The Coming of the Third Reich (The Third Reich Trilogy Book 1)

by Richard J. Evans

Hitler could scarcely ignore the everyday antisemitism of the kind of newspapers that were available in the reading-room of the Men’s Home, and the cheap antisemitic pamphlets he later described reading at this time. And his enthusiasm for Wagner, whose operas he went to hundreds of times in this period, can only have strengthened his political views. Virtually all the followers of Schönerer, Wagner and Lueger were antisemitic by this time, many of them rabidly so, and there is no reason why Hitler should have been an exception. The fact that he sold his pictures to Jewish traders and borrowed money from Jewish inmates of the Men’s Home does not mean that he was not antisemitic. Nevertheless, it is likely that his antisemitism at this time had an abstract, almost theoretical quality to it; his hatred of Jews only became visceral, personal and extreme at the end of the First World War.