Hitler's hatred of Jews

Does Hitler's delusional exterminatory antisemitism already have its roots in his Vienna years before World War I, as he claims in his book "Mein Kampf"? Or is his fanatical hatred of Jews due to the chaos of the post-war years, when revolution and the Treaty of Versailles deeply shook Germany and Munich became a hotspot for völkisch-antisemitic conspiracy theories? Much speaks for the latter, as historian Ralf Georg Reuth demonstrates. For neither in Hitler's early years nor in his time as a World War soldier is there a single antisemitic testimony from him. From February 1919, there are even recordings showing him at the funeral of the assassinated Bavarian Prime Minister, the Jewish-born left-wing socialist Kurt Eisner. And shortly thereafter – during the Bavarian Soviet Republic, which was apostrophized as "Jewish" – Hitler demonstrably had himself elected to the soldiers' council of the "Red Army". The later dictator was – according to Reuth – initially a follower whose path to Jew-hater only began after the end of the short rule of the councils and under the impression of the devastating peace terms of the Treaty of Versailles in the spring of 1919. In his book, Reuth debunks the image of the early Jew-hater adopted by generations of historians from Hitler and provides a new answer to the question of the roots of the genocide of European Jews.


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