he answer to this question lies in the strong anti-Semitic tradition in Europe, which predated the Nazis’ rise to power. This was not a specifically German phenomenon. A widespread hatred of the Jews can be found in the writings of Martin Luther and it was an important part of the self-perception of many Christians.
In a more modern form, at the end of the 19th century, a racist-biological anti-Semitism was developed, where the Jews were perceived as a ‘deformity on the body politic’. The Jews were also increasingly perceived as a specific problem to society, a problem that needed solving if the nation were to survive. In Germany, Hitler and the Nazis succeeded in segregating the Jews from the rest of the population, despite the fact that German Jews were among the best assimilated in Europe. Jewry was also linked to communism (in ‘Judeo-Bolshevism’), thus making the Nazis capable of presenting the Jews as one the German middle class’s greatest fears.
There has been much debate among historians as to why the Nazis set out to exterminate the Jews. Some have stated that it had always been Hitler’s plan to exterminate the Jews, while others have perceived the mass murders as a result of a long and curved process, where the Nazi Jewish policy was gradually radicalised.
The Jews’ presence in the German-occupied parts of Europe was seen as a problem and a great annoyance. At best, they were to disappear from the face of the earth, so that the Nazis could reach their goal: a Greater Germany free from Jews. Different solutions were tried: voluntary immigration, forced immigration, and several different plans for deportation. Plans surfaced to deport all the Jews to the east, first to eastern Poland, then to Siberia. Serious plans were also developed that included deporting all European Jews to the east African island of Madagascar. Because the Holocaust involved people in different roles and situations living in countries across Europe over a period of time—from Nazi Germany in the 1930s to German-occupied Hungary in 1944—one broad explanation regarding motivation, for example, “antisemitism or “fear,” clearly cannot fit all. In addition, usually a combination of motivations and pressures were in play. For the Holocaust as other periods of history, most scholars are wary of monocausal explanations. Interpretations of individuals’ motivations fall into two broad categories: first, cultural explanations (including ideology and antisemitism); and second, social-psychological ones (fear, opportunism, pressures to conform and the like).
Cultural explanations focus on values, beliefs, and prejudices, particularly antisemitism of various forms, including Nazi antisemitism.
Within Nazi Germany, everyone did not support Nazism or the Nazi regime to the same degree and to the extent suggested by iconic photographs and film footage of Nazi-staged spectacles. As Doris Bergen writes, “Smooth functioning of the system did not require all Germans—or even most—to share every tenet of Nazi ideology. Enough enthusiasts could always be found to stage enormous public shows of support such as the annual Nazi Party rallies. On a day to day basis, the Nazi regime only needed most people to obey the law, try to stay out of trouble, and promote their own interests as best they could under the current circumstances.”9
Many older Germans retained old loyalties. “Beneath the cover of totalitarian uniformity . . . social and religious structures and even political orientations of the previous period were preserved to a certain extent,” Otto Dov Kulka and Eberhard Jäckel explain.10 Protestant, rural, and northern regions generally Nazified earlier than Catholic, urban, and traditionally more liberal western parts of the country. When Hitler took power in Germany, only a small minority of ordinary people shared Nazi antisemitism that saw “the Jews” as “enemies of the people” and a threat to Germany’s very survival. Nazi propaganda and changing norms and laws did erode older, pre-Nazi ties (to Christian teachings or leftist, anti-Nazi political beliefs), especially in the absence of the public expression of opposing views under the Nazi dictatorship. Still, those who espoused extreme antisemitic views remained a minority.11
The majority of Germans held more moderate prejudices that predated Nazi rule. Many could more easily support measures against “the Jews” in the abstract than the visible persecution or physical harm of Jewish neighbors or business people with whom they had longstanding relations. Thus the limited support of ordinary Germans for the national boycott of Jewish businesses of April 1, 1933, for example, and the shocked response of many Germans to the unprecedented violence and destruction of the Kristallnacht pogroms of November 9–10, 1938.12 Many Germans’ toleration for or acquiescence to Nazi antisemitic policies was facilitated by broader support for the Nazi regime during the years of economic improvement, the popularity of Hitler as a strong leader, and foreign policy successes in the 1930s that restored Germany to great power status after its humiliating defeat in World War I (1914–1918).13
Outside Nazi Germany, the form and depth of antisemitic attitudes varied greatly from areas where the Jewish population was larger and less integrated, such as many areas of Poland and Romania, compared to many countries in western Europe, such as the Netherlands and France, with smaller, more assimilated Jewish populations and traditions of democratic pluralism. Peoples in the Baltic countries (Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia) and eastern Poland who experienced and suffered under a “double occupation” during World War II, first by the Soviets (1939–1941), then the Nazis (1941–1944), were particularly susceptible to Nazi propaganda and incitement linking “the Jews” to the “Communist” or “Bolshevik” threat.14
Antisemitic attitudes were usually secondary, however, to other considerations. In German-occupied countries, the need to prove loyalty to new German masters, particularly if one had previously cooperated with Soviet occupiers, provided many individuals with powerful motivation to collaborate. The hope that cooperating with the Nazis might yield special rewards, from plunder to political independence (say, for Ukraine or Lithuania) also influenced individuals’ choices. 15 Some leaders, allies of Germany with greater autonomy, from more antisemitic Romania to less antisemitic Italy, chose not to collaborate in all measures, notably turning over Jews for deportation “to the East,” in part to protect their countries’ sovereignty. Toward the end of the war, as German defeat seemed imminent, opportunism and the drive for self-preservation again rose to the fore: some leaders, officials, and private citizens helped individual Jews mainly in the hope of garnering protection against charges of prior collaboration with the German enemy.