Why hitler hated jews wikipedia

As Europe became more secular, many places lifted most legal restrictions on Jews. This, however, did not mean the end of antisemitism. In addition to religious antisemitism, other types of antisemitism took hold in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries. These new forms included economic, nationalist, and racial antisemitism. In the 19th century, antisemites falsely claimed that Jews were responsible for many social and political ills in modern, industrial society.

Theories of race, eugenics , and Social Darwinism falsely justified these hatreds. Nazi prejudice against Jews drew upon all of these elements, but especially racial antisemitism.

Racial antisemitism is the idea that Jews are a separate and inferior race. The Nazi Party promoted a particularly virulent form of racial antisemitism. The Nazis believed that the world was divided into distinct races and that some of these races were superior to others. According to the Nazis, Jews were a threat that needed to be removed from German society. Almost immediately, the Nazi German regime which called itself the Third Reich excluded Jews from German economic, political, social, and cultural life.

Throughout the s, the regime increasingly pressured Jews to emigrate. But the Nazi persecution of Jews spread beyond Germany. Throughout the s, Nazi Germany pursued an aggressive foreign policy. Prewar and wartime territorial expansion eventually brought millions more Jewish people under German control. During this time, Germany annexed neighboring Austria and the Sudetenland and occupied the Czech lands.

Over the next two years, Germany invaded and occupied much of Europe, including western parts of the Soviet Union. Nazi Germany further extended its control by forming alliances with the governments of Italy , Hungary , Romania , and Bulgaria. It also created puppet states in Slovakia and Croatia. Together these countries made up the European members of the Axis alliance , which also included Japan. By —as a result of annexations, invasions, occupations, and alliances—Nazi Germany controlled most of Europe and parts of North Africa.

Nazi control brought harsh policies and ultimately mass murder to Jewish civilians across Europe. The Nazis and their allies and collaborators murdered six million Jews. Geography of the Holocaust. Between and , Nazi Germany and its allies and collaborators implemented a wide range of anti-Jewish policies and measures.

These policies varied from place to place. Thus, not all Jews experienced the Holocaust in the same way. But in all instances, millions of people were persecuted simply because they were identified as Jewish. Throughout German-controlled and aligned territories, the persecution of Jews took a variety of forms:.

Many Jews died as a result of these policies. But before , the systematic mass murder of all Jews was not Nazi policy. It was the last stage of the Holocaust and took place from to Though many Jews were killed before the "Final Solution" began, the vast majority of Jewish victims were murdered during this period.

There were two main methods of killing. One method was mass shooting. German units carried out mass shootings on the outskirts of villages, towns, and cities throughout eastern Europe. The other method was asphyxiation with poison gas. Gassing operations were conducted at killing centers and with mobile gas vans. The Nazi German regime perpetrated mass shootings of civilians on a scale never seen before.

At first, these units targeted Jewish men of military age. But by August , they had started massacring entire Jewish communities. These massacres were often conducted in broad daylight and in full view and earshot of local residents.

Mass shooting operations took place in more than 1, cities, towns, and villages across eastern Europe. German units tasked with murdering the local Jewish population moved throughout the region committing horrific massacres. Typically, these units would enter a town and round up the Jewish civilians. They would then take the Jewish residents to the outskirts of the town.

Next, they would force them to dig a mass grave or take them to mass graves prepared in advance. Sometimes, these massacres involved the use of specially designed mobile gas vans.

Perpetrators would use these vans to suffocate victims with carbon monoxide exhaust. Germans also carried out mass shootings at killing sites in occupied eastern Europe. Typically these were located near large cities.

At these killing sites, Germans and local collaborators murdered tens of thousands of Jews from the Kovno, Riga, and Minsk ghettos.

They also shot tens of thousands of German, Austrian, and Czech Jews at these killing sites. At Maly Trostenets, thousands of victims were also murdered in gas vans. The German military Wehrmacht provided logistical support and manpower. Some Wehrmacht units also carried out massacres. In many places, local auxiliary units working with the SS and police participated in the mass shootings.

These auxiliary units were made up of local civilian, military, and police officials. As many as 2 million Jews were murdered in mass shootings or gas vans in territories seized from Soviet forces. In late , the Nazi regime began building specially designed, stationary killing centers in German-occupied Poland.

They built these killing centers for the sole purpose of efficiently murdering Jews on a mass scale. The primary means of murder at the killing centers was poisonous gas released into sealed gas chambers or vans. German authorities, with the help of their allies and collaborators, transported Jews from across Europe to these killing centers. In order to efficiently transport Jews to the killing centers, German authorities used the extensive European railroad system , as well as other means of transportation.

In many cases the rail cars on the trains were cattle or freight cars; in other instances they were passenger cars. The conditions on deportation transports were horrific. German and collaborating local authorities forced Jews of all ages into overcrowded railcars. They often had to stand, sometimes for days, until the train reached its destination. The perpetrators deprived them of food, water, bathrooms, heat, and medical care.

Jews frequently died en route from the inhumane conditions. The vast majority of Jews deported to killing centers were gassed almost immediately after their arrival. Some Jews whom German officials believed to be healthy and strong enough were selected for forced labor. My mother ran over to me and grabbed me by the shoulders, and she told me "Leibele, I'm not going to see you no more.

Take care of your brother. At all five killing centers, German officials forced some Jewish prisoners to assist in the killing process. Special units disposed of the millions of corpses through mass burial, in burning pits, or by burning them in large, specially designed crematoria.

Nearly 2. Ghettos were areas of cities or towns where German occupiers forced Jews to live in overcrowded and unsanitary conditions. German authorities often enclosed these areas by building walls or other barriers. Guards prevented Jews from leaving without permission.

Some ghettos existed for years, but others existed only for months, weeks, or even days as holding sites prior to deportation or murder. German officials first created ghettos in — in German-occupied Poland. Beginning in June , German officials also established them in newly conquered territories in eastern Europe following the German attack on the Soviet Union.

German authorities and their allies and collaborators also established ghettos in other parts of Europe. Notably, in , German and Hungarian authorities created temporary ghettos to centralize and control Jews prior to their deportation from Hungary. German authorities originally established the ghettos to isolate and control the large local Jewish populations in occupied eastern Europe.

Bloch thanking him for his devoted care. Three decades later, in post-Anschluss Austria in , when Bloch wrote to the chancellor asking for help, Hitler arranged for him to be spared the harsh measures being taken against Jews until he could make arrangements to emigrate to the United States, where he died in According to Benjamin Netanyahu, Hitler would have sufficed with expelling the Jews from Germany, but Husseini complained that if he did that, they would just come to Palestine.

Anti-Semitism , some of it murderous, rose across the continent, including in Germany. When the Jews were kept apart in the ghetto, and limited to certain professions, it was possible to accuse them of clannishness, and resent the interest they charged on loans. But when they emerged from the ghetto, and became captains of industry and finance, and socially and intellectually prominent, there was a whole new set of reasons to hate them.

The success of the emancipated Jews was perhaps even more galling than the poverty and degradation of disenfranchised Jews — and it gave rise to racial theories that posited an essential biological difference in them. His political theories blended with increasingly technical racial theories that imagined the Jews, along with other groups like Slavs and Gypsies, as biologically inferior to Aryans, the white northern European race that pure Germans were presumed to belong to.

However perverted his thinking and outrageous his theories, though, and whatever personal experiences he did have that may have turned him against Jews, Hitler was supported at every level of German society by people who were ready to see their country return to the greatness they felt had been denied it, and to believe that it was the Jews who were responsible for that fall from grace. Via the offices of the Sicherheitsdienst the German security police , a prison in Amsterdam, and the Westerbork transit camp, the people from the Secret Annex were put on transport to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp.

The train journey took three days, during which Anne and over a thousand others were packed closely together in cattle wagons. There was little food and water and only a barrel for a toilet.

Upon arrival at Auschwitz, Nazi doctors checked to see who would and who would not be able to do heavy forced labour. Around people from Anne's transport were immediately taken to the gas chambers and murdered. Anne, Margot and their mother were sent to the labour camp for women. Otto ended up in a camp for men. In early November , Anne was put on transport again. She was deported to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp with Margot.

Their parents stayed behind in Auschwitz. The conditions in Bergen-Belsen were horrible too. There was a lack of food, it was cold, wet and there were contagious diseases. Anne and Margot contracted typhus.

In February they both died owing to its effects, Margot first, Anne shortly afterwards. He was liberated from Auschwitz by the Russians and during his long journey back to the Netherlands he learned that his wife Edith had died.

Once in the Netherlands, he heard that Anne and Margot were no longer alive either. Anne's writing made a deep impression on Otto. He read that Anne had wanted to become a writer or a journalist and that she had intended to publish her stories about life in the Secret Annex.

And that was not all: the book was later translated into around 70 languages and adapted for stage and screen.