‘Why did Hitler hate the Jews?’

I remember a macabre joke that was told during the war. Jacob asks Daniel: ‘Who started the war?’ and Daniel answers: ‘The Jews and the cyclists.’ ‘Why the cyclists?’ asks Jacob. ‘Why the Jews?’ Daniel replies.

Growing up, I slowly became aware of the world outside my little room, the big world. That other children lived in different conditions, that not everyone spoke the same language, that not everyone went to the synagogue like I did. As I grew older, I understood more of my parents’ conversations, and I began to feel afraid. What was happening? My parents talked about politics, about the coming elections and the risk that us Jews would be in trouble if the anti-Semitic farmers’ party won. The liberals were still in power, and I was mighty proud that Papa’s oldest brother was a member of parliament. At the same time, I listened in on discussions about Germany, the country far away, where a party that persecuted Jews was in power. ‘Why?’ I asked.

My father told me about the history of anti-Semitism. How, far back in time, people believed in many different gods. In Ur, in Mesopotamia, there was a small tribe led by a man named Terah, an idol maker. His son Abraham doubted that some lifeless lumps of clay could rule the world. He arrived at the conviction that there must be an invisible higher power. A new religion was born — monotheism, the belief in one true God — and Abraham became its founding father. The religion was given the name Judaism, and it spread. But the rest of the world had a hard time accepting it.

After the birth of Christ, a new kind of monotheism began to spread. It was known as Christianity. Jesus himself was a Jew, a rabbi in one of the various Jewish factions. Soon, more people followed Jesus’ doctrine, and his disciples went out into the world to convert heathens. The Christian prophets tried to convince the Jews to adopt Christianity, but when the Jews steadfastly refused, they were accused of having murdered Christ. The persecution of the Jews took increasingly hateful forms.

Various unfounded accusations began to spread and witch-hunts of Jews became commonplace over the centuries. Two of these accusations in particular have survived until today, despite the fact that their groundlessness has been proven time and time again.

One of them is that Jews murder little children and use their blood to bake bread for Easter. The first time this rumour spread was in the Middle Ages, in a village in Eastern Europe. One day in early spring, a young Christian boy disappeared, and the Jewish baker in the village was accused of having slaughtered the child to use his blood for the Easter bread. False witnesses were lined up, who claimed to have seen the incident. That was enough for the villagers to initiate a pogrom: they armed themselves with cudgels and marched on the Jews, ready to murder every last one of them.

Later, when the ice on the top of the nearby lake melted, the child’s dead body floated to the surface. But that did not help. Soon, the next village would make the same accusation when a child went through the ice. The last trial on the basis of such an allegation was held in 1883 in Hungary.

The other unfounded accusation was a concoction of lies originating in Tsarist Russia, compiled in a pamphlet titled The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This was a fabrication about how the Jews held various leading positions all over the world. In a meeting at the end of the nineteenth century, it claimed, they had drawn up a detailed plan for achieving global domination. Hitler took this paranoid old wives’ tale as blood-tainted truth; it led to his fear of the Jews, and expressed itself through aggressive hatred and his determination to exterminate every last one of them.

Hitler’s hatred for the Jews was so strong that you could say that he was not waging war against the Allies, but against the Jews. Even when there were no more train seats left for transporting soldiers to the front, he continued to mobilise carriages for the transport of Jews to Auschwitz.

Paradoxically, the German population at large was not anti-Semitic. There was therefore a strong need to foster anti-Semitism among the people, and Goebbels, the minister of propaganda, was ingenious at this. Film, art, literature, education — everything was permeated by anti-Semitic doctrine. Prejudices were cemented, and every German child was taught that the Jews were not people, they were to be destroyed. Jews were vermin to be exterminated, Jews were a cancerous growth on the clean body of the Reich, and the cancer had to be excised.

A simple answer to the question: Hitler hated the Jews because they were Jews.