Why and how did antisemitism play such an important part in Nazi ideology?

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Why and how did antisemitism play such an important part in Nazi ideology?

Introduction

Ideological thinking is at least as old as the Ancient Greeks, and beyond the idea of a political doctrine. Ideology is a system of beliefs that portrays and validates a prefered political order for society, and offers an approach. The Nazis (National Socialist German Worker’s Party), for example, stressed the superiority of the Aryan race. The purpose of this essay is to discuss the issue of why and how did antisemitism play such an important part in Nazi ideology.  

Brief introduction to Nazism

The Nazi party is the most recognised example of Fascism - an extreme form of right-wing ideology that celebrates the nation or the race as an organic community surpassing all other loyalties. Fascism first arose in the early part of the twentieth-century in Europe. It was a response to the rapid social upheaval, the devastation of World War I, and the Bolshevik Revolution. Fascism emphasised a myth of national or racial rebirth after a period of decline and destruction. Thus, Fascism called for a ‘spiritual revolution’ against signs of moral decay such as individualism and materialsm, and seeked to purge ‘alien’ forces and groups that threatened the organic community.

When the Nazis came to power in 1933 they began to introduce a set of ideas into the German society. They offered the German population an easy solution to all their problems – eliminating Jews and democracy. The Nazis cleverly played on the ‘political paranoia’ of the middle class, and the Jews and communists worked excellently as representations of the enemy. These ideas were based on the Nazi ideology and policies, which had been outlined by Hitler in his book “Mein Kampf” (“My Struggle”) a few years earlier. Nazis also stressed the superiority of the Aryan race, calling for the unification of all German-speaking peoples into one single empire. The overall aim for Nazis was to create a generation of racially pure Germans who were ready to serve their country. They celebrated the nation or the race as an organic community transcending all other loyalties, and promoted racial superiority doctrines, ethnic persecution, imperialist expansion, and genocide. Hitler used his book “Mein Kampf” to establish a plan of action for creating this racially pure state. However, unlike Fascism, the state for Nazis was second in importance, behind only racial purity for the nation.

Origins of antisemitism

Antisemitism was first invented in Germany in the 1870s by the German journalist Wilhelm Marr to describe the ‘non confessional’ hatred of the Jews. Early antisemites stressed that they did not oppose Jews for religious reasons, but rather claimed to be motivated by social, political, economic or ‘racial’ factors. In the late nineteenth century Jews as a social and national group, were portrayed as being fundamentally ‘alien’ to their fellow citizens. The Jews were the only minority in this pagan world that claimed Judaism as being the sole truth and the supreme moral teaching. Not only did they persist in their historic survival as separate social and religious group, they even refused to interact with the rest of society due to their dietary laws, Sabbath observance and prohibition on intermarriage. This provoked a great deal of hostility.

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Why antisemitism was one of the elements of Nazi ideology?  

Modern antisemitism was strongly present in the ideologies and policies adopted by Adolf Hitler as head of the German Nazi State. In Hitler’s first written political statement on 16 September 1919, the future leader of the Third Reich supported a so-called ‘rational’ systematic antisemitism that would aim at eliminating the Jews from the German state.  In his early speeches during the 1920s he referred to the Jews as being made in the image of the Devil, a universal form of ‘racial tuberculosis” or a sub human species of ...

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