Arguably, the detestation of Jewish people in Germany can be slightly traced back to Wilhelm Marr in the late 1870's (though technically the issue of antisemitism in Europe spans many centuries), who actually came up with the word antisemitism and created the political party Antisemiten-Liga (League of Antisemites). That decade also saw the rise of many other antisemitic political parties, such as the Christlich–soziale Partei (Christian Social Party) founded by Adolf Stoecker in 1878.

Antisemitism had a long history in Germany prior to the Nazis. It may be argued that the Nazis served to increase this phenomenon into its most murderous form, however their actual hate for the Jews and the nature of their resulting practices were nothing new.

Walter Bruch, a Nazi officer with the party rank of Obergruppenführer, said:

"Many people confess their amazement that Hitler preaches ideas which they have always held.... From the Middle Ages we can look to the same example in Martin Luther (German protestant reformer). What stirred in the soul and spirit of the German people of that time, finally found expression in his person, in his words and deeds." -"Geist und Kampf" (speech), Bundesarchiv Berlin-Zehlendorf, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919–1945:]

Martin Luther's tract, "On Jews and Their Lies" was used by the Nazis' in support of their views. Luther's writing on the Jews demonstrates that the murderous antisemitic inclinations of the Nazis' shared a history with the Christian traditions of the German people.

Julius Streicher, editor of the Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer, described Luther's "On Jews and their Lies" as the most antisemitic text ever published.

Luther's recommendations for the Jews:

1. "that their synagogues be burned down"

2. "I advise that their houses also be razed and destroyed. For they pursue in them the same aims as in their synagogues."

3. "that all their books their prayer books, their Talmudic writings, also the entire Bible, be taken from them"

4. "that they be forbidden on pain of death to praise God, to give thanks, to pray, and to teach publicly among us and in our country"

5. "that they be forbidden to utter the name of God within our hearing"

6. "I advise that safe-conduct on the highways be abolished completely for the Jews. For they have no business in the countryside"

7. "I recommend putting a flail, an ax, a hoe, a spade, a distaff, or a spindle into the hands of young, strong Jews and Jewesses and letting them earn their bread in the sweat of their brow, as was imposed on the children of Adam (Gen. 3 [:19]). For it is not fitting that they should let us accursed Goyim toil in the sweat of our faces while they, the holy people, idle away their time behind the stove, feasting and farting."

Luther wrote, "If I had power over the Jews, as our princes and cities have, I would deal severely with their lying mouth...if I had power over them, I would assemble their scholars and their leaders and order them, on pain of losing their tongues down to the root, to convince us Christians within eight days of the truth of their assertions and to prove this blasphemous lie against us, to the effect that we worship more than the one true God."

As you can see from Luther's vision of taking action against the Jews, his version was not far from the Nazis. Murder, torture, the destruction and confiscation of legally owned property, travel restrictions, limits on freedom of speech, and forced labor for the Jews was not invented by the Nazis. Even mass murder was not missing from Luther's sentiments about the Jews. Luther wrote, "We are at fault in not slaying them."

The imagination of Jewish conspiracy was not new either. In spite of the lack of evidence, Luther still insisted of the enemy nature of the Jews saying that "they remain our daily murderers and bloodthirsty foes in their hearts".

American Historian Lucy Dawidowicz (The War Against The Jews) argued that there was a distinct inheritance of antisemitism from Martin Luther to Hitler.

The concept of a driver implies that something is driven. If there was zero history of Christian antisemitism, would Hitler's antisemitism have even made sense to the German people? Hitler and the Nazis were a primary (not sole) driving force in terms of exciting the existing antisemitism of the day and enlarging its impact. The antisemitism itself already existed, had its own momentum, and the Nazis cultivated it.

I do not argue that the history of antisemitism preexisting Hitler in Germany paved the way for Hitler or that Germany would have manifested the Shoah without Hitler.

Historian Christopher Browning reminds us in an interview with yadvashem.org:

"it's important not to take what we know happened in 1933 and see it as the natural and inevitable result of a burgeoning antisemitism in Germany in the latter part of the nineteenth century"

I am merely saying that in the absence of a history of antisemitism that still impacted Hitler's time, Hitler's views of and actions towards the Jews: a) may never have formed in the mind of Hitler, b) could not have taken hold in a theoretical Germany, which existed in the absence of any history of antisemitism.