Why did the Nazis hate the Jews so

much?
DAVID CESARANI: The Nazis werent the only people who hated Jews
during the 20th Century, but they hated Jews in a different way to most
other people. Theres a long history of conflict between Judaism and
Christianity, a millennia of conflict. Theres also a long history of
conflict between Jews and non-Jews because of the social and
economic relations between Jews wherever there have been
substantial communities of the Jewish population and non-Jews around
them. But those historic conflicts were contained within religious
understandings - a conflict between Christianity and Judaism, and they
were social, economic and sometimes political conflicts. What made
the Nazis hatred of the Jews so unusual is that it was racial and it was
biological. They believed that the Jews were not just the followers of an
abhorrent religious doctrine, or that the Jews had grabbed too much
economic influence, or even that they were too intrusive in politics or
culture: what made the Nazis hatred of the Jews so different is that
they believed that the Jews were biologically and racially distinct and
that there was a kind of biological struggle for dominance over the
entire human race between the Jews and everybody else.
This wasnt something that could be solved through religious debate
and argument, the conversion of the Jews, for example, wouldnt do.
The Nazis hated assimilated and converted Jews as much as they
hated orthodox Jews. This was a struggle that was almost zoological,
from the animal world. This was a struggle for survival between the
human race and this Jewish species that the core group of the Nazis
invested with almost a kind of supernatural demonic power, which was
absolutely unprecedented.
LAURENCE REES: How and why did people take that seriously?
DAVID CESARANI: One of the peculiar developments in the middle of
the 20th Century which makes Nazi anti-Semitism so powerful and
ultimately so lethal is not that the Nazis were able to spread their
poisonous fantasies through everybody elses minds, its that there
was a sufficient overlap between a traditional dislike of Jews and the

Nazis own very radical, cosmological, biological hatred of the Jews. It

wasnt until too late in the day that people who disliked Jews for
religious, social or political reasons, that were very traditional and
actually rather conservative, realised that what the Nazis had in mind
in their dealing with the Jews was something very different indeed.
Lets take the Catholic Church, for example. The Catholic Church was
very happy to convert Jews. Catholics believed that Christ would return
when all the Jews were converted and this was a fundamental element
of Christian doctrine, more exaggerated in certain Protestant sects but
nevertheless present amongst the Catholics.
Catholics, therefore, saw the Jews as a bit of a problem. Certainly if
they were radical Jews, Bolsheviks Jews, but if these Jews would see
the truth, see the light, would convert to Christianity and become good
Catholics, then the problem of the Jews would disappear. They didnt
want to kill Jews.
And when they realised that the Nazis' solution to the so-called Jewish
question was murder, the vast majority of Catholics were appalled by
this and many of them, as we know, risked their lives to save Jews;
they believed that Catholicism required them to save the lives of Jews
because all human life was sacred. Now, what separated Nazi antiSemitism from other anti-Semitism is the Nazis did not believe that all
human life was sacred. They certainly didnt believe that the lives of
Jews were sacred, on the contrary they believed that every Jewish life,
even a child, was a threat to the fatherland, the German Volk, and the
human race, and had to be exterminated. That kind of biological, racial
hatred was something quite unprecedented in human history. The
Nazis were able to wrap it up in traditional hatred of Judaism, they
used traditional stereotypes, and it wasnt until too late in the day that
people realised that what the Nazis had in mind was very different to
what most anti-Semites had believed and had practised for centuries
beforehand.
LAURENCE REES: How important was the feeling a number of nonJewish Germans had about the Jewish role in the First World War?
DAVID CESARANI: Another thing that separates the Nazis apart from

other people who dislike Jews is that the Nazis believed that the Jews
had acquired vast power, and that they had used this power in a
malign way. It was the power of the Jews that had led to the Bolshevik
revolution, it was the power of the Jews that had led to revolution in
Germany, had stabbed the German Army in the back and had brought
down Imperial Germany. In the Nazis world vision not only were the
Jews a force for evil, a Manichean, demonic force for evil, but they had
vast power, they had their hands on the levers of power. They had to
be eliminated, they had to be deprived of that power, they had to be
broken and then destroyed. To the Nazis the entire course of world
history vindicated that interpretation of Jewish power.
What happened in 1918 was simply one more example of the power of
the Jews, and the level and power of the Jews. One reason that Hitler
was keen to see the Jews segregated in Nazi Germany and subjected to
increasingly harsh measures once the Second World War began, and
why he wanted Jews segregated and eventually destroyed throughout
the Nazi sphere of influence while the Nazis were fighting the war, was
that he believed that if Jews were allowed to exist freely, to hold what
he believed was economic and political power while Germany was at
war, if they were within the German sphere of influence, they would do
what they did in November 1918; they would stab Germany in the
back.
So in Hitlers eyes you had to destroy Jewish community after Jewish
community wherever the Germans conquered, the countries they
occupied, even the Jewish communities that were their allies - those
Jewish communities had to be destroyed otherwise they would subvert
the war effort and stab Germany in the back. That was a lesson that he
had learned from 1918 but it was something that he believed could be
seen throughout the workings of history: the malign power of the Jew.
LAURENCE REES: But there is no real evidence that anyone can point
to of any reality behind any of this?
DAVID CESARANI: Hitlers not unique in believing that there are
mysterious and malign forces at work behind the scenes of history.
Wherever life is complicated, and life is usually complicated, wherever

political developments or the relations between states begin to unfold

in a way that is difficult to comprehend, certainly difficult for ordinary
people to comprehend, there is a temptation to see the hidden hand at
work; hidden forces that cannot be identified. The only way that many
people can explain what is happening to them is as the result of a
conspiracy of hidden forces, and that fantasy has enormous appeal,
and there are ruthless, cynical people who are willing to exploit that.
Now, Hitler actually believed in this paranoid view of world history.
There were others who went along with that because they knew it was
a way of mobilising public opinion, getting voters into the polls to vote
for them.
LAURENCE REES: And theres this profound sense of illogicality,
because theyre believing that the Jews are behind Capitalism in
America and theyre also behind Bolshevism, the opposite ideology, in
the Soviet Union. So how are they holding those two things together?
DAVID CESARANI: Its nonsensical in one way but its also very
sensible in another way. In this country, in Britain in the 20th Century,
you find many donors to political parties who will donate money to the
Conservatives and to the Labour Party just in case one wins and the
other loses. People always try and back both sides against the middle.
It is not inconceivable to believe that there are certain political forces
in the modern world in the 21st Century. Its very common for
corporations to embody this, who are behind all political parties of the
left or the right, and you make sure that whoever is on tops interests
come through. So what appears to be a nonsensical belief that the
Jews could be behind Capitalism and Communism at the same time is
not that unusual, and in fact the great corporations during the 20th
Century did have economic relations with the Capitalist countries and
with the Communist countries. Fiat in Italy had jolly good relations with
the Communist parties as well as being a backer of fascism.
LAURENCE REES: But surely there's more to it than that. What this
view of the Jews relies upon, is the belief that the Jews are operating
without any core beliefs at all - other than crude self-interest. And the
people who believe the Jews are like this, are thus, themselves,
operating with a massive level of cynicism about how the world is

structured?
DAVID CESARANI: We think of Hitler alone and we think of the great
leaders as alone, but usually they are surrounded by a core or a clique,
and there can be different world views or different ways of seeing
politics amongst these groups. With Hitler you have absolute certainty
and a measure of cynicism, but in a character like Goering you have
absolute cynicism and not much absolutism. Hitler was quite unusual
in that he did have a very rigid world view and a set of policies that he
pursued. He was willing to trim at certain times, but he was fairly
relentless. Other Nazis were much more flexible in their beliefs and
extremely cynical in appearing to be absolutist. Himmler is one of the
most notorious examples of this. You would have thought that Himmler
was actually rigid in his beliefs, but at crucial moments Himmler was
willing and able to be very, very flexible. And I think what makes the
Nazi political machine and certainly its political leadership so
dangerous is that it combined elements of absolute certainty with
other elements of incredible cynicism and flexibility. Thats a very
unusual combination. It enabled them to take power, to hold power
and it almost led to them winning the Second World War.