SIAP More on Smith twins' possible decommit

I think it’s both. 
 

Germany was a new country albeit with old cultures. The idea of a fuhrer, a Germanic superhero to unify and elevate Germany to first among nations had great appeal among many Germans in the decades prior to Hitler. Bismarck could be considered the first of these men. Wilhelm aspired to be, but was lacking. Then came the chaos after WWI in Weimar Germany.

Germany in the 20’s experienced much tumult in the 20’s and early 30’s.Many Germans were looking for stability and national greatness.Hitler recognized that and made direct appeals to that need.

After the putsch and prison Hitler changed tactics. He would use democracy to destroy democracy. Through propaganda, agitation, and especially in his speeches, Hitler would win millions to the Nazi cause by reviling Jews, Marxists, Capitalists, Slavs, the French,and various others. He promised greatness beginning with a revolutionary struggle vs the “Jewish-Bolsheviks” he blamed for Germany’s defeat in WWI.

His ability to manipulate and excite masses of humans was critical to the rise of Nazism.While he was aided by assistance of people like Goebbels and Riefenstahl, Hitler with his ability to win extreme devotion and to unify disparate parts of the German Right was the essential man. Without him there is no Third Reich or Holocaust.

As we know antisemitism is baked into the Western mind(Thanks, Christianity!) so it is possible that a genocide of Jews could have occurred, but I have my doubts. The previous 900 years saw Jews be massacred, ghettoized, deported en masse from countries, denied basic rights, and subject to crudely vile conspiracy theories that accused them of appalling crimes. All this yet no one attempted or thought to annihilate the Jews as a race. That was the German contribution to Western antisemitism.

The post-WWI Marxist uprisings in Berlin and Munich happened to be led mostly by Jews. This was a crucial and intellectually solidifying moment for Hitler and other rabid antisemites. Jews were no longer just a foreign people who didn’t belong. They were an existential threat to the the German Volk. They were an enemy that had to be removed from Germany and Europe permanently.

Even with this desire to “cleanse” Germany and eventually Europe of Jews, the Nazis didn’t  gravitate towards genocide immediately after seizing power. What they did was steadily tighten the screws on German Jews to encourage them to immigrate.(But only after they had surrendered their wealth) The Nazis initially wanted to send Jews to Madagascar. But that wasn’t really practicable. Migration to Palestine was severely limited by the British(for fear of Arabs rioting).Europe, US, Canada, and the ANZACs refused to admit anything more than relatively small number of Europe’s Jews.

After the war started and Germany came into control of millions of Jews across mostly Eastern and Central Europe they altered their thinking on the “Jewish Question”. Germans placed millions of Europe’s Jews into concentration camps or ghettos. They wanted them separated from the rest of the populations of the conquered countries.In the months leading up to the start of Operation Barbarossa the Germans planned to use five Einsatzgruppen(they were deployed in Poland at the beginning of the war albeit not quite as lethal as they would be later)to carry out mass executions of Jews, Romani, Soviet Commissars, and recalcitrant native populations. This is the beginning of the killing stage of the Holocaust. 1.5 million Jews would be murdered between June 27, 1941 and January of 1942.  In January of 1942 in Wannsee, a suburb of a Berlin, a conference would be held by SS Gruppenfuhrer Reinhard Heydrich  where the establishment of the death camps and the Final Solution was officially enacted.

Without Hitler there was no World War Two in Europe or Holocaust. Hitler emerged from anonymity and from the foulest, lowest level of European and German culture to lead both into an apocalyptic war that destroyed tens of millions of lives.
 

The structure of Nazi Germany was built upon the fuhrerprinczep(Leader Principle) where everyone worked to fulfill the leader’s desires. Working towards the Fuhrer is the phrase used to describe how the Nazis ran the government.  Hitler had the government structured in such a way that no one person could hope to create a power base strong enough to challenge him. The Nazis had competing overlapping agencies that frequently quarreled over who had power over what. The result of this is that Hitler was critical to the functioning of the Nazi state. Without him Nazi Germany would have collapsed into many fiefdoms fighting each other for power. Hitler was essential to what happened and he was a product of numerous historical processes in German and European history.

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