Understanding Hitler’s Anti-Semitism | Hacker News Reader

Understanding Hitler’s Anti-Semitism

theatlantic.com

72 pointsPetiver56 comments

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.)

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.

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.

I thought that was interesting too, but it looks like that statement is contradicted later:

>‘Well if the Soviet Union didn’t collapse, it’s because of Jews beyond the Soviet Union in the rest of the world. The rest of the conspiracy around the world is supporting them and propping them up, and therefore we have to expand our war against the Jews.’

Agree. He makes a very strong case. The only part I have a hard to accepting is this:

>"He presents himself precisely as a German nationalist who is going to get the German economy going, who is going to bring Germans inside the borders of Germany. That’s how he presents himself, but that is a lie."

He was able to inspire so many people to do such crazy things. I just have a hard time seeing how he could tell a story that convincing if it was really a lie.

Hitler himself coined the term for how you accomplish such a feat: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_lie

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

No, but a fatalist would. And failure makes fatalists of us all. When we succeed, it's because we're brilliant and terrific. When we fail, it's fate.

Few people in history have ever failed quite as spectacularly as Hitler did by the end of the war, so it's not surprising that he was, by this stage, an angry fatalist.

Well, the German army did decide to march into Russia without bringing any winter equipment with them...

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

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.

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...

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... .

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.

Hitler wasn't interested in the welfare of the whole world. If Nazi Germany had won the war, large-scale extermination of Slavs was the next item on the list [1]. You could say the Third Reich was just getting warmed up with the Holocaust.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalplan_Ost

Hitler believed in something like an even more brutal form of Manifest destiny. He hoped the great crimes required for building a great empire would become distant memories. He believed he was the brave soldier willing to do the hard things required for his people's long-term success.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifest_destiny

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Removal_Act

Yeah, but here that's clearly a case of "the needs of a few Germans and 'Germanizable' populations outweigh the needs of the many non-Germans".

"The needs of the European settlers in America outweigh the needs of native savages."

Seems pretty much the same to me.

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?

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.

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.)

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.

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

>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?

Same way ”the muslims” are invading Europe, using Europeans naivety and their reproductive rates to make Europe into a Muslim colony. It doesn't need to make sense. It just has to be infuriating.

If this is a topic that fascinates you, I'd suggest you read Alice Miller's, "For Your Own Good."[1] This has always seemed to me to be the most plausible explanation for why Hitler and the German people acted in a way that seems so inexplicable.

It's the only explanation I've seen that starts from the assumption that there wasn't anything fundamentally different about Hitler or the Germans of the time but that their shared psychosis was the result of well-understood psychological phenomena...that the extraordinary result derives from the extraordinary circumstances in which they lived the formative parts of their lives.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Miller_(psychologist)#Fo...

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.

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 Was plannig a massive war as well https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_P... 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

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.

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.

> 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/The_Foundations_of_the_Ninetee...

>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.

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

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.

"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-...

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.

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.

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.

Shiboleth. Genocide is older than dirt.

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.

It was in the stateless regions of Eastern Europe where the Nazis were able to experiment with and calibrate the Final Solution

It's not at all clear if this is what Snyder says or if it is Delman's interpretation.

It seems an odd claim to me - many of the killings in Eastern Europe (Babi Yar[1] for example) used some elements[2] of the former state to help with the killings. It's true that these were mostly individuals who switched to the new powerbase, but still..

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babi_Yar

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_Auxiliary_Police#Par...

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

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

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".

KZ Wöbbelin (near Ludwigslust) only existed for few months right before the end of the war. The systematic killing of jews happened predominantly outside of Germany (even though there were many KZ in Germany as well of course. But they were much more focused on slave-labor than mass killing.)

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.

No, concentration camps were distributed throughout Germany as well. See here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nazi_concentration_cam... 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...

This part sounded dubious to me too, but then I visited the wikipedia page which lists all the killing camps outside Germany (most were in Poland), while some labour camps were in Germany proper [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nazi_concentration_cam...

As others have pointed out, it's important to distinguish concentration camps, whose aim was to hold prisoners, from extermination camps, whose aim was to kill them.

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.

> The guy is acting like Hitler invented anti-Semitism.

No he's not, he's saying Hitler used anti-Semitism as the basis for a crackpot philosophical theory about the nature of humanity. I'm not sure whether I agree with that, but it's certainly an interesting idea.

On HN we try to avoid generic dismissals of new work. I'm afraid this comment counts as one.

Yes, the burden of proof is on Snyder (not "this guy") to make an argument. But he just wrote a book about it and you haven't engaged with anything specific in the argument he did make. Nor have you offered a counter-argument; that anti-Semitism was common doesn't imply that Hitler's was garden-variety. To say it was unusual "only" in how it ended is weak—that is more than unusual enough. And to criticize Synder for starting with an intuition is unfair. Much scholarly work starts that way.

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

> 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.

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.

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.

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