The Roots of National Socialism and Germany's Reckoning with its Past

Anti-Semitism was Central to Nazi Propaganda

At the turn of the 20th century, Jews in Austria and Germany were becoming more secular (less religious) and more integrated into these societies (in Vienna, the Jewish population grew from 2% to 8.5% between 1857 and 1910 [Fest 27]). Yet despite Vienna being a world city with Germans, Czechs, Poles, Italians, Romanians, Slovenes, Croats, and Jews, there was jealousy and suspicion of Jews working in both finance and in socialist groups, on both the political right and on the left (ibid.).

Some Austrians and Germans equated Jewish secularization with modernity and the rise of technology and this bred anxiety and fears of being "declassed" and "overwhelmed." Hitler himself spoke hysterically of "being overwhelmed by alien races, by fear of the 'locust-like immigration of Russian and Polish Jews'" and even "by fear that Germans would be 'exterminated'" (Fest 101).

Many historians have pointed out that, while European anti-Semitism had a long history going back centuries, it was in the 19th century that anti-Semitism took on a racial overtones from the pseudosciences of phrenology, physiognomy, and supposed biological "nature" of various "races." (Fest, Arendt). 

Over a thirty-year period, 1885-1914, Germany deported supposedly "undesirable" Eastern European Jews to Russia (Brinkmann). Hitler was no doubt caught up in the anti-Semitic propaganda circulating in these decades. In this same period, there were violent anti-Jewish pogroms in Russia and its territories, leading to a mass migration of Jews to the United States and Britain.

Nazi propaganda ultimately came to be based on idea of Volksgemeinschaft (equality of the people of the German “race”) and the persecution and attempted eradication of the Jewish “race” (Arendt 360).
 

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