Katja Hoyer: evaluation

Transcript context

…Why, in your view, does antisemitism so take off in Germany? Because earlier in history, sometimes Jews would go to Germany for a better life, or it was not obviously worse than many other places, though there was always plenty of antisemitism there. How and why did it explode? That’s a very good question because you do see it across Europe. Even in the 1920s, you still get an influx of Jews to Germany from the East because they find much harsher conditions there in many states. For example, I saw that there were lots of people at Munich University who were complaining that suddenly lots of Hungarian Jews would turn up and enroll at the university because they introduced a quota for Jewish Hungarians at their universities. Even then, there’s still a degree of tolerance there. I think partially it’s because antisemitism tends to always be a symptom of a society in crisis; the worse it gets, the worse antisemitism gets. That’s partially, I think, an explanation for that is that particularly because it’s economic grievances, people then look for scapegoats for the Great Depression, but also hyperinflation. They see that the Jewish Germans who are largely in middle-class and upper-class social environments, that they’re still doing reasonably well for themselves. This narrative of they’re exploiting the poverty of the others is particularly easy to exploit in a situation like that. A journalist put it quite well recently on a different reason, but he said, “To be German means to walk down every cul-de-sac to the end.” The idea that there’s antisemitism already latent in society, then it becomes Hitler’s own obsession. People are working toward the Führer, as Ian Kershaw, the historian, puts it. They’re finding more and more extreme ways of dealing with things that are already latent in society, and the system that Hitler sets up allows this to happen. Rather than saying, you sit there with your antisemitic grievances and prejudices in your head, or you talk about it in the pub, somebody will say, “Why don’t we do something about it?” because that’s what Hitler wants. Then they need to be heard amongst the field of competitors, and they find the most radical and the most extreme solution and take that forward. This is something that spirals very quickly out of control. Most historians now agree that there wasn’t a master plan that led to Auschwitz, basically, in the 1920s within the Nazi movement, despite the rhetoric that you see there. It’s bit by bit, the escalation that you see is due to the radicalism of the Nazi movement and the way that people follow orders and go along with it. To what extent did people think it was weird that you had a highly nationalistic movement, but it’s led by an Austrian with a very bizarre accent?…

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