I am not a European historian (obviously from my flare lol) but I did take several classes on the Second World War and the Holocaust when I was getting my undergraduate degree in History and A few things came to mind.

First, Anti-semetism really began to flourish by the end of the 19th century in most of western Europe. The Rise of Pseudoscientists like Arthur de Gobineau who wrote pieces such as Essay on the Inequality of Human Races , helped start a rise of illegitimate science which believed they could prove that certain races were superior to others. Primarily he argues that if you studied skull sizes, you could determine intelligence, and that Jews (and several other races) were deemed less intelligent.

Many Europeans (including Hitler) would eventually read these documents and take them as fact, which led to "scientific racism."

Now if you are asking for specific events, I'm not sure of any major ones in Germany alone, but I will cite an important one that happened in France (but Germany was implicated as well) which actually tore the country apart for more then a decade. It's known as the Dreyfus Affair, and there are plenty of prominent books on it that are available (the one I read was called France and the Dreyfus Affair: A Brief Documentary History (Bedford Series in History & Culture) by historian Michael Burns). In this incident, a French Army officer, Alfred Dreyfus (who was Jewish) was wrongly accused of selling French military secrets to the German government. Several years after being convicted, evidence arose that Dreyfus had been framed, including multiple testimonies that the accused documents were forgeries, and worse, that French Military secrets had continued to be leaked to the Germans even years after Dreyfus was imprisoned.

The case would continue on for several years, and the public became very infused with the story. Anti-Semitic newspapers crushed Dreyfus' names daily yet his supporters, like Émile Zola (a famous French Writer of the time) published works advocating his innocence. Many people believed that Dreyfus was being held for years after his innocence was proven simply because French Authorities still held hostility against Jews in general.

But Anti-semetism lasted for the whole period, from 1894-1906 when he was finally released and of course continued after. Hateful speech towards Jews were published in papers where they bashed both Dreyfus, his supporters (known as Dreyfusards), and anyone who supported Jews, saying, "A teacher from the Jura, who does not fail to tell his students that Jews and their friends are the vampires of France."

Dreyfus would eventually return to the French Army and even served in the First World War, but the Anti-Semetic hatred that raged during his trial would not go out for several decades.

To add to the the 19th Century summary from /u/jasoncaspian, I think it's important to understand that Antisemitism in Christian Europe was by no means in its infancy during that period.

Generations of European Christians were spoon fed a doctrine that stated that the Jews were responsible for the horrific death of Jesus as far back as the 5th Century with St Augustine, and probably before. Even after the reformation, one of the few things that the Protestants and the Catholics could agree upon was that the Jews were horrible people, evidenced by Martin Luther's extended rant entitled On the Jews and Their Lies.

Pogroms were certainly nothing new by the early 20th Century. The 'People's Crusade', an action taken in 1095 by some lesser nobles and their poorly trained followers, who jumped the proverbial gun after Pope Urban II called for a retaking of the Holy Land, committed horrific pogroms in Speyer, Worms, Mainz and Cologne as they made their way East through the Rhine. This series of slaughters is sometimes referred to as the First Holocaust.

Then there was the inquisition, by no means limited to Spain, in which Jews were rooted out and often slaughtered for their failure to convert to Christianity. This happened all over Christian Europe and even spread into the new world, notably in the form of the Mexican Inquisition. Among the fanatical nut cases produced by this movement are the famous Tomás de Torquemada and Heinrich Kramer, the latter of which was largely responsible for the slaughter we now know as the Witch Hunts with his Malleus Maleficarum.

So to answer your question in summary, indeed there was Antisemitic sentiment and violence in Germany and the rest of Europe far predating Hitler's rise to power, and it can be argued that Hitler simply used already-rampant Antisemitism as a rallying point in gathering support for his power grab.