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It occurs to me that anti-semitism is a disease that ultimately destroys its host. If Germany "simply" wanted to win WW2, it should have cultivated its Jewish

• jandrese 3y ago
  The counterpoint is that Hitler wouldn't have been able to seize power so easily were it not for the clear "other" to demonize. That's just human nature. Fascists always need some identifiable enemy to rally against and there was no shortage of antisemitism already in the country to work with. This is why they also picked up on hating Gypsys and homosexuals. Fear mongering is one of the most efficient ways to gain power, but is a double edged sword since you can only ramp up the rhetoric if you want to keep your coalition together, the very force that brings you to power distracts you from your actual objectives.
  • timeon 3y ago
    Yes he wouldn't have been able to seize power. But what is power for? If he had not sized the power he would be able to see his grandchildren grow.
  • arp242 3y ago
    Hitler didn't exactly seize power "easily"; it took an attack on the German parliament (possibly orchestrated by the Nazis themselves), a paramilitary force intimidating opposition parties (and at times directly preventing them from voting in parliament), and an assassination campaign. In the end it's a "what if?" type question, but I think a decent case can be made that anti-Semitism was not key to the Nazi success, although it was part of it. The NSDAP was far from the first or only anti-Semitic party, even at the time. But it was the only major fascist party in Germany at the time. In other countries fascist parties managed without such strong explicit anti-Semitism, Italy and Spain being the most notable. In my reading of events of the 20s and 30s, it was much more of an ideological battle and disappointment with the ruling class than anything else. This is also why the communist party did well at the time, and one reason the Nazis spent so much effort fighting them even though there are more similarities than both liked to admit. Or in brief: most people voted mostly for the fascism, not anti-Semitism. The basic concept of "strong leader to get shit done" has been and remains popular in various forms for a long time, especially in times of hardship.
    • actionfromafar 3y ago
      Ah the fine line between fascist: “if you died you were weak and deserved to die” vs nazi: “you are weak, you deserve to die”
      • selimthegrim 3y ago
        In the end, Hitler basically stated the first axiom about Germany, so it really wasn’t a difference
    • kromem 3y ago
      Well, "most people" didn't actually vote for the fascism. The ticket was split enough that it ended up being minority rule.
      • arp242 3y ago
        "Most people" of the people who voted for the NSDAP, obviously.
    • greedo 3y ago
      Hitler's ascension to power was aided and abetted by the ruling class which thought he would be a tool they could control. And the Reichstag fire was just a pretext for Hitler to assume complete control; the Nazis were already in control of the German government at this point. And Hitler did seize power quite easily. After the Beer Hall Putsch was put down, he was given extremely light treatment for treason. Upon his release from Landsberg, he was funded by the industrialists and aristocracies who were afraid of a communist/socialist government. If you've read Mein Kampf or listened/read many of Hitler's speeches from 1924 through his seizure of power in 1933, there's one thread that runs through them all; anti-semitism and blaming the Jews for all of Germany's woes.
    • usrusr 3y ago
      Without the "your enemy is not capitalism, it's the Jew!" ploy that entire "working class brownshirts beat up communists on behalf of industrialists" thing would not have happened at all. Antisemitism was the keystone that kept their self-contradicting ideological mess from collapsing before they even got a foot on the ground.
• myth_drannon 3y ago
  Anti-semitism(or any other type of systematic hate) is not a disease but a symptom of a declining, rotten society. It's also wishful thinking that any society that engages in genocide will self-destruct. Plenty of historical examples exist where it continued to survive and collapsed for other reasons.
• arp242 3y ago
  From a Nazi perspective, what you're saying makes little sense. It would be similar to "we should enlist Ted Kaczynski and Timothy McVeigh in the army, because they've shown to be excellent at bombing stuff". That would be silly because these people and the organisations they associate with are considered a corrupting influence. In the Nazi view, Jews consisted a corrupting influence. "Hitler and his friends hated the Jews more than they wished for some positive outcome for Germany" really misunderstands the world-view of the Nazis, and what Hitler did and didn't believe. Anti-Semitism came rolling out of 19th century racial science; many people self-described themselves as such. As in: "against the Semitic race" (as opposed to the Aryan race), in the same way someone might describe as "anti-" any number of things today. A number of organisations in the late 19th century carried the label (e.g. Antisemitische Volkspartei in Germany, or Antisemitic League in France), and a number of elected candidates from other parties were explicitly and proudly self-described anti-Semitic. From outside the Nazi world-view, it of course makes a lot more sense. A lot of the Nazi rhetoric isn't even internally consistent and it was all a load of bollocks. But I don't think you can so easily separate Nazi-ism and the second world war.
  • greedo 3y ago
    Anti-Semitism as a 19th century development doesn't seem historically accurate. While anti-Semites in the 19th century glommed on to racial theories as backing for their hate, the origins of anti-Semitism are millennia old.
    • arp242 3y ago
      It's not; anti-Semitism as we know today is very much rooted in racial science (well, "science") of the 19th century. Before that it was an anti-religious thing: anti-Judaism, which was a markedly different and similar to Anti-Catholicism, anti-Protestantism, and things like that. Especially in the context of the Nazi ideology, this really matters. Recall that the Nazis killed more Slavs than Jews, who were also considered racially inferior, and the plan was to kill many more. Nazis treated the Danish, Dutch, French, English, etc. much better (no mass executions of prisoners of war, and the occupation of those countries was markedly different from the occupation of Slavic countries).
• antod 3y ago
  You're mixing up the unintended consequences with the intended consequences. Persecuting jews (and others) was an intended consequence and started a lot earlier than WW2. Hitler wanted war, but just to the east - not a world war with the west. He was convinced the French, British and Americans wouldn't care enough to resist him. WW2 was an unintended consequence.
  • littlestymaar 3y ago
    This explanation fails to describe what happened in 1940: when Hitler invaded Poland, UK and France declared war, but they stayed in France and Belgium so if Hitler only wanted war on the East, he could very much have it due to the reluctance of the colonial powers to attack. He deliberately chose to invade France. (And it was an overwhelming success by the way, his demise came from the betrayal of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact (and the even stupider move by the Japanese to attack the US at Pearl Harbor): had the conflict settled, or at least stick to a stalemate, in the positions of May 1940, WWII would have ended as a complete German and Japanese success.)
• freedomben 3y ago
  [flagged]
• sebastian_z 3y ago
  Indeed, that is what Sebastian Haffner argues in The Meaning of Hitler: In December 1941 he abandoned the goal of world conquest in favour of the Final solution–exterminating the Jews [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Meaning_of_Hitler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Meaning_of_Hitler
• neffy 3y ago
  It's an interesting question, and on the face of it, yes, the Nazi's probably would have won with the Jewish people on board. Similar arguments can be made about their invasion of Russia, given the support they would have received against Stalin without their accompanying genocide. The big but in this, is whether they would have gotten there to begin with. Picking on the Jews was a huge cash/property grab, which was used to buy their support with general German population. Are the Nazis still the Nazis without the genocide? Do they even end up wanting to start a war?
  • greedo 3y ago
    The only way the Nazis would have "won" is if they developed the atomic bomb before the US. Even with many of the emigres that helped with the Manhattan project, that might not have been possible. The Soviets were never going to surrender, same with the British, and once the Americans started supplying Britain with arms, they were safe. And then when Hitler declared war on the US, it was game over. The industrial might of the US alone was simply too powerful. "You have horses! What were you thinking? Dragging our asses half way around the world, interrupting our lives... For what, you ignorant, servile scum!"
    • neffy 3y ago
      I think the cash/property grab aspect was there from the beginning, and even in the 20´s you see it manifesting itself on a local level with intimidation etc. Klemperer's, I will bear witness, diaries from Dresden in that period are a fascinating read on the day to day impacts. Then as you say, it escalates culminating in Kristallnacht. But I think they would never have succeeded if it hadn´t been for the 1929 US crash, and the subsequent withdrawal of loans from Germany by the New York banks in response, which pushed Germany over the edge for the second time. As to how Germany wins WW2, or at least fights into a Cold War like stalemate. Germany continues the Battle of Britain for another month, rather than switching to bombing London, the RAF runs out of operational pilots (rather than newly trained pilots with 8 hours flying experience who have yet to fire their guns, they had plenty of those.). Or just that the men who made up the Polish and Czech squadrons that had the most kills in the Battle of Britain don´t make it across Europe to fight on for the RAF. Britain falls, the London government retreats to Canada, Hitler can now turn his attention to Russia, without having to fight a two front war. They might still have lost that one, Russia is big, and would presumably have been backed up by the USA and the remains of the British Empire, but the atom program in Germany isn´t that far behind, and they do have the V3 by 1944, so it hopefully? ends up in some kind of Cold War by the 1950´s. (Essentially the storyline of several alternate histories out there. and the SS-GB series.)
• deleted 3y ago
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• Anotheroneagain 3y ago
  That is, ironically, racist, as it sort of implies that jews are somehow the only ones capable of doing science.
  • atq2119 3y ago
    It's really not. It leaves open the possibility that others could fill in the gaps, given enough time. Their wasn't enough time, and path dependence matters.
    • Anotheroneagain 3y ago
      It doesn't seem like Germany suffered any setbacks in this regard. In fact it seems that this dispute was a major cause of antisemitism, rather than its result.
• huytersd 3y ago
  You have to tap into some strong basic instinct to get unquestioning massive support from the majority of the populace. In most cases, like in the case of Nazi germany, it is/was tapping into tribalism. Doing that builds up the in group’s self worth, imbues them with a feeling of superiority and generally makes them feel like they are living better, happier lives. Having someone to look down on is probably the easiest way to feel successful and happy. This isn’t rational thinking.
• mrguyorama 3y ago
  This actually comes up a lot in the "alternative history" community, who like to imagine ways "the nazis could have won", and in the end, they always come down to "If the nazis had just been less nazi, they could have survived". Nazism was society built upon hatred and lies, including lying to yourself. When you are no longer connected to reality in such a way, you miss very clear details, things like "Hey maybe we can't win against everyone at the same time"