Holocaust scholar: WWII started because of Hitler’s anti-Semitism

Prof. Yehuda Bauer tells the assembled leaders that anti-Semitism is not a threat to the Jews, but to Europe itself. He argues that Adolf Hitler embarked on World War II because of his belief the Jews were controlling the world and had to be stopped.

Besides the roughly six million Jewish dead, he notes, 29 million European non-Jews were killed by the Nazi war machine.

Anti-Semitism is not about the Jews, he concludes.

“There are 29 million [non-Jewish] reasons” to fight anti-Semitism. “Don’t you think 29 million reasons are enough?”

For those interested in the history, Bauer made this case to our diplomatic correspondent Raphael Ahren in an interview published last week.

In the interview, Bauer cited a secret memorandum Hitler wrote to Hermann Goering in August 1936 in which he spoke about the need for Germany to be ready for war within four years. Otherwise, Hitler argued, Jewish Bolshevism will “replace” the German nation.

Raphael writes:

“For a victory of Bolshevism over Germany would not lead to a Versailles Treaty but to the final destruction, indeed to the annihilation, of the German people,” Hitler wrote.

This belief was compounded by a speech Hitler gave in the Reichstag on January 30, 1939, Bauer said during the interview.

“If the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war,” Hitler predicted, “then the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!”

“In other words,” Bauer explained, “the Jewish capitalists who rule the West are Bolsheviks whose idea is to create a world war so that they can rule the whole world. This was a deeply held belief. And I argue that this was one of the main reasons for the outbreak of World War II, because that clearly identifies the aim — the threat of physical annihilation to German people and therefore preparation for war because otherwise it will be a terrible catastrophe.”

World War II, which raged from 1939 until 1945, eventually caused 29 million non-Jewish victims, apart from the victims of the Holocaust, said Bauer, a professor emeritus of history and Holocaust studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

“These 29 million victims died up to a point, and probably mainly, because of anti-Semitism — not because of Jews, but because of the hatred of Jews, which means that anti-Semitism is a cancer that eats society.”