There was an economic boycott of German goods and services by the Jewish people. This was in early 1933 and was published in a British tabloid, the day after the Germans passed the Enabling Act (which may have been a coincidence ) The American Jewish committee was also involved According to the article in the Express, Hitler may have figured that suppressing the Jews would end the boycott, since he came to power on the platform of rebuilding German economy. http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/Black.html I think it was a combination of racism and politics.
Anti-Semitism had existed in Europe, especially East-Central Europe for centuries. It was just a culmination of all that historically-existing anti-Semitism and the general post-WW1 dissatisfaction. The Germans were wholly afraid and scared, their high position on the world sphere suddenly shattered from the legs down, and many saw certain minorities, ones already despised, as perpetrators of this sudden, sharp, change. They viewed this minority, who were stereotyped as wealthy and educated, as the penultimate evil in their country, and endeavoured to put themselves on what they saw the right path to a high position once more. This, however, does not and cannot justify the persecutions undertaken by the Nazi regime. Nothing ever can.
I dont believe the Nazis viewed the Jews as a scapegoat. Their desire to remove the Jewish population from their society had more to do with Hitler and Himmler's ideals of racial purity. After the 19th century work in linguistics determining that the languages of India, Persia and Europe were all related in their origins, the Nazis hatched the notion that higher Aryan civilization must have started in Germania and spread throughout southern Europe and Asia. Semitic peoples were thought to be a corrupting influence whose genetic blending with Nordics would lead to the eventual fall of higher culture. As Hitler noted in Mein Kamf: "All human culture, all the results of art, science and technology we see before us today, are almost exclusively the creative product of the Aryan. He is the Prometheus of mankind from whose bright forehead the divine spark of genius has sprung at all times, forever kindling anew the fire of knowledge which illuminated the night of silent mysteries, and caused man to climb the path to mastery over the other beings of this earth. Exclude him, and perhaps after a thousand years darkness will yet again descend on the earth. human culture will pass, and the world turn to desert."
You'll have to ask the Jewish virtual library What is inadequately addressed in WWII history is the German hatred for communism, their intense patriotism and nationalism, which turned them into barbarians. In the 1930ies the majority of the German people loved and supported Hitler, and equated Judaism with Bolshevism, which was their word for Communism. The Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles has an exhibit on the depth of anti-Semitism in Germany and the street fighting between the Nazis and the Reds, as the Communists were also called. The Holocaust was their Vietnam, their war on terror, their Gitmo and Abu Ghraib, to protect their economy and at the same time demonize the Jews and destroy them. Only they kept body counts. Of course the reason they were able to continue to scapegoat Jews for so many years is because nobody cared. http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?lang=en&ModuleId=10005182
She posted some quotes. I've seen other sources which suggest Hitler and his peers thought the Jews were trying to destroy Germany's economy. One was from a Jewish guy who was ridiculing the Germans and comparing their "paranoia" of Jews to that of the Arabs today. I was raised to think of Jews as God's chosen people who have been wrongly persecuted by bad people all over the world. It is America's job to protect them from the evil people around the world who mean to do them harm. What I keep coming back to is the question: Can America be so smart about something that the rest of the world seems so stupid about? Either there are legitimate reasons why Jewish people are disliked or there are not. With 51 of the 100 most powerful people in the world banking and media being Jews according to Vanity Fair there seems to be something going on which I don't fully understand.
You need a minority to blame things on. The Nazis were all about channeling anger. Germany was one of the most emotionally suppressed cultures around then. Hating Jews was an acceptible catharsis for Germans. You also needed a minority with some power. Jews in Germany included wealthy people and middle class people. To have simply aimed hatred at Gypsies, which they also did, would hardly have seemed sufficient. To say all the problems in Germany were caused by a very poor outcast group would nto have worked. No one would have bouth it.
No, that would have meant they knew that Jews were innocent. They thought the jews were guilty of all sorts of crimes and they focused on these in propaganda CONSTANTLY. Sure they were concerned about racial purity, but they harped on what jews were doing to German society ALL THE TIME.
Why have the Jews been persecuted in empire after empire, country after country? What does each instance of persecution share in common? Hmmm.
It's usually when Jews are doing "great" that they are kicked out. In pre-Hitler Germany they were 1% of the population and 50% of the doctors. How do you think that happens?
? Up until very recently, the better US universities imposed informal quotas to limit the number of Jews admitted - if they just went by transcripts and test scores they'd have filled their entering classes with Jews mostly, and legacy students. Medical schools are accused of doing that still. Since the Asian and Indian surge, that has been less of a problem. If you read Glieck's biography of Richard Feynman you'll find a chapter titled "Feynman of course is Jewish" - Feynman's Jewishness, which apparently had little to do with his life in general, was a possible obstacle to the furtherance of his studies in Physics: it was something he had to overcome, not an advantage. In old Europe under the Church, Christians were forbidden to charge interest on loaned money - and Jews were forbidden most other lucrative professions. So Jews were more or less forced into medicine (not a well-paid profession then) and money-lending, if they wanted educated work. Looking back, we see that forcing Jews into banking and medicine prior to the Industrial Revolution may have had unexpected consequences - similar in principle to the herding of American Indians unto apparently worthless land, prior to the discovery of the value of oil and gas.
Why did the Nazis invade France? Obviously, they were tired of those sneaky French taking over the world with their evil fashion industry. They just wanted to replace corrupting French fashion with good, wholesome Nazi fashion (more swastikas) so they marched in and installed a fascist puppet government. I mean, what other way is there to control fashion but fascist puppet governments? It's not like the French would have given up willingly :shrug: