ook the “Jewish problem” seriously liked to solve it by assimilating the Jews into the larger population or else repealing their emancipation and restoring the old discriminatory laws. Even the toughest that may have thought there was a Jewish conspiracy to dominate the economy, recommended their expulsion as a remedy of last resort. So I believe that anti-Semitism was necessary prior to the Holocaust, but did not make it inevitable.I have learned that after World War I, Europe experienced severe economic and political problems that intensified anti-Semitism almost everywhere. This added to the old charges that Jews were unpatriotic and greedy and there was the accusation that they were behind the spread of Communism. In Germany, Adolf Hitler, who had become a racial anti-Semite as a youth in his birth country of Austria, made attacks on the Jews from the beginning of his career in the Nazi party in postwar Munich. Such attacks became the mainstay of Nazi propaganda throughout his rise to power, but he did not always use them. Hitler and his followers used these attacks when it played for their position and not when it served against them. However, once in power, the Nazis showed that they were sincere anti-Semites from the start. Jews were fired from government jobs, and were subjected to discriminatory laws, sporadic economic boycotts, and physical violence, all designed and used to make them despair of a future in Germany and leave the country. In 1935 the infamous Nuremberg Laws deprived Jews of their German citizenship and outlawed sexual relations between Jews and “Aryans.” The Germans did not press too hard at first. In the beginning, Jews were only sent to concentration camps if they had been active in anti-Nazi political parties. Emigration or deportation remained the Nazi solutions to the “Jewish problem” throughout the first year of World War II. The Nazi party discussed sendin...
