Re: WHY HITLER KILLED THE JEWS?

Yamashita <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> I am confounded by this question for the last 50 years.

And you will not get a quick answer here, I am afraid. Thousands of
books and millions of articles have been published about that question.
Every totalitarian system needs some kind of scapegoat, some "common
enemy". For the nazis, that was primarily the Jews. Hitler believed they
had too much political, economic, cultural (etc. etc.) influence.

But pretty much anybody else who did not fit in their master race scheme
was or could have been killed as well: gypsies, homosexuals, severely
handicapped people, and so on. And of course people who opposed the
regime, like communists, freemasons or critical Christians. 

Antisemitism was not exactly new in supposedly Christian societies, but
in this case people were not "just" deported or had to live in ghettos
based on their religious beliefs: The nazis believed or claimed that
Jews were some inferior race, so even Lutherans or atheists were
considered Jewish if their relatively recent ancestors had been Jews. 

> I welcome answers from Germans and Jews a like.

Hmm. Contrary to what the Nazis believed, a German can very well be a
Jew and vice versa. The number of Jews in Germany (more than 100,000) is
still considerably lower than before the nazi years (between 500,000 and
600,000, I think) but has been growing considerably in the recent past,
mostly due to immigrants from Eastern Europe. Hope that "constructing"
such a dualism was not intended when you wrote the above :-)

Christian