Why Did Adolf Hitler Hate the Jews?

Anyone who learns about the Holocaust eventually asks the same question: why did Adolf Hitler hate the Jews so much? The scale of the murder was so vast that many people have searched for a personal explanation – some private wound that could account for it. The real answer is less dramatic, and more troubling.

The theories

A Jewish grandfather? Hitler’s father, Alois, was born to an unmarried woman, Maria Anna Schicklgruber, who never named the father. Rumors spread that Hitler’s grandfather was Jewish. At the Nuremberg Trials, Hitler’s lawyer Hans Frank claimed the father was the son of a Jewish family named Frankenberger, for whom Maria worked as a cook. No evidence has ever been found to support the story, or even that such a family existed.

His mother’s doctor? Hitler’s mother, Klara, died of breast cancer in 1907, at 47. Her doctor, Eduard Bloch, was Jewish, and the painful treatment he gave her did not save her life. Some have suggested Hitler blamed him. But Hitler wrote to thank Bloch after her death, and in 1938, after Germany annexed Austria, he made sure Bloch was protected until he could leave for the United States.

Neither theory explains anything. Having a disputed family tree, or losing a parent, does not turn a person into the architect of genocide.

Where the hatred came from

In Mein Kampf, written in the mid-1920s, Hitler said he had no strong feelings about Jews until he moved to Vienna as a young man, where he claimed his views changed. Many historians believe his hatred hardened after Germany’s defeat in World War I.

What is clear is that Hitler did not invent his antisemitism. He absorbed it from the world around him:

• A backlash against Jewish emancipation. In the 19th century, Jews across Europe left the ghettos and entered business, the professions and public life. Their success provoked resentment, and new “racial” theories claimed Jews were biologically different and dangerous.
• The “stab in the back” myth. After Germany lost World War I in 1918, many Germans blamed the Jews, falsely, for the defeat.
• Fear of revolution. Because some Jews were prominent in socialist and communist movements, and others in finance, antisemites accused Jews of being both revolutionaries and capitalists – disloyal either way.

Hitler combined these ideas into a single racial worldview, in which Jews – along with Roma, Slavs and others – were seen as inferior to so-called “Aryans,” and Jews were cast as the enemy behind all of Germany’s troubles.

Not one man alone

The most important part of the answer is this: Hitler could not have carried out the Holocaust by himself. Millions of ordinary Germans and their collaborators across Europe shared his beliefs, accepted them, or looked away. They wanted their country restored to greatness, and they were ready to believe the Jews were to blame for its fall.

That is why, at the March of the Living, we teach not only what happened, but how hatred spreads – and why it must be confronted early, before it becomes deadly.

Adapted from an article first published in Haaretz.

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