Why did Hitler believe that Jews and other "subhumans" had to be exterminated?
1 Answer
The core element of Nazism was involved building a new German nationalism. Hitler and his party intended to unite all Germans in Europe in one state, and leave a "pure" German society.
Explanation:
19th Century Europe was a hot bed of new ideas, not all of them good. Nationalism -- the idea that distinct people should have a distinct state -- was one of them, except that defining people by ethnicity is always risky. Another idea that popped up was Social Darwinism, which linked evolutionary theory with nationalism and supposed that if a people's technology and social organization were superior to those of others, it followed they were biologically superior too.
Beyond this, while German language and culture were well established for centuries, Germans began the 19th Century as a fragmented people in a dozen states and with pockets of ethnic Germans from northern France to the Volga River. With the emergence of Germany as a nation in 1871, came German identification as a unifying element.
However, the First World War not only left Germany defeated, territory was stripped away as new states (like Poland and Czechoslovakia) appeared, and the other other German state -- the Austro-Hungarian empire - disintegrated. Creating new states with peoples as mixed as they are in Europe always leaves somebody on the wrong side of a new border.
The Nazis pledged to rebuild a new German state that would encompass all Germans and undo the sense of humiliation that defeat and the Versailles Treaty had left them with. They focused even more strongly on their idea of a German identity both as a political and an ethnic ideal. Traditional anti-semitism found fertile new soil in the emerging ideology, and the argument that Jews could not be 'real' Germans gained favour.
The Nazis foreign policy was based reoccupying the Rhineland, absorbing Austria, and stripping away German dominated territories from Czechoslovakia and Poland. This was also matched to a growing insistance that Jews and Gypsies (and the mentally ill or handicapped) constituted a threat, just by existing, to a new 'pure' German identity.
As always, when ideologies meet realities, horrible things happen.
