Why did Hitler persecute the Jewish people?

Video Description

The persecution of the Jews by Adolf Hitler had deep ideological, political, and personal roots in his worldview. From his youth in Vienna, Hitler was influenced by the racial antisemitism present in certain sectors of European society. Unlike traditional, religion-based antisemitism, Hitler’s hatred was grounded in the idea that Jews constituted an inferior and dangerous race, one that threatened to corrupt the purity of the German people. For Hitler, the Jews represented the ultimate internal enemy. He blamed them for Germany’s defeat in World War I, promoting the conspiracy theory of the “stab in the back,” according to which Germany had been betrayed from within. He also accused them of being behind both international communism and global financial capitalism, portraying Jews as masterminds of leftist revolutions and economic crises. This narrative allowed him to rally his followers around a common enemy. Nazi ideology turned antisemitism into state policy. Once in power, Hitler introduced racial laws such as the Nuremberg Laws, which stripped Jews of their civil rights, forbade them from marrying non-Jewish Germans, and excluded them from public life. What began as systematic discrimination quickly escalated into isolation, mass deportations, and ultimately, extermination. The persecution was not merely social or legal—it was a step-by-step process that culminated in the Holocaust. Hitler’s hatred of the Jews was not a marginal aspect of his thought but the central axis of his worldview. In his book Mein Kampf, he had already announced his intention to eradicate Jewish “influence” from Germany. Throughout his regime, this obsession materialized into a machinery of death made up of concentration and extermination camps. Hitler’s antisemitism not only annihilated millions of lives but also left an indelible mark on history as one of the most atrocious crimes ever committed.