A Judeophilic (philo-Semitic) Adolf Hitler

NoMommsen

Donor
To remove his racism against Jews would be to remove his racism altogether, why would Hitler hate Slavs while not hating Jews who were by far despised more by the German population and anti semnitism was more ingrained.

If he did not hold these beliefs I doubt the suicidal Barbarossa would have been attempted. Maybe Hitler only tries to reclaim former German and ethnic German lands.
Where did you get this wisdom from ?

Racism in geneal was an widly accepted view of the world at that time virrually everywhere, including the distinction into 'good' races and 'bad' races with all of its consequences (though never executed as 'consequentially' as done by the Nazis IOTL).
'Nation' and 'race' were at that time often interchangable : there was an 'albanese race', an 'irish race', an 'armenian race' and so on.

Why would he 'hate' the slavs ?
It was panslavism of Russia, that 'caused' WW I in example.
Other than that : the slavs are 'blocking' the 'righteous' and needed expansion of the german kind into the east.
 

CaliGuy

Banned
In my experience it tends to stem from a desire to explore Germany winning WWII without having to deal with the Holocaust, Generalplan Ost, and other German atrocities.
Why not have Germany wins WWI instead, though?

Also, what exactly is with the apparent Germanophilia here?
 

NoMommsen

Donor
I am skeptical of that idea. The reason why Hitler could make the argument that he could fix the German economy is because he could sell his very simplistic idea of why the economy was broken: "the Jews did it, we just have to clear them out, and I'll do that". Plus his incarceration and Mein Kampf helped him a lot on the principle of "there is no such thing as bad publicity". If he doesn't say the Jews did it... what can he say? If he wants to pretend to be a socialist, the KPD and the SPD will do a much better job at that and will wreck Hitler at the elections (they had much closer ties to the organized working class than Hitler did). Also, I'm not sure Hitler would have received as much support from right-wing business magnates, plus other antisemitic forces would have blasted Hitler on his philosemitism - and, finally, I'm not sure what this alt-Hitler's programme would be exactly, but if it's mostly just focused on "moar Lebensraum!", well, that alone wouldn't have been very convincing in the Weimar era when there was already a lot of fighting at home and when fixing the economy was the main issue for a lot of people. Sure, there are people who can be hypnotized by this kind of nationalist snake-charming, but there were other, more established parties who did that kind of stuff. My guess is that your Hitler would simply become irrelevant in comparison to the DNVP.
I am less skeptical, cause in 1928 there was a 'Führertagung' (leaders conference) tying to find out why the heck the Nazis couldn't translate their well growing numbers of members (not at least due to Gregor Strassers reforms and leading of the propaganda apparatus) into an as well growing share of voters. They came to two conclusions :
  1. The urban, socialistic strategy competing with the left for blue collar workers had failed. Therefor the new taget became the white collar workers and lower-middle to middle class, that had been more successfull during the farmers uprisings in the north of 1926 to 1928.
  2. The Julius-Streicher like antisemitism repelled exactly these white collar, middle-class people. And was changed afterwards.
Therefore I would assume they could/would even do a bit (not much) better in the 1918 elections.


"The Jews did it, ..."
make that a : : "The jewish did it." and you still have the though more vague (this 'vagueness' overall was a bonus for the Nazi-propaganda machine, as they were able to adress everybodies gains, even if contadictory) antisemitism you need to get the other right-wingers into your camp.

Oh, and on the question : "What is 'jewish' ?"
I remember a quote alleged being said by Göring : "I decide who's a jew and who not." ...
 
In my experience it tends to stem from a desire to explore Germany winning WWII without having to deal with the Holocaust, Generalplan Ost, and other German atrocities.

Yeah. And in doing so they flagrantly ignore that a Germany without the Nazis raging ideological hard ons just doesn't start WWII. Without Hitler and his madness - of which anti-Semitic racism was a big part - flogging them on, odds are good they pull back from the brink. And on the off-chance they do end up in a war they get crushed for it because, once again, Hitler and his madness pushed him to take some major gambles that happened to pay off. Without that willingness to risk it all on stuff like the historical Fall Gelb, Germany doesn't achieve it's historical success and gets ground down by the Anglo-French.
 

CaliGuy

Banned
Yeah. And in doing so they flagrantly ignore that a Germany without the Nazis raging ideological hard ons just doesn't start WWII. Without Hitler and his madness - of which anti-Semitic racism was a big part - flogging them on, odds are good they pull back from the brink. And on the off-chance they do end up in a war they get crushed for it because, once again, Hitler and his madness pushed him to take some major gambles that happened to pay off. Without that willingness to risk it all on stuff like the historical Fall Gelb, Germany doesn't achieve it's historical success and gets ground down by the Anglo-French.
That's why it's better to imagine Germany winning WWI instead of WWII and then not implementing the Polish Border Strip plan afterwards.
 
Yeah. And in doing so they flagrantly ignore that a Germany without the Nazis raging ideological hard ons just doesn't start WWII. Without Hitler and his madness - of which anti-Semitic racism was a big part - flogging them on, odds are good they pull back from the brink. And on the off-chance they do end up in a war they get crushed for it because, once again, Hitler and his madness pushed him to take some major gambles that happened to pay off. Without that willingness to risk it all on stuff like the historical Fall Gelb, Germany doesn't achieve it's historical success and gets ground down by the Anglo-French.

Why is there a direct link between antisemitism to ideological hard-on? Wouldn't antisemitism be a result of that ideological hard-on, since it was the most convenient outlet and consolidating factor of the party? I can imagine a Hitler having a hard-on for lebensraum without a desire for specific extermination of the Jew.

Notler criticism seems to be based on the false assumption that Hitler had to be antisemitic to be the gambling NEET that he was.
 
Where did you get this wisdom from ?

Racism in geneal was an widly accepted view of the world at that time virrually everywhere, including the distinction into 'good' races and 'bad' races with all of its consequences (though never executed as 'consequentially' as done by the Nazis IOTL).
'Nation' and 'race' were at that time often interchangable : there was an 'albanese race', an 'irish race', an 'armenian race' and so on.

Why would he 'hate' the slavs ?
It was panslavism of Russia, that 'caused' WW I in example.
Other than that : the slavs are 'blocking' the 'righteous' and needed expansion of the german kind into the east.



I didn't mean that it was impossible to be racist against Slavs and not Jews of course that's possible.

The problem is that Hitlers hatred of Jews and Slavs came from a feeling of the superiority of the aryan race. Why would he as a German nationalist like Jews but still view Slavs as being inferior, clearly anti semnitism was more popular than anti slavism.

If you remove the feeling of German superiority of and threat caused by Jews you have changed the entire nature of Hitlers thinking about race and nationality.

E.g remove the extreme racialism of Hitler and where does his motivation for massive expansion into Eastern Europe come from?

I'm not saying a pro Jewish Hitler is impossible or that his ascent to power is either but he would just be radically different as a man and as a fuhrer.
 
Additionally even if Hitlers is not personally anti semnitic that does not mean the nazi party would not still be it. The stab in the back myth was not invented by nazis it was by militarists like Ludendorff and Hindenburg, these militarists were instrumental in bringing hitler to power and being friendly with Jews would be a major issue with building a ultra nationalist power base and support from the military/administration.
 
The problem is that Hitlers hatred of Jews and Slavs came from a feeling of the superiority of the aryan race. Why would he as a German nationalist like Jews but still view Slavs as being inferior, clearly anti semnitism was more popular than anti slavism.
Germany was one of the least antisemitic countries of Europe before 1933. Why is antisemitism a requirement in considering Slavs as Untermenschen?
 
Germany was one of the least antisemitic countries of Europe before 1933. Why is antisemitism a requirement in considering Slavs as Untermenschen?

It's not a requirement but you have to concede the ideas were heavily linked. To the point where it seems unlikely that hitler would believe In one without the other.

I mean is there an example of a German nationalist ideology that values Jews higher than Eastern Europeans and wishes to exterminate Eastern Europe while simply viewing Jews as made up of good and bad elements.

Not impossible it just seems unlikely
 
It's not a requirement but you have to concede the ideas were heavily linked. To the point where it seems unlikely that hitler would believe In one without the other.

I mean is there an example of a German nationalist ideology that values Jews higher than Eastern Europeans and wishes to exterminate Eastern Europe while simply viewing Jews as made up of good and bad elements.

Not impossible it just seems unlikely
If perhaps Hitler went with the Stahlhelm idea of service for Germany equaling German, things might move in a different way. Jewish German Nationalists are a complicated bunch.
 
I think that in OTL much of Hitler's anti-Semitism was a result of the general popular anti-Semitism of the day, but also his interaction with Jewish migrants in Vienna's slum. I think the easiest way to make him less anti-Semitic is to let him serve on the East Front instead of the West.
 
Here is my take how such a timeline under the premise of a Judeophilic Hitler might look like......



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Jakob Altenberg and Hitler's early adulthood in Vienna and Munich (OTL)

From 1905, Hitler lived a bohemian life in Vienna, financed by orphan's benefits and support from his mother. He worked as a casual labourer and eventually as a painter, selling watercolours of Vienna's sights. The Academy of Fine Arts Vienna rejected him in 1907 and again in 1908, citing "unfitness for painting". The director recommended that Hitler study architecture, which was another of his interests, but he lacked academic credentials as he had not finished secondary school. On 21 December 1907, his mother died of breast cancer. Hitler ran out of money and was forced to live in homeless shelters and men's hostels.

At the time Hitler lived there, Vienna was a hotbed of religious prejudice and racism. Fears of being overrun by immigrants from the East were widespread, and the populist mayor Karl Lueger exploited the rhetoric of virulent anti-Semitism for political effect. German nationalism had a widespread following in the Mariahilf district, where Hitler lived. Hitler read local newspapers such as the Deutsches Volksblatt that fanned prejudice and played on Christian fears of being swamped by an influx of eastern Jews. Hitler also read newspapers that published the main thoughts of philosophers and theoreticians such as Darwin, Nietzsche, Le Bon and Schopenhauer.

So it is not particular odd that when Hitler found was gifted a cheap collection of books on race theory he gladly read them. What is odd, is the man who gave them to Hitler, a certain Jakob Altenberg (1875–1944). He was an Austrian businessman and picture frame dealer. Altenberg, who was Jewish by birth, was a business partner of the young Adolf Hitler in his Vienna period (1909–13). After a discussion of racial theories, Jewish politics etc. Altenberg had the “bright” idea to broaden Hitler’s horizon a bit. Introducing him to Jewish, or Jew friendly figures who had their own ideas about race, war and eugenics.

Ludwig Gumplowicz and Der Rassenkampf (Struggle of the Races)

The first books author Ludwig Gumplowicz (March 9, 1838, Kraków – August 20, 1909, Graz, Austria-Hungary), was one of the founders of European sociology. He was also a jurist and political scientist who taught constitutional and administrative law at the University of Graz and as it happens he was also a Jew.

Gumplowicz became interested in the problem of suppressed ethnic groups very early, being from a Jewish family and coming from Kraków, a city of the former which was first partitioned and later as the Free City of Kraków annexed by Austria-Hungary. He was a lifelong advocate of minorities in the Habsburg Empire, in particular the Slavic speakers. Gumplowicz soon became interested in the later form of sociology of conflict, starting out from the idea of the group (then known as race). He understood race as a social and cultural, rather than a biological phenomenon. He stressed in every way the immeasurably small role of biological heredity and the decisive role of the social environment in the determination of human behavior. While attaching a positive significance to the mixing of races, he noted that pure races had already ceased to exist.

He saw the state as an institution which served various controlling elites at different times. In analysis, he leaned towards macrosociology, predicting that if the minorities of a state became socially integrated, they would break out in war. In his 1909 publication, Der Rassenkampf (Struggle of the Races) he foresaw a world war. During his life he was considered a Social Darwinist, mainly because of his approach to society as an aggregate of groups struggling ruthlessly among themselves for domination.

Nevertheless, he did not deduce his conceptions directly from evolutionary theory and criticized those sociologists (Comte, Spencer, Lilienfeld) who employed biological analogies as an explanatory principle.


Alfred Ploetz and “Die Tüchtigkeit unserer Rasse” (The Viability of Our Race)

The second book in the collection was not written by a Jewish author but nevertheless enlightening to Adolf. Die Tüchtigkeit unserer Rasse (The Viability of Our Race) the German eugenicist Alfred Ploetz (1860-1940). In it he advocated the complete absorption of Jews into the Aryan race: “The Hygiene of the entire human race converges with that of the Aryan race, which apart from a few small races, like the Jewish race – itself quite probably overwhelmingly Aryan in composition – is the cultural race par excellence…. All anti-Semitism is a pointless pursuit – a pursuit whose support will slowly recede with the tide of scientific knowledge and human democracy.”

Ploetz first proposed the theory of racial hygiene (race-based eugenics) in his "Racial Hygiene Basics" (Grundlinien einer Rassenhygiene) in 1895. In 1904 Ploetz founded the periodical "Archiv für Rassen-und Gesellschaftsbiologie" with Fritz Lenz as chief editor, and in 1905 the German Society for Racial Hygiene (Die Berliner Gesellschaft für Rassenhygiene) with 31 members. page [5] In 1907 the society became the "International Society for Racial Hygiene". In 1930 he became an honorary doctor of the University of Munich. Ploetz was a supporter of the Nazi Party, which took power in 1933. Ploetz wrote in April 1933 that he believed Hitler would bring racial hygiene from its previous marginality into the mainstream since the latter had already contacted him long before his meteoric rise, discussion their common ideas on the future of Germany.

In his early writings Ploetz credited Jews as the second highest cultural race after Europeans. He identified no substantial difference in "racial character" between Aryans and Jews, arguing that the mental abilities of Jews and their role in the development of human culture made them indispensable to the "process of racial mix" which would enhance humanity. The high aptitude of the Jews and their outstanding role in the progress of mankind considering men like Jesus, Spinoza (Marx – this name would be edited out of later editions) has to be kindly acknowledged without hesitation...”. A conviction that he carried over into his knew post, distinguishing Germany from other authoritarian regimes of its time.

There were certainly other factors at play but it was probably these books and the cordial relationship Jakob Altenberg that transformed Hitler’s potential anti-sementism into the opposite.


Adolf Hitler, Max Naumann and World War I

In 1914, at the outbreak of World War I, Hitler was living in Munich and voluntarily enlisted in the Bavarian Army. According to a 1924 report by the Bavarian authorities, allowing Hitler to serve was almost certainly an administrative error, since as an Austrian citizen, he should have been returned to Austria. However this little error allowed him to meet, serve and forge a friendship with Max Naumann (12 January 1875 – May 1939). He was the founder of "Verband nationaldeutscher Juden" (League of National German Jews), which called for the elimination of Jewish ethnic identity through Jewish assimilation and served in the Bavarian Army alongside Hitler during World War I (….)

Notes and Sources

All these people are real and from OTL. Max Naumann did serve in the Bavarian Army so he could have met Hitler, but I wanted a stronger theoretical- interllectual framework for Hitlers philo-semitism than a mere friendship. This is just a draft for how a hypothetical timeline might look like.

The Sources are Wikipedia and Jewish Eugenics by John Glad
 
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We can probably extend that to the Putsch attempt. Perhaps Naumann could contribute during Hitler's trial, which brings in quite a bit of support that Hitler grows appreciating of.


In OTL, from 1932 the Naumannites gained renewed attention by focusing on the anti-Semitism of the National Socialist party, and the illegitimacy of the National Socialists as German patriots. The Naumannites saw an “idealistic essence” in National Socialism that was obscured by racism, and considered that Hitler would outgrow Judaeophobia. The Naumannites advocated that Jews should join non-Nazi nationalist organizations, which could nonetheless aid the Nazis, and perhaps diminish the influence of the more vitriolic of the anti-Semites. Naumann supported the “German socialism” that had been a feature of the Right, and not only among the National Socialists.

Perhaps Naumann would bring his supporter base into a Judeophilic Hitler's party, which pushes him to be a full-blooded German (naturalized with help from Naumann) that gains the support of a broader spectrum of people. Maybe this can lead to him becoming President in the 1932 election, since the Harzburg Front might have held better with additional support from Naumann.
 
Yeah. And in doing so they flagrantly ignore that a Germany without the Nazis raging ideological hard ons just doesn't start WWII. Without Hitler and his madness - of which anti-Semitic racism was a big part - flogging them on, odds are good they pull back from the brink. And on the off-chance they do end up in a war they get crushed for it because, once again, Hitler and his madness pushed him to take some major gambles that happened to pay off. Without that willingness to risk it all on stuff like the historical Fall Gelb, Germany doesn't achieve it's historical success and gets ground down by the Anglo-French.

Hitler is such an extreme historic character that it is likely many modifications will butterfly OTL as we know it.
Having said that, "Lebensraum" could have been the driver without anti-semitism. Gypsies could have replaced the jewish people. Vengeance could have supplied the madness. We'll never know, but as long as the OP do supply another plausible driver/motivation for aggression (that would be plausible in AH's mind), I guess its a fair attempt.
 
Neither Lebensraum nor anti-Semitism was necessary to get Hitler to power and Germany into a new war. You could pretty much run German fascism on regaining territories from Poland, unite the German speaking areas outside Poland and anti-Communism, and anti-Communism would be pretty much the least important issue of those three. In fact you could drop all three and just run on MGGA (Make Germany Great Again). What we need to remember are while the Nazi was genocidal lunatics, Versailles was what gave them the fuel to gain power and attack Germany's neighbours.
 
It's an interesting Idea, though it would mean that there'd have to be very different conclusions by the pseudo-scientists the Nazi's believed, as they concluded jews were of a very low race.
Hitler could declare them Honorary Aryan like he did with the Japanese and Chinese, but he'd alianate a lot of anti-semites that he would have needed the support of in the early days
 
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