Generally speaking, the attitude of the Third Reich to the Inquisition was not good. The Spanish Inquisition and its practitioners had entered into German historical memory via the Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment and were cultural shorthand for obscurantism and superstition. The Third Reich styled its antisemitism as the antithesis of that practiced by the sixteenth-century Spanish. Whereas the Spanish persecutions were unsystematic and religious-based, German antisemitic commentators presented legislation like the Nuremberg Laws as vetted by biological science and thoroughly modern. In a manual for teaching German and Jewish history, VolK und Rasse: Das neue Reich, Karl Hahn attacked Torquemada as a crypto-Jew who persecuted Jews that did not convert, which implied that one of the Jewish goals was insinuation into gentile institutions. Another National Socialist ideologue, Werner Dittrich, would contrast Catholic Jewish policy, which allowed the decedents of converts like Torquemada to assume positions of power to the Nuremberg Laws, which precluded such an eventuality. Dittrich would also lament that the Inquisition killed many innocent Aryan Christians.

There was some common ground between the Third Reich and the Inquisition. The Nazis frequently instrumentalized historical evidence of popular antisemitism as a vindication of its own racial policies. Thus, although they did not care for the Inquisition as an institution, they would present Catholic Spain's rejection and expulsion of Jews as an example of correct thinking. And of course, many of the symbolism of older religious-based antisemitic violence remained in place under the Third Reich despite the latter's pretensions towards modernity. Thus the desecration of Torah scrolls and other Jewish religious artifacts, the flaunting of Jewish dietary and dress customs, were present in much of the violence directed at Jews.

Sources

Confino, Alon. A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014.

Wegner, Gregory Paul. Anti-Semitism and Schooling Under the Third Reich. New York, N.Y.: Routledge Falmer, 2002.