
Understanding Hitler’s Anti-Semitism - Petiver
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/09/hitler-holocaust-antisemitism-timothy-snyder/404260/?single_page=true
======
schoen
Snyder says in the interview:

> [Hitler] was a kind of racial anarchist who thought that the only good in
> the world was for races to compete, and so he thought that the Germans would
> probably win in a racial competition, but he wasn’t sure. And as far as he
> was concerned, if the Germans lost, that was also alright.

I don't know how accurate other historians think this view of Hitler was, but
I've also seen it in Borges's short story "Deutsches Requiem". I just re-read
it and the entire story is an exact expression of this perspective, from the
point of view of a fictional concentration camp superintendent who worships
violence and conflict. There are dozens of paraphrases in the story of what
Snyder thinks Hitler believed.

For instance:

> Hitler thought that he was fighting for _a_ nation, but he was fighting for
> _all_ nations, even for those he attacked and abominated. [...] There are
> many things that must be destroyed in order to build the new order; now we
> know that Germany was one of them. We have given something more than our
> lives; we have given the life of our belovèd nation. [..] Now an implacable
> age looms over the world. We forged that age, we who are now its victim.
> What does it matter that England is the hammer and we the anvil? What
> matters is that violence, not servile Christian acts of timidity, now rules.
> [...] (trans. Andrew Hurley)

Original:

> Hitler creyó luchar por _un_ país, pero luchó por todos, aun por aquellos
> que agredió y detestó. [...] Muchas cosas hay que destruir para edificar el
> nuevo orden; ahora sabemos que Alemania era una de esas cosas. Hemos dado
> algo más que nuestra vida, hemos dado la suerte de nuestro querido país.
> [...] Se cierne ahora sobre el mundo una época implacable. Nosotros la
> forjamos, nosotros que ya somos su víctima. ¿Qué importa que Inglaterra sea
> el martillo y nosotros el yunque? Lo importante es que rija la violencia, no
> las serviles timideces cristianas. [...]

(I wonder if Snyder has ever read this story.)

------
LordHumungous
I've been doing a lot of reading on the First World War and thinking about how
it affected what came later. When I read about Hitler's view of the world, I
can't help but wonder if it was forged in the savage darwinian struggle of
trench warfare. It strikes me as the mentality of a generation that has been
brutalized by violence, and is now convinced that violent struggle is all that
matters.

------
reitanqild
Have read about 2/3rds about it now and came back to upvote.

My first impression is there are some really interesting observations in there
like this:

> At the end of the war, Hitler said, ‘Well the Germans lost, that just shows
> the Russians are stronger. So be it. That’s the verdict of nature.’ I don’t
> think a nationalist would say that.

~~~
qubex
It seems to me that Snyder is imposing an ex-post unity and coherence of
thought upon a broken, irrational man, and somehow succeeding in joining up
the dots into some accidental semblance of linearity. I'm by no means
convinced that the eventual outcome was ’compatible’ with the initial mindset.
Hitler in 1938 had no real reason to create an accommodation for what
eventually came to pass in 1945 simply because (for him) it was probably
almost impossible to anticipate; asymmetrically Hitler in 1945, faced with
disaster, tried to shoehorn-in an interpretation of events that was as
minimally discontinuous from his prior statements as possible.

~~~
pron
I don't think Snyder means Hitler had a tactical plan and an exact route of
achieving a specific goal. He means that Hitler had a certain vision, and many
of his actions can be understood as being influenced by that vision. Even if
Snyder claims a more calculated approach on Hitler's part, I think his basic
interpretation of the vision is enlightening enough even if you don't buy the
theory of the calculated mind.

~~~
emp_zealoth
To me, Hitler threw WW2 - after overwhelming initial victories he, against the
advice from generals, changed goals from strategic to vanity - London Blitz,
Stalingrad - took away Third Reich's lead and turned into militarily pointless
endeavours.

While the bombings had some doctrines/ideas (even if flawed - The Bomber Will
Always Get Through), stopping th steamroll of Red Army in the middle of
nowhere, with looming winter was just suicidal. If Moscow fell, CCCP could
have folded - the evacuated industry would not have a strong transport system
to enable it, and, the Wehrmacht wouldn't freeze to death in the fields.

It's hard to retroactively explain it as a vision. It was megalomania.

~~~
pron
Well, even if we accept Snyder's interpretation of Hitler's vision, I don't
think it's right to expect _every_ action to be a result of _solely_ that
vision. Even if we did, nobody said Hitler's strategy was ideal in achieving
his vision. A visionary can be a bad strategist.

My takeaway is that Hitler's vision may not have been one of German
nationalism but of racial anarchy. Fascism is often associated with the desire
to return to an imagined "golden age". But Hitler's golden age wasn't one of
an imagined pure Germany, but of an imagined reality much further ago in the
past, of people fighting like "pure" animals for racial superiority.

I think that's a very interesting interpretation.

------
vezzy-fnord
The interpretation of Hitler seeing racial struggle as the natural order and
otherwise being generally amoral (definitely corroborated by _Mein Kampf_ )
strongly reminded me of Ragnar Redbeard's _Might is Right_ :
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Might_Is_Right](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Might_Is_Right)

Well worth reading just for its entire raging style, featuring such quotes as
"I gaze into the glassy eye of your fearsome Jehovah, and pluck him by the
beard — I uplift a broad-axe and split open his worm-eaten skull." This
somehow passing in 1890.

------
digitalengineer
I highly recommend Reading "He's Back", a satire: " Narrated in the first-
person by Hitler, the story follows the Führer as he awakens from a 66-year
sleep in his bunker beneath Berlin to find an entirely changed Germany. In the
celebrity-obsessed modern-day city, everyone assumes the fulminating leader of
the Nazi party is a comedian in character — and soon he becomes a celebrity
with a guest slot on a Turkish-born comedian’s TV show. His bigoted rants are
interpreted as a satirical exposure of prejudice, leading him to decide to
start his own political party. If you think "people totday would-be never fall
for his BS, think again. [http://newsfeed.time.com/2013/02/10/hes-back-hitler-
satire-t...](http://newsfeed.time.com/2013/02/10/hes-back-hitler-satire-tops-
germanys-bestseller-list/)

~~~
JadeNB
It looks like this may have appeared in America as "Look who's back". The
Onion AV Club, which actually publishes decent book reviews, thought it wasted
the intellectual heft of its premise: [http://www.avclub.com/review/look-whos-
back-wastes-provocati...](http://www.avclub.com/review/look-whos-back-wastes-
provocative-premise-wacky-hi-218552) .

------
staunch
Like many descendants of German Jews, I've long been fascinated by Hitler's
rationale. I think, fundamentally, Hitler viewed the Final Solution as the
_lesser_ of two evils.

1918:

1\. Jews make up a tiny percentage of Germany but they dominate Germany's
media, banking, etc.

2\. Germany wouldn't have lost the war if the Jews hadn't influenced the
people back home using their control of the media. They were agents of the
enemy, doing the bidding of their fellow Jews on the opposing side.

3\. Jews are the reason millions of his fellow soldiers died in vain and
Germany was humiliated.

1942:

4\. Jews have used their influence in Britain and America to start another war
with Germany.

5\. This time the Jews will be eliminated so Germany won't be undermined
again.

6\. Killing a small percentage of the population spares the whole of the
population from defeat and ruin. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of
the few. The Jews must die.

~~~
brador
People say "the jews" but were they an organised group or system?

How can such a large collective of people (the jews) make a common decision on
such a scale and act on it in seeming secret?

Is there something fundamental in "the jews" grouping that allows them to, in
theory, act cohesively? Is it their teachings? holy books?

What was driving Hitlers hate against all jews, not just the jews that screwed
him?

~~~
staunch
Hitler's view: All Jews are Jewish first and German second. Their true loyalty
was to the other Jewish people of the World, in Britain, America, and
everywhere else. They viewed the war between Germany and the western powers as
a war of Jew vs Jew. Their incentive was to end the war using their massively
disproportionate influence over German society. The defeat of Germany was a
victory for German Jews.

My view: Jews were a somewhat cohesive group of people for thousands of years.
For various reasons (prosecution among them) they were insular. Through the
passage of time many Jews did accumulate vast wealth and power. But _most_
Jews were poor as shit and got nothing out of being a Jew except an extra hard
life. Some Jews felt like they were more German than Jew and others felt the
opposite. Many Jews died fighting bravely for Germany and many more would have
done so again.

~~~
lispm
Hitler's view was that Jews are a race. A race without state. They live within
other states. They also have preserved their race in a cleaner form through
inbreeding, then other races.

In his world view there is a hierarchy and classification of races. The
'Arier'/'Germanen'/'Deutsche' are a productive race able to create culture.
There are races who can preserve culture and there are races, who can destroy
culture. The jews.

(I'm not a proponent of this view.)

~~~
staunch
This is the official Nazi doctrine but that doesn't mean Hitler's own views
aren't more complicated.

Like most cult leaders, he probably didn't believe his own bullshit the way
his followers did. I think there are some hints that this is true.

~~~
lispm
Hitler certainly believed his bullshit, but he did not believe all the
bullshit around him.

------
notahacker
I don't see any reason to take the "so be it" comment of a defeated,
distraught Hitler as a deeper expression of his philosophy than his
proclamations of a "thousand year Reich" or the motor cars and holiday camps
planned for a peaceful post-war Germany.

The other problem this theory has is that whilst the Jews have at various
times been accused of conspiring to impose ideologies as conflicting as
capitalism and communism, the notion that they were in fact responsible for
maintaining the ideas of peace between nation states and love for ones
neighbours is actually the polar opposite of the usual anti-Semitic narrative
of them being destabilising, war-profiteering Christ-killers. Was Hitler's
anti-Semitism that different from the anti-Semitism of his contemporaries,
including many responsible for actually implementing his Holocaust?

Then again, I've always thought that attempts to "understand Hitler" in
isolation from other expansionist military leaders might be missing the point.
Hitler was exceptional in the number of simultaneous wars he managed to start
and people he managed to kill (and unusual in his activities taking place in
many living people's memory) but that seems to have as much to do with
geography and technology as his worldview being more inherently destructive.
The general mixture of personality cult, rigid organization of domestic
society and accelerating expansionism and ethnic cleansing fits a pattern of
empire builders that stretches back across millennia, as do other things.
Indeed Hitler fits this pattern _far better_ than most of the other butchers
of the 20th century, not least when you consider his obsession with monumental
architecture and fondness for Speer and his "theory of ruin value"[1].

The bigger cause for concern for humanity might be that many of these admired
earlier empire builders - their victims dead in some cases for millennia - are
as admired today as they were in Hitler's day.

[1]Of course Snyder can posit an alternative explanation for that last bit.

~~~
emp_zealoth
Except he wasn't exceptional when it came to killing, his contemporary,
Stalin, beat him by a mile, not even counting excessively unnecessary manpower
losses during the actual war. He caused a massive famine. Executed thousands,
was an avid fan of various genocides. Deported hundreds of thousands of people
to Siberia, which was more often than not just a more cruel death sentence.
Decimated tens of thousands of polish intelligentsia
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katyn_massacre](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katyn_massacre)
Was plannig a massive war as well
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_P...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pact)
One could pile it up.

I find it rather mystifying that Hitler is the epitome of evil, when Stalin
takes it all to next level

------
NickHaflinger
Understanding Hitler’s anti-semitism? You could start with the most Holy
Office of the Inquisition and work your way forward. Most all nation states
were virulently Anti-Semitism to varying degrees.

~~~
heapcity
The idea that a 'nationalism' with particular ethical values in conflict with
Judaism, like Catholicism has moral and ethical values which conflict with
Judaism, as a source of anti-semitism was refuted and replaced with Darwinism
versus Judaism and the notion that the absence of ethical value was directly
opposed to ethical value.

------
lispm
> We all think of Hitler as the prototypical nationalist

Who is 'we'?

Hitler's theories around 'race' are well known.

Similar thinking:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houston_Stewart_Chamberlain#Di...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houston_Stewart_Chamberlain#Die_Grundlagen_.28The_Foundations.29)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Foundations_of_the_Ninetee...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Foundations_of_the_Nineteenth_Century)

------
garrettgrimsley
>The whole problem of the Jews exists only in nation states, for here their
energy and higher intelligence, their accumulated capital of spirit and will,
gathered from generation to generation through a long schooling in suffering,
must become so preponderant as to arouse mass envy and hatred. In almost all
contemporary nations, therefore – in direct proportion to the degree to which
they act up nationalistially – the literal obscenity of leading the Jews to
slaughter as scapegoats for every conceivable public and internal misfortune
is spreading."

—Friedrich Nietzsche, 1886

Snyder seems to ignore the plans for expulsion of Jews to areas both under and
outside of German control. This includes Palestine, which was specifically
mentioned when talking about Polish anti-antisemitism. Why omit this fact? As
for the argument that that the killing could only be done in a "zone of
anarchy" well, the Nazi-German state did not leave a vacuum after invading
Poland. Instead, they took over state functions. A genocidal state, but a
state nonetheless.

------
coolandsmartrr
I wonder where Hitler was inspired and adopted anti-Semitism. Some sources
attribute to his years of homelessness in Vienna, a city known for its
virulent anti-Semitism. Others blame it on composer Richard Wagner, of whom
Hilter was an ardent admirer of. While other musicians like Chopin were also
anti-Semitic, Wagner remains as the most notorious. His musical works suggest
disgust towards Jews, notably _Meistersinger_ and _Parsifal_ , while essays
like _Jewishness in Music_ express it more explicitly. But Wagnerian anit-
Semitism was rather cultural, as Stephen Fry put it once. [1] Now that
Wagner’s reputation has become retroactively tainted with its the association
to the more radical anti-Semitism of the Nazis, I’m thinking he would be
rolling in his grave.

[1] www.youtube.com/watch?v=16noW1H0yq8

------
danieltillett
The more I have learned about Hitler over the years the less I understand him.
At this stage I really have no idea what he was trying to accomplish or even
if he knew what he wanted to accomplish. To me his motivations are a mystery
wrapped in an enigma hidden inside a riddle.

------
rsync
"The book focuses on the integral role that the state and its institutions
played in determining the effectiveness of Hitler’s genocide. Where states
were destroyed, Jews were murdered; where the state remained intact, Jews
could find some protection in bureaucracies and passports. It was in the
stateless regions of Eastern Europe where the Nazis were able to experiment
with and calibrate the Final Solution"

Well, that's one way of looking at it.

I guess if you are a proponent, or defendant of statist, authoritarian power,
at some point you have to come up with some answer to the violence and
repression of statist, authoritarian actors like Hitler.

Later:

"And again, that’s only possible—killing Jews is only possible—because states
are destroyed."

I don't think this argument holds up when you extend your historical worldview
to Soviet Russia under Stalin:

"Judging from the Soviet records we now have, the number of people who died in
the Gulag between 1933 and 1945, while both Stalin and Hitler were in power,
was on the order of a million, perhaps a bit more. The total figure for the
entire Stalinist period is likely between two million and three million. The
Great Terror and other shooting actions killed no more than a million people,
probably a bit fewer."[1]

"The largest human catastrophe of Stalinism was the famine of 1930–1933, in
which more than five million people died. ... Of those who starved, the 3.3
million or so inhabitants of Soviet Ukraine who died in 1932 and 1933 were
victims of a deliberate killing policy related to nationality."[1]

That's the state and there's no argument. Perhaps they were not jews
specifically, but that probably hurts the pro-statist argument even more:
human beings (nazis) made human decisions to kill discriminately, whereas a
machine (the soviet state) just steamrolls indiscriminately.

Even if one stipulates that the occupying and invading German forces were not
"the state" (which I don't) it's still clear: the state is perfectly capable
of killing jews by the millions.

[1]
[http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/mar/10/hitler-...](http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/mar/10/hitler-
vs-stalin-who-killed-more/)

~~~
venomsnake
Genocide is pretty high energy expenditure affair. You need records, you need
logistics, you need system to minimize the false positives, you need a lot of
stuff that must be state provided.

Indiscriminate killing is easier. You just carpet bomb and wipe the ashes.

~~~
Crito
I don't think that is true at all. There have been _many_ genocides throughout
history, but how many have been characterized as industrial, documented, in
need of logistics, or particularly concerned with false identification?

Well the last one is questionable at all, but generally speaking the Holocaust
is spoken of as fairly unique in those other regards.

The general rule of thumb is that the only thing you need for a genocide is a
bunch of men willing to do it. You don't need trains or camps. You don't need
gas chambers or tabulating machines. You just need willing men.

~~~
venomsnake
Depends when indiscriminate killing turns into genocide. If I say - kill
everyone in this city, and don't care about false positives, it is mass
killing. The genocide requires precision.

And lets take srebrenica - finding all the muslim men and executing them is
obviously harder than just killing everyone in that area.

~~~
Crito
Ethnic cleansing is much more straightforward than you are making it out to
be.

How is it that these people can be targeted with discrimination or verbal
abuse hurled from across the street, but those same racists armed with
murderous intentions would be unable to find them? That's just silly.

Humans have been doing this longer than we've been writing down our own
history. "Industrial" genocides like the Holocaust are the exception, not the
rule.

------
EGreg
One should take into account the war hawkish right-wing xenophobia that was in
place for years leading up to the Nazi party:

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stab-in-the-
back_myth](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stab-in-the-back_myth)

Especially troubling today given right-wing attitudes towards immigrants with
this current election cycle in the US.

------
Pamar
I just changed trains in Ludwiglust (I am in Germany but not German) and
apparently it was a concentration camp site (and no more than 2 hours from
Berlin by train)... So while I find the article interesting I am a bit dubious
about the part where the historian says that "Jews could not be killed in situ
and had to be deported first".

~~~
foobar2020
Concentration camps were mainly in Poland, because at that time Poland had
about as many Jews (~3 mil) as the rest of the Europe combined (~3.5 mil), and
it was a fully controlled, occupied state. It was just an engineering
optimisation, however dark this sounds.

~~~
woodpanel
No, concentration camps were distributed throughout Germany as well. See here:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nazi_concentration_cam...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nazi_concentration_camps)
If you are talking about extermination camps however, then you're more
correct.

But I hope the author doesn't rest his claim solely on the fact on which side
of the border a camp site was built: Borders between Germany and Poland were
"fluent" to say the least until the end of WWII. Especially when he combines
"Borders" with "ethnic homogeneity". Many Germans lived in inter-war-Poland,
as did many Poles in inter-war-Germany. See here:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_minority_in_Poland#/med...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_minority_in_Poland#/media/File:German_language_frequency_in_Poland_based_on_Polish_census_of_1931.PNG)

------
hugh4
I don't think this guy is doing a great job of trying to understand Hitler by
using his own "intuition" and then searching back through Mein Kampf to find
things that support it.

The guy is acting like Hitler invented anti-Semitism. But really, it was an
extremely common piece of the cultural furniture in early 20th century
Germany. This being the case, is it really likely that Hitler's antisemitism
was somehow original and philosophically distinct from everyone else's? I
doubt it, I think it originated in the same place that it did for a lot of
other people, and like most anti-semites (or anti-various-other-things) he
tried to justify it in a number of different ways at different times.

It's not that hard to understand where German anti-semitism came from (of
course understanding something is not the same as excusing it), it's a
drearily common pattern that we see all over the world, any place and time
that we have two poorly-integrated groups living together and one is
statistically more successful than the other. The less successful group (which
may be smaller or larger than the more successful) inevitably grows to resent
the more successful group and blame their own lack of success on _them_.
Crises tend to exacerbate the resentment.

It's a pattern we've seen all over the world, all through history, and Nazi
Germany is unusual only in that it all happened to end particularly badly.

~~~
danieltillett
I do like that he is being honest about how historians think and reason. Start
with the conclusion and then work backwards.

~~~
pron
> Start with the conclusion and then work backwards.

That's just not true (I studied history in graduate school). It is true,
however, that sometimes you look at the facts and a certain pattern emerges,
and you then go back to find further evidence for that pattern. But you full-
well realize that you're by no means providing an absolute and complete model
of reality -- just an aspect of it. The reason is that in a complex system,
it's very hard to build models that are both "predictive" and descriptive. So
you settle for an approximation, with the assumption that your readers
understand it as such. Few historians claim that their model is complete.

------
andrewfong
The first thought I had while reading this is that Hitler, as described here,
would have hated Calvinball from Calvin & Hobbes.

The whole premise of Calvinball is that you make up the rules as you go along.
You don't win by being stronger or faster but by constantly redefining the
rules until you win by default. In Hitler's worldview though, there's no value
to these rules. They're just artificial constructs that pervert the true
nature of Hobbes, a tiger red of tooth and claw. Since Calvinball is
inextricably tied to Calvin, Calvin must die, so that the Hobbes can revert
back to the state of nature imagined by (Thomas) Hobbes, rather than the one
imagined by Calvin.

------
JesperRavn
Hitler was wrong in his opinion that Jews exploited the economic system for
nefarious means, or that Jews were entirely in control of the international
politics. On the other hand, he was correct that Jews (both as individuals,
and through Jewish political organizations) supported communism, and sought to
subvert the majority culture in the nations in which they lived. Many
moderates say the same thing. The difference is that _they_ say this is a good
thing. Anyone can say "Jews have, because of their history of oppression,
sought to deconstruct and subvert the dominant culture of [Western nation]"
and be thought a political moderate, as long as they assert that this is a
good thing. However, to make the same claim and assert that this is a bad
thing, makes one, well, a Nazi.

