Has historian finally discovered real reason for Hitler's obsessive hatred of Jews?



Unmasked: Adolf Hitler's virulent hatred of the Jews led to the Holocaust, which claimed six million lives

Adolf Hitler's obsessive hatred for Jews was sparked by his experiences after World War One, according to a new book.

Respected historian Ralf-George Reuth argues the dictator blamed them for both the Russian revolution and the collapse of the German economy.

The claim is a stark contrast to previous theories that Hitler's anti-Semitism was spawned on the back streets of Vienna when he was a down-and-out in the lead up to 1914.

Historians have even speculated that he was partly-Jewish himself – or even that his mother died at the hands of an inept Jewish physician.

'Hitler’s Jewish Hatred; Cliché and Reality’draws on numerous archives to pinpoint the reasons behind the Holocaust, which claimed six million lives.

Reuth argues that what was probably lower middle-class bigotry shared by many at the time, morphed into murderous hatred for Hitler after 1919.

At the time almost half of all German private banks were Jewish owned, the stock exchange dominated by Jewish stockbrokers, almost half of the nation’s newspapers were Jewish run as were 80 per cent of chain stores.

It became fashionable to decry the loss of the war on Jewish financiers.

But Hitler, according to Reuth, also blamed Jews for the Russian revolution, citing Leon Trotsky’s faith, as well as that of Marx whose theories he followed and even Lenin, who was one-quarter Jewish.

When a Soviet republic was declared briefly in Munich that year, argues Reuth, the die was cast for Hitler to demonise the Jews as bearing responsibility for the world’s ills.

'With World War One lost and Germany in financial ruin, with revolution threatening, he came to see the Jews as solely responsible for stock-exchange capitalism, which caused acute poverty and suffering when it faltered, and Bolshevism,' said Reuth.

'These two events were pivotal in shaping his views of Jews and his subsequent plan to murder them all.

'He bought into the rumours and the whispers that blamed Jewish capitalists for stabbing Germany in the back.

The final solution: Millions of Jews died at Auschwitz Concentration Camp, seen here after the war ended in 1945

'Then he saw that many Jews played prominent roles in the brief Soviet republic founded in Munich in 1919, against everything Hitler the nationalist stood for.

'The two events, together with the Russian revolution, coalesced to turn them, in his mind, into scapegoats for everything.

'But it was only after World War One, not before. I show that he had many Jewish acquaintances in Vienna, despite his writing in Mein Kampf that he was sickened by the sight of the Jews he saw there.'

Reuth draws on a wealth of archival material showing how Hitler fed off the intellectuals of the day to shape his belief.

He quotes Nobel prize-winning novelist Thomas Mann who wrote in 1919 that he equated the Bolshevik revolution in Russia with the Jews.

Ernst Nolte, a Berlin historian, expounded this theory over 20 years ago in a paper that was not given much credit at the time.

Reuth is a distinguished Nazi-era biographer who wrote an acclaimed book about Third Reich propaganda master Josef Goebbels.

Flashpoint? Reuth claims the role of Jewish people in the 1917 Russian Revolution was one of the triggers for his hatred











