history that the Aryan race survive and thrive; otherwise, as he said inMeinKampf, the world would plunge into a new dark ages.

Hitler was not alone in his anti-semitism, which was widespread at the time and led countries like England and the United States to limit the number of Jewish refugees they would take.

Hitler blamed a Jewish so-called backstab for Germany's defeat in World War I. He conflated Judaism and communism, which he loathed, and he thought Jews would impose communism on Germany if they had a chance. He decided (historians debate exactly when) that his only option was to eradicate all the Jews. The difference between his anti-semitism and that of the rest of the West was that he went far beyond discrimination and the occasional violent pogrom and actually attempted genocide.

The Jews also provided a convenient scapegoat for a political demagogue whose power was based on stirring up hate. The in-group needs an out-group to despise. Jews comprised less than one percent of the German population, and so were a convenient target to a demagogue and a bully.

To understand why Hitler targeted Jewish people, it is useful to look at Nazi racial ideology. These ideas were developed by Hitler and published in his autobiography, Mein Kampf. According to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Hitler believed that the Jews were a subhuman race of people and that they posed a genuine threat to the survival of his own race - the Aryans. In this respect, it was Hitler's racial duty to stamp them out. (See the first reference link provided).

Hitler also targeted the Jews because he believed that they were responsible for many of Germany's failings. He blamed them for the collapse of the economy, for example, and for Germany's defeat in World War One. Hitler also believed that the Jews planned on taking over the world and that they must be stopped before this could happen. (See the second reference link for more information).

Why Hitler hated Jewish people: World War I was a great disaster for Germany.  One of that war's causes was competition between industrial England and industrializing Germany for world trade and world markets. 

Hitler was a soldier in the German army during the war; he was very proud of his war-time service.

Germany was devestated by the war.  The peace settlement imposed upon Germany by the Allies at the end of the war was humiliating and designed to keep Germany in a third-world state of existence. 

During the war, German jews had not rallied to the colors; they did not support the German war effort.  A German once told me that jews were much disliked in Germany after World War I because they had not supported the war.  Considering Hitler's pride in his war-time service and Germany's devestation by the war and the shameful settlement imposed upon Germany by the Allies, it is very likely that Hitler shared this dislike of jews.

Hitler certainly used the German people's displeasure with the jews for his own political advantage, as previous answers have amply described. But how could he murder so many people?

Hitler was extremely power hungry. He started and prolonged World War IIso that he could increase and prolong his hold on power. When it became obvious that Germany would loose the World War II, he continued to make war because it was also obvious that he could hold onto power only so long as the war lasted.

That he could persecute the jews for political power, then use that power to murder so many of them; that he could prolong the suffering and death of so many victims of war so as to hold onto power,demonstrates thatat the very least that he had no value system to form his character. I believe he was a psychopath. Desire for power and lack of empathy for other people's suffering are characteristics of psychopaths.

Certainly, this constitutes a fundamental question about Hitler and his place in History.  I would say that his hatred and depiction of the Jewish people was motivated out of a need to find a political scapegoat, or someone that was to blame for all of Germany's problems after the First World War I.  Hitler was one of the first to use the politics of blame in order to consolidate his own power and ensure that there could be no voices of opposition or dissent.  In the final analysis, his hatred of the Jewish people was motivated by political expediency.  His message would not have resonated with a shattered Germany if he argued that Germans have themselves to blame for their economic and social conditions of disarray.  These types of messages do not allow politicians to hold power for very long.  Rather, it became politically pragmatic for Hitler to argue that there were enemies of Germany, individuals who engineered its downfall and wish for nothing more to keep it pinned under the weight of such a conspiracy.  Hitler chose the Jewish individuals within and outside of Germany because it was easy to target groups that lacked a national boundary- based identity, or a government which could speak for them.  All of Hitler's targets were individuals who lacked that political voice that could stand for them.

There is no way of knowing for sure why Hitler singled out Jews to be his scapegoats for all the problems that Germany faced after the end of World War I.  But I can speculate some about why this might have been.

For centuries, Jews had lived in Europe but had not assimilated into European society.  This was not really their fault -- they had often been banned from integrating.  But that doesn't matter -- they were different and separate and kept to themselves.

This made them a perfect scapegoat.  They were a distinct group, pretty much separate from society.  They were often also more successful economically than average.  This meant they did not have a lot of supporters to back them against people like Hitler.

I do not know if Hitler picked them because they would be an easy target or if he hated them just because they were obviously different and often successful.  One way or the other, it was reasons like this that led to the Holocaust in my opinion.

There are many theories regarding Hitler's hatred of the Jewish people. One of these reasons is mere jealously. The Jewish people were not hit hard during the Great Depression and Germany was hit the hardest. Hitler also blamed Germany's defeat in WWI on the Jewish people. Also, some blamed the Jewish for the "Treaty of Versailles" which was very damaging to the Germans.

The idea of the Aryan German race was also to blame for Hitler's hatred of Jewish people because they were not part of the ideal white race that Hitler envisioned.

In addition, Hitler supposedly had a bad experience as child with Jewish people and this is when the hatred was seeded.

These are just a few of the theories why Hitler hated Jewish people so much. There are many many more.

He didn't have to work that hard to justify it at that time in Germany.  Jews had been the "outsiders" for centuries, had been economically successful, worshipped and lived differently, and tended to marry among themselves.  They were an easy target as the cause of all of Germany's ills.

Hitler himself did not just make up his hatred so he could be politically powerful, he believed it too.  He had grown up and experienced life in a time where anti-Semitism (anti-Jewish feelings) were common and openly expressed, and this rubbed off on him.  He blamed the Jews for the loss in World War I, and for the economic hard times of other Germans in the years after the war.

It is fallacious to assume that Hitler's anti-Semitism was unique or even new. Jews throughout Europe had been vilified since the Middle Ages because they were (1) Not Christian, (2) persisted in retaining their traditional religion, culture and values, and (3) were the money lenders at a time when that practice was denied to Christians. Jews in England were slaughtered immediately after the coronation of Richard Lion Heart. Similarly, before the First Crusade was launched, Peter the Hermet's Peasant's Crusade killed thousands of Jews in continental Europe.

Although most Europeans by Hitler's time had learned to live peacefully with their Jewish neighbors, an anti-Semitic element was always present. As a young man, Hitler was an avid reader of an anti-Semitic (and at times pornographic) periodical known as Ostara. He was also enthralled with the music of Richard Wagner, who was a virulent anti-Semitic. Because many of the early Communists were Jews (Marx, Trotsky, Rosa Luxembourg) Hitler easily associated Communism with Judaism. The threat of a communist revolution in Germany following World War I lent itself to the connection in Hitler's mind.

Hitler's anti-Semitism was thus an element of his culture. This alone does not explain his attempts to exterminate them, however. All National Socialists were anti-Semitic and pro-Nordic; Hitler's gift for oratory and his personal charisma brought him to the forefront of that movement and he thus became the figurehead for the anti-Semitism that was already present.

Hitler had strong ideas about racial purity and the superiority of the Nordic race. He hated the idea of Jews and Germans intermarrying and produciing children who were half Jewish and half German. He probably would have been glad to drive all the Jews out of Germany rather than trying to exterminate them, but this was impossible because they had nowhere to go. His obsession with creating a pure Aryan master race which would dominate the world was part of his grandiose and megalomaniacal plan to shape human history. It caused horrible suffering for millions of people. Ultimately even his loyal supporters recognized that he was a madman with absolute power, somebody comparable to the Roman emperor Caligula.

It is impossible to know why any one person comes to be racist or anti-Semitic.  We can have ideas as to why many people in Hitler's time and place hated Jews, but we cannot know for sure what motivated any individual.

We believe that Hitler and others like him hated Jews because they were so different.  Jews had kept to themselves in places like Germany for a long time.  This was partly because they had been hated and discriminated against for years.  But their separateness made it more possible for people to hate them.  They were seen as a group of people who were fundamentally different from those who lived around them.  Because of this, when people looked for scapegoats, the Jews were the first choice.  Because people had long looked at Jews as an alien presence who could be blamed for anything bad that happened, Hitler and many others like him chose to hate them.

Hitler's hatred of the Jews was clearly pathological, but it was also political. By portraying the Jews as racially inferior and scapegoats for everything that had gone wrong in Germany in the twentieth century, he was tapping into a strain of anti-Semitism that had tragically deep roots in European history. For centuries, many (but not all) Jewish people had been viewed as outsiders in central Europe, set apart from Christians by their religion and their customs. From time to time, leaders would engage in brutal pogroms, or systemized attempts to either dislocate or otherwise oppress and persecute Jewish populations within their borders. These pogroms often enjoyed considerable popular support among Europeans, especially in times of crisis. Hitler's hatred of the Jews grafted this strain of anti-Semitism onto a new, pseudo-scientific theory of race. He, like many people around the Western world, believed that race was the defining characteristic of nationhood and that racial conflict was the driving force behind history. He also believed that Germanic peoples, which he called "Aryans," were the purest and highest form of humanity, and he painted the Jews as the opposite, the lowest form. Yet he also claimed, as did anti-Semites around the world, that the Jews had been responsible, through their supposed manipulation of global markets, for both World War One and the Great Depression. So the Jews, for Hitler, were the embodiment of evil and of racial debasement (which were the same thing in his mind) and he based his rise to power in no small part upon the ascent of Aryan nationhood, a development that inevitably involved, in his mind, the final destruction of the Jews. So Hitler's brand of anti-Semitism was both old and tragically new--it combined ancient hatred with modern crackpot theories and sought to explain, under its own warped terms, the events of the twentieth century. That Hitler's hatreds, which were never exactly disguised, received such popular support among Germans, is one of the most chilling aspects of his rise to power.