LogFAQs > #968402496

PrettyBoyFloyd posted...

I also heard that his dislike for the Jewish was because they wasn't putting anything back in.

Oh sure, because anti-semitism wasn't already deeply ingrained in pre-war Austria or Germany.

The truth is that anti-Jewish prejudice in German states was old even before the unification of 1871, let alone before WW1. When the lower house of the Bavarian parliament passed a bill in December 1849 to grant Jews full civil equality, there was a furious popular backlash; petitions protesting the bill were collected from somewhere between 10-20% of the entire adult male population of Bavaria within just three months. Berlin, Baden and Frankfurt also saw bitter political fights over attempts to confer on Jews the status of German subjects or citizens.

The prejudice intensified after German unification. A whole generation of parties and organizations with anti-semitic programmes emerged: the League of Anti-Semites (1879), the Christian-Social Workers Party (1878), the Social Reich Party (1881), the German Antisemitic Alliance (1886), the German Social Party (1893) and the Antisemitic People's Party (1890) -- both of which folded into the German-Social Reform Party (1894) and, in turn, into the German-Populist Party (1914) -- the German National Commerce Clerks Association (1893), the Agrarian League (1893), and the Pan-German League.

This wasn't just a hobby for outfits on the lunatic fringe of politics, either. In 1880, a nationwide campaign calling for the rescinding of Jewish rights in Germany gained 265,000 petition signatures and led the national parliament, the Reichstag, to consider the demand in a debate that lasted two full days. The German Conservative Party -- the main parliamentary supporter of Bismarck and the Wilhelmine Reich -- made a formal declaration in its Tivoli Programme of December 1892 that it would "combat the widely obtruding and decomposing Jewish influence on our popular life."

On March 6, 1895 the speaker of the Reichstag, Ahlwardt, told deputies that: "If it is now pointed out ... that the Jew is human too, then I must reject that totally." He added: "A Jew who is born in Germany is still no German; he is still a Jew."

Ahlwardt went a little too far when he called upon deputies to wipe out "these beasts of prey" [Rotten Sie diese Raubtiere aus], but he qualified it by saying that he didn't want to go quite as far as the Austrian anti-semites in the Reichsrath and "reward everybody who shoots a Jew, or ... decide whoever kills a Jew, inherits his property." Wasn't that nice of him?

Oh, and I might point out that were twelve trials of Jews for the age-old charge of "ritual murder" in Germany and the Austrian Empire between 1867 and 1914, while nineteen publications by prominent anti-semitic writers that appeared between 1861 and 1895 in Germany called for the physical extermination of the Jews.

This was the milieu in which Hitler grew up, and it gave Hitler any number of ready-made excuses to hate Jews because it was such a popular pastime already.