It may seem like a pointless question - after all, the horrific results are the same regardless of the motivation behind the actions - but I am curious: Was the racism the core starting value and the end-game? Or did Hitler simply see manipulation of the tradesmen class on the sensitive subject of "the Jewish Question" as a quick path to power and decide to take it to the extreme? I know Hitler cited Karl Lueger (among others) as inspirational to what would follow, but it seems that Nazism became an ultra-extreme version of the more "polite" (in the context of that era) antisemitism of the Christian Social movement that was used as a political tool of the early GNP.
On a broader level, is this type of propaganda and manipulation (gaining support of a majority populace by oppression of a minority populace or turning the proletariat and petite bourgeoisie on each other in ignorance of the machinations of the ruling class) not commonplace throughout history? At what point do we start to "wake up" to this cycle and break it?
Hi there,
On /r/AskHistorians we often get questions along the lines of 'what did Hitler think about X' - I mean, as an April Fools joke one year, we changed the sub to /r/AskAboutHitler. However, for better or worse, many of these questions about what Hitler thought are, in the literal sense, unanswerable. We don't know what Hitler thought about many things, and especially about things which were inconsequential for him. Hitler did not keep a diary, and the collections of his private conversations is disjointed and nowhere near complete, being almost completely dependent on the post-war recollection of his intimates (who may also be unreliable in their recollections, especially given those circumstances).
Of course, you may still get an answer to this particular question! However, broadly speaking, proving the negative is very hard (there could be an 1965 article on the topic in Swahili), and if you've asked a question which is almost certainly "We don't know, and he probably didn't care anyways", few historians familiar with the topic matter actually are going to want to put in the necessary gruntwork, doubly so about a man who on a personal level was decidedly uninteresting.
For more information that will be helpful in understanding the context around your question, please read /u/commiespaceinvader's wonderful post on why Hitler's opinions actually aren't that interesting, and please see here for an example of a historian attempting to find evidence about Hitler's thoughts on a topic, but finding that it is likely unanswerable.