To What Extent Were the German People Supportive of the Nazi Regime’s Anti-semitic

When the Nazis took office the Jewish population in Germany according to the census of 1933 was 499, 682. So how was the Nazis party able to turn the German people against the Jews? Without doubt Hitler and his Nazis regime took their anti-Semitic policy to a much greater extreme than any other anti-Semitic policy or programme carried out before or since. Hitler (unusually for a politician) had the power and the means to carry out the policies he wanted to. He was not a man given to compromise, and would only do so to gain an advantage or bide his time until he could do exactly as he wanted. It is clear that Hitler and his subordinates fully intended to carry out the ‘Final Solution’ that led to the deaths of upwards of six million Jews, and millions of others that did not fit in with Hitler’s racial ideas.

The Nazis regime carried out mass murder simply because Hitler wanted it done out of hatred and he knew that people would do it for him. What is not so clear is how much support was given by the German people aside from the members of the SS, the Gestapo and the armed forces carrying out their orders with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Many Germans who took part in the Holocaust claimed that they were only following orders and that they could not have stopped their regime’s murderous anti-Semitic policy. It has also often been claimed that the German army was not as involved in the policy as the SS or the Gestapo.

Prior to the Nazis regime taking power in 1933, the German people were not particularly noted for their anti-Semitism, although there was a fringe on the Far right that that included the Nazis party that declared their hatred of the Jews. In fact anti-Semitism had been more apparent in countries such as a Russia, France, Poland and Hitler’s homeland of Austria. When the Nazis actually started their genocide after invading Poland it surprised some of the Polish Jews who had feared their own compatriots more than the Germans. Indeed Hitler’s own anti-Semitism dated back to Vienna before the outbreak of the First World War. From his time in Vienna Hitler had drawn conclusions about race, religion and politics. Firstly he concluded that Germans were part of a master race and that Jews were a separate and inferior race. Hitler had also decided that parliamentary democracy was flawed and that people could be controlled by effective propaganda.