Anti-Semitism and the scapegoating of Jews for economic and other European and German national problems were integral to the rise of Adolf Hitler and were made explicit in his autobiographical manifesto Mein Kampf (1924). Of course, these themes were hardly new or original with Hitler. Throughout Europe, anti-Semitism had a long tradition. Hitler, the Nazi Party (NSDAP), and the Third Reich, however, made anti-Semitism a central political and cultural crusade, which entered into virtually every law, government activity, and administrative policy. As developed by Hitler and the Nazis, anti-Semitism required, initially, purging Jews from "German" life and, ultimately, the murder, (genocide) of all Jews who fell under German control. This was the Holocaust, in which approximately 6 million Jews perished during World War II. It must be recognized that implementation of the Final Solution, the genocide of the Jews, was not merely an aspect, let alone side effect, of World War II, but was, for Germany, a cause and a war aim, for only in the context of world war and conquest could the Holocaust called for by the Final Solution be perpetrated.

The Final Solution to the "Jewish Question" grew out of Hitler's pledge to "free" Germany of Jews and Jewish influence (which Hitler deliberately confounded with Marxism and communism). Hitler conflated German nationalism with a doctrine of German "Aryanism," a heritage of superior racial purity, which the Jewish "race" threatened to pollute. He and other Nazis demonized Jews as alien, subversive, and generally dangerous. Hitler posed to the German people the Jewish Question (Judenfrage): What was to be done to make Germany "Jew-free" (Judenrein)? The initial "answer" was internal exile, the expulsion of Jews from rural Germany, from villages and small towns, and their concentration in the larger cities. The next "answer" was voluntary emigration abroad, which was encouraged (but not required) by the government. This constituted official Reich policy from 1933 to the outbreak of war in 1939. While the emigration was voluntary, German law prevented Jewish emigres from taking their property (including homes and businesses) and most of their monetary assets with them. These were confiscated by the government. Between 1933 and 1938, more than 50 percent of Germany's 500,000 Jewish citizens emigrated, despite the great material sacrifices involved. About 100,000 went to the United States, 63,000 to Argentina, 52,000 to Great Britain, and 33,000 to Palestine. What motivated this costly exodus were government-instituted programs of persecution, discrimination, economic restriction, and exclusion from professions, culminating in the government-orchestrated "spontaneous" nationwide violence and vandalism of Kristallnacht during November 9-10, 1938. Moreover, there was virtually nothing those identified by the government as Jews could do to remove the onus of the ethnic and racial label. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 defined a Jew essentially as anyone with one Jewish grandparent. Religious practice had nothing to do with this identity; it was, rather, a question of "blood," and even those who had converted to Christianity or who had been practicing Christians for years or generations were counted as Jews on the basis of a single grandparent. As defined by the Nazis, identity as a Jew trumped and voided any other national, ethnic, or religious identity. . .

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