The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich Theme of Hate

Lieutenant Cable was right: You've got to be taught to hate and fear.

It'll come as no surprise to most readers of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich that Adolf Hitler had a burning hatred for peoples whom he thought of as racially inferior to Germans. He turned that hate into the anti-Jewish laws that were quickly passed in Germany and German-occupied countries once he rose to power, and in the horrors of the Holocaust.

Under Hitler's rule, six million Jews were murdered, along with millions more Slavs, Gypsies, gays, blacks, and disabled persons whom the Nazis considered to be untermenschen—subhuman. In Shirer's words, such hatred was like a catastrophic infection, and that left a permanent scar on human civilization.

Sample scar: at Shmoop's press time, a white supremacist named Andrew Auernheimer had just hacked into printer networks at colleges all over the U.S. and made them print flyers with a message blaming Jews for destroying the country "through mass immigration and degeneracy" and asking people to "join us in the struggle for global white supremacy."

'Nuff said.

1. What reasons does Shirer provide for the anti-Semitism that Hitler came to feel so early in life?
2. Apart from Hitler, who else does Shirer name as being responsible for supplying the Nazi Party with its notions of racial purity and racial superiority?
3. Going by the information that Shirer provides, how common was anti-Semitism in the Europe of Hitler's day? To what extent were Hitler's ideas shared by the broader culture in which he lived?

The hate Hitler picked up in his adolescence resulted in the exterminations of millions during WWII.

Everyday Germans were just as much to blame as Hitler and the S.S. officers who carried out the massacres and managed the extermination camps. They were filled with hate, too.