Adolf Hitler’s persecution of the Jews was not a sudden impulse or an isolated act of madness. It was a slow construction, sustained and accepted by millions, that turned ideas into laws and prejudices into state policy. Behind every speech and every decree, there was a purpose. The persecution was fueled by beliefs, defeats, and ambitions that intersected at a specific moment in history, resulting in a system where hate became the norm and exclusion became a duty.
Hitler was born on April 20, 1889, in Braunau, a small Austrian town on the border with Bavaria. His father, Alois Hitler, was a customs official, a stable position that required discipline and obedience. His mother, Klara Pölzl, represented the traditional domestic model of the imperial provinces. The domestic environment combined authority and affection. Alois imposed the discipline of an official accustomed to hierarchy, while Klara compensated with constant protection. Adolf grew up under that contrast, described as a smart, stubborn child unwilling to submit to authority.
The family relocated several times due to the father’s work. They lived in Passau for several years, where the child became familiar with Bavarian language and idioms. This linguistic assimilation would later be decisive for his identification with German culture. In 1897, they returned to Austria and settled in Leonding near Linz. School records show uneven academic performance. He achieved outstanding grades in drawing and handwriting in early years, but his performance declined in secondary education. His father insisted on an administrative career, while the son wanted to dedicate himself to the arts.
The death of his father in January 1903 altered the family structure but did not improve his academic situation. Hitler repeated a year and left school without a diploma. His mother maintained the household with a state pension. The educational framework of the time was deeply influenced by German nationalism. In classrooms, manuals extolled the Prussian unification wars and the figure of Otto von Bismarck. The German identity was presented as a bearer of culture and order in contrast to the ethnic fragmentation of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
After the death of his father, domestic life revolved around his mother’s illness. Klara was diagnosed with cancer in 1907. Hitler took care of her while trying to prepare for the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. The family doctor recorded the affection and dedication with which the son accompanied the illness. Klara died in December 1907, marking the end of the family bond and economic support. From then on, Hitler was left without stable support or professional guidance.
In 1908, Hitler arrived in Vienna with the intention of entering the Academy of Fine Arts. The entrance exam turned out to be unfavorable. The jury rated him as technically correct but lacking originality in human figures. He was allowed to apply again the following year, but the evaluation was again negative. With that second rejection, his formal aspiration to become a painter ended. The maternal inheritance was exhausted in a few months, and by mid-1909, he was left without resources and turned to the municipal welfare system.
The records of the Meldemannstraße shelter mention him as a resident for several years. These establishments provided a bed, basic food, and access to reading. In that environment, he joined a group of young men who survived through temporary jobs or selling crafts. He sold watercolors to traders and tourists. Some companions recalled his habit of discussing politics and reading newspapers for hours. The Vienna Central Library offered free access to the press, and loan records show nationalist titles of German orientation.
Vienna was then an imperial city of almost 2 million inhabitants. Its population included communities from the entire Austro-Hungarian territory. Urban growth was fueled by immigration from the east, mostly Jewish. According to the census of 1910, they represented one-tenth of the population. Coexistence between groups was tense, and newspapers turned cultural differences into a constant topic of debate. Nationalist discourses simplified economic problems in terms of invasion or ethnic competition.
Viennese anti-Semitism did not emerge suddenly. Since the late 19th century, it had been a structural component of urban politics. Mayor Karl Lueger, leader of the Christian Social Party, had consolidated his power by appealing to popular Catholic sentiment and resentment against financial elites, often identified as Jewish. His anti-Semitism was political rather than racial. He used it as an instrument of cohesion among German Christian voters. Hitler attended rallies and observed the effectiveness of Lueger’s oratory. From him, he learned that a common enemy could unify the discontented.
Alongside that political anti-Semitism coexisted another of a more radical nature. Georg von Schönerer, a former deputy and leader of the Pan-German movement, proposed the union of Austria with Germany and the total exclusion of the Jews and Slavic peoples. His rhetoric appealed to racial purity and Germanic superiority. Hitler absorbed both models. From Lueger, he took the technique of emotional mobilization. From Schönerer, the racial interpretation of society.
In newspapers and everyday conversation, the theory of races was presented as a scientific explanation of history. Authors like Arthur de Gobineau and Houston Stewart Chamberlain were cited as authorities. In the popular versions of these theories, culture was associated with biology, and inequality was legitimized as a natural law. Hitler’s material life during those years was precarious but stable. The shelter offered sufficient hygiene and food conditions to avoid absolute misery. His routine was marked by reading, drawing, and observation.
On August 1, 1914, when Germany mobilized its forces, Hitler resided in Munich. Although he was still a subject of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he volunteered for the Bavarian Army and was accepted into the 16th Reserve Infantry Regiment, known as the List Regiment. He was assigned to the regiment’s messenger service, an intermediate role between the front and command posts. His task consisted of transporting orders between companies, traveling under fire.
During the fighting of October and November 1914, the regiment suffered severe losses. In December, Hitler received the Iron Cross second class for liaison duties under fire. In the summer of 1916, during the Battle of the Somme, he was wounded by shrapnel in the leg. He was evacuated to a rear hospital and then to centers in German territory. The convalescence allowed him to observe the internal situation of the country. Long queues for food, rising prices, and labor protests contrasted with the discipline of the front.
On August 4, 1918, Hitler received the Iron Cross first class, a decoration reserved for officers or non-commissioned officers. Its award to an enlisted soldier was exceptional. In October 1918, during a British mustard gas attack in Flanders, he suffered keratitis that caused temporary blindness. He was transferred to a hospital in Pasewalk in Pomerania. There, the news of the German collapse reached him. The Allied offensive, the naval mutinies, the Kaiser’s abdication, and finally the armistice of November 11.
For a soldier immobilized and dependent on medical staff, the defeat was perceived as a sudden and external event. Trench warfare had created a moral division between the front and the rear. When the defeat came, that mental structure allowed it to be attributed to domestic politics. The military defeat, which in strategic terms was due to Allied material superiority and logistical exhaustion, was reinterpreted as treason. That perception gave rise to the myth of the stab-in-the-back.
Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff, in their statements before a Reichstag commission, transferred the responsibility to the civil government and the moral weakness of the nation. Hindenburg uttered the phrase that would establish the legend. The army had been stabbed in the back. The concept shifted the discussion from logistics and strategy to internal politics. Nationalist newspapers reproduced it as a testimonial truth. Propaganda identified socialist leaders of Jewish origin as proof of an internal conspiracy.
In the summer of 1919, Germany was a disjointed country. The Weimar Republic was trying to assert itself amidst inflation, demobilization, and violence. In Bavaria, Hitler, 30 years old, remained as an auxiliary soldier in Munich. The Bavarian Reichswehr used ex-combatants with communication skills in political education courses. Captain Karl Mayr, head of the information department, organized lectures on the Marxist threat. Hitler first attended as a student and later as a lecturer.
The oldest document that contains his ideas is the Gemlich memorandum, dated September 16, 1919. He drafted it at the request of the information department in response to an inquiry about the Jewish question. It distinguishes between an emotional anti-Semitism, which leads to disorder, and a rational one aimed at legal exclusion. It defines Jews as a separate race and people and considers their influence as disintegrating for the state. It proposes to deny them citizenship and exclude them from public life.
In September 1919, Hitler attended a meeting of the German Workers Party, a small group founded by Anton Drexler and Karl Harrer. Its program combined nationalism, anti-Marxism, and criticism of financial capital. Hitler spoke out against a separatist attendee, and his oratory impressed Drexler, who proposed that he join. He enrolled on September 19 as member number 55. In February 1920, the group changed its name to the National Socialist German Workers Party.
On February 24, 1920, at the Hofbräuhaus in Munich, Hitler presented the 25-point program to 2,000 people. It demanded the nullification of the Treaty of Versailles, the union of all Germans, and the nationalization of large companies. It also established that only those of German blood could be citizens, explicitly excluding Jews. More than a government plan, it was an agitation platform. Hitler understood that form could replace structure. The meetings were transformed into spectacles where emotion replaced deliberation.
Between 1920 and 1921, the party grew rapidly in Bavaria. Hitler displaced Drexler and assumed the presidency in July 1921. He introduced the salute with the outstretched arm and adopted the black swastika on a white and red background. During this period, anti-Semitism moved from the margin to the center of the discourse. Hitler combined three elements: the idea of Jewish Marxism, the notion of international conspiracy, and the distinction between productive capital and financial capital, the latter identified with Jewish domination.
The economic crisis of 1922 and the hyperinflation of 1923 intensified the chaos. The occupation of the Ruhr by French and Belgian troops paralyzed industry. In that context, the promise of order attracted popular support. Mussolini’s march on Rome in October 1922 served as a model for German far-right groups. On November 8, 1923, Hitler burst in with armed men at the Bürgerbräukeller beer hall where Commissioner Gustav von Kahr was giving a speech. He proclaimed a national revolution.
The next day, when the columns marched towards the center of Munich, the police opened fire in front of the Feldherrnhalle. The coup known as the Munich Putsch failed within hours. Hitler was arrested and tried for high treason. During the trial, he used the courtroom as a platform. He was sentenced to five years in prison and served nine months in the Landsberg fortress. The trial and press coverage turned him into a national figure.
During his imprisonment, Hitler dictated to Rudolf Hess the text that would be published in two volumes under the title *Mein Kampf*. The first volume appeared in July 1925 and the second in December 1926. The book combined autobiography, historical interpretation, and ideological program. The conceptual axis was the permanent struggle between races and the existence of a world conspiracy of Judaism to dominate the planet through financial capitalism and Marxism.
In chapter 11, “People and Race,” he introduced the biological idea of racial inequality. Humanity was divided between creator races and inferior races, with the Aryan being the culture-generating one. The Jew was described as a parasite that degraded people through mixing, economic control, and cultural manipulation. The second volume developed the political consequences. It rejected parliamentarism and defended a system based on the Führer principle. In foreign policy, it proposed the conquest of living space towards the east.
The first editions had little circulation. In 1925, 9,000 copies were printed. In 1926, a little more than 6,000. Its dense style limited the reading. However, it became a reference text among militants. Starting in 1928, *Mein Kampf* acquired new relevance thanks to Joseph Goebbels, head of party propaganda. He understood that the book could be better disseminated through summaries, lectures, and articles. The propaganda eliminated biological terms and emphasized the ideas of internal betrayal, international Jewry, and national reconstruction.
The electoral growth of the party between 1928 and 1932 was partly due to that transformation. In the elections of 1928, the Nazis obtained 2.6% of the votes. In September 1930, in the midst of the global economic crisis, they reached 18.3%. Unemployment, recession, and the discrediting of traditional parties generated receptivity. Propaganda used all available means: press, posters, rallies, and since 1931, radio broadcasts. The image of Hitler as a providential Führer was supported by the narrative of *Mein Kampf*.
The normalization of anti-Semitism was consolidated through three mechanisms. The first was repetition. The Nazi press reiterated news every day linking financial or cultural scandals with supposed Jewish influence. The second was trivialization. Anti-Semitism was incorporated into graphic humor and common conversation. The third was pseudoscience. Conferences and articles presented racial theories as biological facts.
Between 1925 and 1932, more than 250,000 copies of *Mein Kampf* were printed. In some states, it was given as a gift at weddings and distributed in schools. The book went from marginal to a symbol of respectable adherence. When the party obtained 37.4% of the votes in July 1932, the book had fulfilled its function to turn anti-Semitism into collective morality.
The rise of Adolf Hitler to power on January 30, 1933, transformed partisan anti-Semitism into state policy. The process was consolidated through a legal and administrative framework aimed at excluding Jews from German life. The institutional reorganization was based on the principle of *Gleichschaltung*, or total coordination. Anti-Semitism stopped being a propaganda tool and came to define the social order.
The first explicit measure was the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service from April 7, 1933, which excluded non-Aryans from public administration. Thousands of teachers, judges, doctors, and officials were dismissed. On April 1, 1933, the regime organized a national boycott against Jewish businesses. The SA placed pickets in front of shops with signs that said, “German, defend yourself. Do not buy from the Jew.”
In the following months, universities, the press, and liberal professions applied exclusionary rules. In education, a law limited the number of Jewish students to 1.5%. In the press, a law prohibited non-Aryan editors. The category of Jew ceased to be confessional and became biological. In 1935, the Nuremberg Laws formalized that definition. The Reich Citizenship Law restricted political rights to those who had German or related blood. The Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor prohibited marriages and relationships between Jews and Aryans.
The decrees of November 1935 defined the categories. Three or four Jewish grandparents defined the full Jew, one or two the *Mischling* of first or second degree. The German bureaucracy developed genealogical certificates, racial tables, and family records. Churches, town halls, and registry offices cooperated to verify ancestry. Racism acquired the appearance of administrative legality.
Between 1936 and 1937, the regime sought to show stability. The Berlin Olympics offered a moderate image. Anti-Semitic signs were temporarily removed. However, economic exclusion continued. The process of Aryanization, the forced transfer of Jewish properties into Aryan hands, progressed through taxes, prohibitions, and forced sales. By 1937, more than 60% of Jewish businesses had passed to new owners.
In March 1938, Germany annexed Austria. The immediate implementation of racial laws in Vienna led to arrests, looting, and public humiliations. In August, a decree imposed adding the names Israel or Sara to all Jewish documents. In November, the assassination of the German diplomat Ernst vom Rath in Paris was used as a pretext for a coordinated act of violence. During the night of November 9 to 10, the Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, took place.
Troops of the SA and Hitler Youth destroyed synagogues, businesses, and homes throughout Germany and Austria. More than 1,000 synagogues were set on fire, and about 30,000 people were arrested and temporarily sent to concentration camps. The police were ordered not to intervene. Kristallnacht marked the transition from legal discrimination to physical persecution.
After the pogroms, the regime promoted forced immigration. International restrictions meant that the majority could not leave. The Central Office for Jewish Immigration, led by Reinhard Heydrich, centralized applications and confiscated assets before authorizing departures. Immigration became a process of legal plunder.
In 1939, the invasion of Poland expanded the scope of racial policy. Ghettos were created in major cities. The one in Łódź was established in April 1940. The one in Warsaw in October. Jews had to wear armbands with the Star of David and surrender properties. The Jewish councils imposed by the authorities administered rations and forced labor. The initial objective was concentration and labor exploitation. The conditions of overcrowding, hunger, and epidemics led to massive mortality.
In 1940, after the defeat of France, plans emerged for mass deportations. The most well-known was the Madagascar Plan, which proposed relocating 4 million Jews to the French colony under SS control. The lack of means and British control of the sea made it unfeasible, and it was abandoned that same year.
The invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 represented a turning point. Previous orders instructed the troops to act with maximum severity against racial and political enemies. In that context, state anti-Semitism, until then focused on exclusion and confinement, transformed into physical elimination. The Einsatzgruppen, mobile security units, accompanied the army with orders to shoot commissars, intellectuals, and entire Jewish communities.
Between 1933 and 1941, anti-Semitism evolved from administrative marginalization to systematic persecution. The Nuremberg Laws established its legal basis. Kristallnacht normalized the violence. The war extended the scale. The civil, military, and police institutions integrated into a unified network of repression. Exclusion ceased to be a political instrument and became a means of social reorganization under a fully consolidated racist state.