Bigotry: Adolf Hitler

"Don't buy from Jews" & "A good German doesn't buy from Jews" - Jews were made to carry those signboards

Bigotry rarely begins with violence. It begins with certainty. The certainty that I am right. The certainty that the other is wrong. And finally, the most dangerous of all, that the other does not deserve to exist as equal.

After World War I, Germany was left humiliated, wounded, and searching for meaning. Into this fragile psyche of a nation stepped Adolf Hitler, not merely as a politician, but as a storyteller. The narrative he offered was dangerously simple. Germany is a great nation, a great race, with a glorious ancient past, but now betrayed. Your suffering has a cause and that cause has a face. The face, Hitler told the Germans, was the Jew.

What Hitler said was not really new. The Germans did have problems with the Jews. But what Hitler did with those problems was new: he transmuted prejudice into purpose. And thus bigotry became a public policy in Germany.

The kind of bigotry that Hitler shaped in his country was not just an emotional reflex. It was systematised into a worldview. Hitler made bigotry a law. The Jews were stripped of citizenship – without even any nicety like India’s revision of electoral rolls or enactment of certain Acts like FCRA which look innocuous on  the surface.

The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 explicitly excluded Jews and other minorities from German citizenship and civil rights. Kristallnacht or the Night of Broken Glass and the Holocaust were natural outcomes soon. A whole big population of the country became traitors overnight.

Bigotry is a potent sociopolitical alchemist.

In just one night, some 7500 Jewish businesses and 1400 synagogues were destroyed. 30,000 Jews were sent to concentration camps. That night came to be known in history as Kristallnacht. These numbers would dwindle into insignificance soon when hundreds of thousands of Jews would be killed in the concentration camps.

A 15-year-old girl named Anne Frank died in one of those camps. Not knowing that her death was imminent, she had written earlier in her diary: “In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.”

One of the heartrending ironies of bigotry is that even as a nation dehumanises a people, the victims still cling to humanity.

Where Hitler perceived enemies, Anne saw human beings.

For Hitler and his Nazis, a neighbour was no longer a human being. He was a category. A classification. A problem to be dealt with.

When the Jewish synagogues burnt, the vast majority of Germans stayed silent. Some were afraid, some agreed, but most were just indifferent. A Jew who survived the concentration camp and went on to become a Nobel Peace laureate, Elie Wiesel, would write 20 years after Kristallnacht that “The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference” [in his book, Night].

Hitler and his devout followers used words such as vermin and disease for the Jews. Bigotry does that invariably: strip away humanity from the targeted population. Eliminating vermin and diseases is a duty of any conscientious citizen. Violence becomes duty in a bigoted nation.

Six million lives were soon extinguished. They were vermin, diseases, threats to the nation.

Was Hitler an anomaly? A lone figure of madness? If he were, I wouldn’t be writing this post now.

Hitler was not just an odd man out. He had a large number of followers. He was cheered enthusiastically. He was obeyed fanatically.

Yet, we have reason to be optimistic. For every Hitler, there is a Niemöller. Martin Niemöller [1892-1984] was a Lutheran pastor in Hitler’s bigoted country. He spent eight years in concentration camps, though he was not a Jew, though he belonged to Hitler’s camp by race and religion. He was in the concentration camp because he questioned Hitler’s bigotry. It is he who told us that our silence in the face of brutality against other communities will boomerang. “First they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out,” he wrote famously. “… Then they came for me – and there was no one left to speak for me.”

PS. This post is a part of Blogchatter A2Z Challenge 2026

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Tomorrow: Courage – Gandhi