A Functionalist View Of the Holocaust

13 Pages 3282 Words

r, anti-Semitism would not become an overtly political issue in Germany until Hitler’s creation of National Socialist German Workers Party, or the Nazi party, in 1919.
As previously indicated, the Jews had garnered a status as a sort of universal scapegoat, starting with their supposed culpability in the crucifixion of Christ. Hitler aroused anti-Semitism by attributing Germany’s defeat in the First World War to the Jews.
Until the end of World War One in 1918, Germany had been a proud military nation. They had produced military luminaries like Carl von Clausewitz, Helmuth von Moltke and Otto von Bismarck. They had proven their military might in the late nineteenth century with their great victories in the 1866 Austro-Prussian War and the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1. Therefore, for Hitler to admit that Germany had lost fair and square would be great blow to Germany’s self-esteem; instead, he created the Deustchschultfrage, or stab-in-the-back theory, saying that Germany had been betrayed by those within, and Jews were especially culpa...