Hitler was obsessed with the idea of the superiority of the “pure” German race, which he called “Aryan,” and with the need for “Lebensraum,” or living space, for that race to expand. While imprisoned for treason for his role in the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, Hitler wrote the memoir and propaganda tract “ Mein Kampf” (or “my struggle”), in which he predicted a general European war that would result in “the extermination of the Jewish race in Germany.” Soon after World War I ended, Hitler joined the National German Workers’ Party, which became the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP), known to English speakers as the Nazis. Like many anti-Semites in Germany, he blamed the Jews for the country’s defeat in 1918. Born in Austria in 1889, he served in the German army during World War I. The roots of Adolf Hitler’s particularly virulent brand of anti-Semitism are unclear.
Swiss government and banking institutions have in recent years acknowledged their complicity with the Nazis and established funds to aid Holocaust survivors and other victims of human rights abuses, genocide or other catastrophes. Anti-Semitic feeling endured, however, in many cases taking on a racial character rather than a religious one.ĭid you know? Even in the early 21st century, the legacy of the Holocaust endures. The Enlightenment, during the 17th and 18th centuries, emphasized religious tolerance, and in the 19th century Napoleon Bonaparte and other European rulers enacted legislation that ended long-standing restrictions on Jews. Though use of the term itself dates only to the 1870s, there is evidence of hostility toward Jews long before the Holocaust-even as far back as the ancient world, when Roman authorities destroyed the Jewish temple in Jerusalem and forced Jews to leave Palestine.
Anti-Semitism in Europe did not begin with Adolf Hitler.
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