) that different groups of people or races exhibited different emotional traits that were linked to physical differences. This led to the belief that Jews and Gypsies were corrupt and thieving by their irreversible nature and that they could not be "cured" and brought up as proper Europeans. This formalized Racism in Germany and made the situation much more dire for German minorities.

5) Heresy: Although not as much an issue in World War II as it may have been 500 years prior, Jews were still considered the heretics who murdered the LORD and Savior. This helped to justify Anti-Semitism as the Jewish comeuppance for their accepting of the Christ Bloodguilt.

because they didn't believe in his culture

Answer 2

Hitler targeted the Jews because he blamed them for losing Germany world war 1 because during that time Hitler was just a foot solider but clearly he loved Germany and hated the Jews

Answer 3

Jews were a convenient target because they had already been persecuted in Europe for a thousand years, and there was a well established tradition of hating Jews. When Hitler announced that all of German's problems had been caused by Jews, there were lots of people who found that lie very easy to believe.

Answer 4

He blamed everything on the Jews. He thought that they were unpure. He had thought that the perfect race had blue eyes and blonde hair. No one was pure.

Answer 5

Adolf Hitler was serving in a strict military when he was young, and to them surrender was the worst embarrassment. Anyway, in the end the German army Hitler was serving for asked a high end Jewish society for funds to help them keep fighting, since they were flat broke, but the Jewish society refused, because they thought Hitlers army had no chance to win.

Therefore, with no funds, the German army was forced to surrender, the worse embarrassment.

When the war ended, Hitler was furious with the Jews for not giving them money, and forcing the army to surrender.

With this fury against the mainly innocent religion and people, Hitler set out for revenge, and the rest is History.

Because, Adolf Hitler had a lot of hatred against the Jews.

Answer 6

After World War 1 there were all kinds of conspiracy theories circulating about the Jews. They were widely regarded as Communists and subversives. In Germany and Austria there was a widespread view (for which there was no evidence) that they had engineered the defeat of Germany. This was also a conspiracy theory but was taken seriously by hardline nationalists. because they didn't believe in his culture

Answer 6

Hitler target the Jews for elimination since he believed that they were responsible for most of the events in the world that affected his country. This was also a way of showing how powerful he was.

Answer 7

he believed they were to blame for the mistakes in/against Germany