The ideology of National Socialism was intrinsically tied up with antisemitism and racism, there really is no way around it. While there were certainly Germans who belonged to the Party who wished the state would downplay its racial invective, Nazism had little room for those who denied the centrality of race to the Volksgemeinschaft.

One of the important things to recognize about Nazi antisemitism was that it was very extreme compared to other forms of antisemitism within Europe. For one thing, Nazism was far more doctrinaire about the exclusion of Jews from the nation. The Viennese Christian Social mayor Karl Lueger apocryphally said "I decide who is a Jew!" when questioned about his connections to various Viennese Jews, and this sums up the typical right-wing attitudes of European political antisemitism. Antisemitic poltcans might blame "Jews" for all sorts of ills, but there was a flexibility at the ground-level for important individuals and a guarded ambivalence towards converts. Italian Fascism or the Hungarian Arrow Cross fit within this paradigm. Neither political movement welcomed Jews into the new order and their various discourses on nationalism and nationality tended to relegate Jews to aliens, but there was little impulse to eliminate Jews from daily life. Such was emphatically not the case with Nazism. The purging of Jews from the organs of state and the creation of a hierarchical classification of racial status were among the first major initiatives the Party took once in power. All of this was intended to cut off Jews from the body politic and foster a type of social death.

The way these discriminatory practices were implemented further underscores the centrality of antisemitism to Nazi power. While a minority of Germans were directly involved in direct persecution of Jews, the whole apparatus depended upon the silent consent of the bulk of the population. The ritualized humiliation of Jews was a public event, with Jewish men and women made to wear signs or perform humiliating labor like cleaning gutters. Michael Wildt and other social historians of the Third Reich have noted that this public humiliation created an "us/them" dynamic with the greater population. Seeing humiliation and violence meted out to one's neighbors and doing nothing sent an unspoken message that Jews were not a part of the national community. Some Germans might protest this humiliation on the grounds of humanitarianism or common decency, but doing nothing signified an acceptance of this racial separateness. German wartime private letters discussing the wartime deportations of the Reich's remaining Jews often show how strong this separateness; many letter-writers had a little sympathy for the Jews who remained but also noted the deals in redistributed Jewish property and blamed the Jews' plight on their own behavior. Nazism may not have created this antisemitism and segregation, but it entrenched it into the fabric of German society.

Much of the Nazi opposition the the Holocaust was not really opposition to murder of the Jews, but disagreements over the final solution to the Jewish problem. Most of these alternative solutions were genocidal in nature. The Madagascar Plan, favored by the Foreign Ministry, for instance, was about relocating Europe's Jews onto an island that could not support such a population, keeping them under guard, and letting nature take its course. There were also various plans to use the Jewish population as human shields around strategic targets. This was one of the more popular ideas among the wider public as the Allied bombing offensive intensified. There were both letters from German citizens to Goebbels as well as to various German newspapers lambasting the policy of murdering the Jews when they could be used to prevent the Allied bombing. The unquestioned idea in this correspondence is that the Jews were behind the decision-making of the Allied powers and thus shows the strength of both Nazi propaganda and existing antisemitic tropes within the wider population. Most of the friction the SS encountered with other governmental agencies in implementing the Holocaust had more to do with internal turf wars (encouraged by the chaotic structure of Hitler's dictatorship) than opposition to murdering the Jews of Europe. More often than not, this opposition to the SS was framed as trying to make the most efficient use of Jews for the war effort, often as forced laborers. The SS itself was proactive on this measure and sought to make Judeocide a practical matter with the construction of purpose-built extermination camps and its own economic teams.

Part of why antisemitism was so inseparable from National Socialism was because antisemitism was arguably the only fleshed-out component of its ideological program. Much of its other visions of society and politics were hazy, contradictory, and fused together an uneasy coalition of various right-wing German thinkers in a volatile combination. Führerprinzip, for instance, created administrative chaos as Hitler could hem and haw over certain issues. Antisemitism was much more clear-cut of a platform and threaded its way through many of the components of Nazi rule.

Sources

Fritzsche, Peter. An Iron Wind: Europe Under Hitler. New York: Basic Books, 2016.

Stargardt, Nicholas. The German War: A Nation Under Arms, 1939-45 : Citizens and Soldiers. New York: Basic Books, 2017.

Wildt, Michael. Hitler's Volksgemeinschaft and the Dynamics of Racial Exclusion: Violence against Jews in Provincial Germany, 1919-1939. New York: Berghahn Books, 2014.