Extreme instances of persecution include the pogroms which preceded the First Crusade in 1096, the expulsion from England in 1290, the massacres of Spanish Jews in 1391, the persecutions of the Spanish Inquisition, the expulsion from Spain in 1492, Cossack massacres in Ukraine, various pogroms in Russia, the Dreyfus affair, the Final Solution by Hitler's Germany, official Soviet anti-Jewish policies and the Jewish exodus from Arab and Muslim countries.

However, Munk's attitude towards Hitler ( and Mussolini ) turned to outspoken disgust, as he witnessed Hitler's persecution of the German Jewish community, and Mussolini's conduct of the war in Ethiopia.

Rabbi David Dalin's The Myth of Hitler's Pope argues that critics of Pius XII are liberal Catholics and ex-Catholics who " exploit the tragedy of the Jewish people during the Holocaust to foster their own political agenda of forcing changes on the Catholic Church today " and that Pius XII was responsible for saving the lives of many thousands of Jews.

After Hitler's takeover of the German government in 1933, political enemies of the Nazis were persecuted, and their institutions closed or destroyed ; the Gestapo began actions against Polish and Jewish students ( see: Jewish Theological Seminary of Breslau ), Communists, Social Democrats, and trade unionists, arrests were even made for speaking Polish in public, in 1938 the Nazi-controlled police destroyed the Polish cultural centre.

Hitler's chief lieutenants, Göring and the SS chief Heinrich Himmler, took this and other comments by Hitler at this time ( most of which were not recorded, but were attested to at postwar trials ) as authority to proceed with a definitive " final solution of the Jewish question " ( Die Endlösung der Judenfrage ) involving the complete removal of the Jews from the German-occupied territories.

It had been anticipated only to discuss problems that occurred with the deportations of the ( Greater ) German Jews ... Only after Hitler's speech of 12 December was Heydrich able, as Gerlach shows, to broaden the theme and fix a conference on the ' Final Solution of the European Jewish question '.

The same speech also sees Hitler's " prophecy " where he warns that if " Jewish financers " start a war against Germany, the ... result will be the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe ".

In point of fact, in war time Europe, the Jewish citizens of the new territories of Macedonia and Thrace were all under Hitler's direct jurisdiction, since they were not formally Bulgarian citizens.

At the same time, Irving put a copy of Hitler's " Prophecy Speech " of 30 January 1939, promising the " annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe " if " Jewish financiers " started another world war, onto his wall.

This anti-Semitic standpoint concerning the bible can be traced back to the earliest time of the Nazi movement, e. g. Dietrich Eckart's ( Hitler's early mentor ) book " Bolshevism from Moses to Lenin: A Dialogue Between Adolf Hitler and Me ", where it was claimed that " Jewish forgeries " had been added to the New Testament.

Frank said that the investigation uncovered evidence that Maria Schicklgruber, Hitler's paternal grandmother, had been working as a cook in the household of a Jewish man named Leopold Frankenberger before she gave birth to Hitler's father, Alois, out of wedlock.

Though several characters, including Stingo, discuss in detail the fact that the Jewish people suffered far more than other groups, Stingo also describes Hitler's attempts to eliminate the Slavs or turn them into slave labor and makes the case that the Holocaust cannot be understood as an exclusively Jewish tragedy.

He requested, as part of the Pan-Arab struggle, Hitler's support to oppose the establishment in Palestine of a Jewish national home.

With Hitler's approval he remained head ( Reichsstatthalter ) of the newly named Ostmark, with Ernst Kaltenbrunner his chief minister and Josef Burckel as Commissioner for the Reunion of Austria ( concerned with the " Jewish Question ").

Because of their Jewish origin, violinists Norbert Brainin, Siegmund Nissel and Peter Schidlof ( later violist ) were driven out of Vienna after Hitler's Anschluss of 1938.

Heinkel had been a critic of Hitler's regime concerning being forced to fire Jewish designers and staff in 1933, however, he was a member of the Nazi party, awarded the German National Prize for Art and Science in 1938, one of the rarest honors of the German government, and he used forced Jewish labor starting in 1941, in which his company was considered a " model for slave labor.

The Upper West Side is a significant Jewish neighborhood, populated with both German Jews who moved in at the turn of last century, and Jewish refugees escaping Hitler's Europe in the 1930s.

Thyssen accepted the exclusion of Jews from German business and professional life by the Nazis, and dismissed his own Jewish employees, but he did not share Hitler's violent anti-Semitism.

* Bryan Mark Rigg, Hitler's Jewish Soldiers: The Untold Story of Nazi Racial Laws and Men of Jewish Descent in the German Military, University Press of Kansas ( 2002 ), ISBN 0-7006-1178-9.

Werner Goldberg's story formed part of the 2006 documentary Hitler's Jewish Soldiers, a 58 minute film produced by Larry Price in association with the Israel Broadcasting Authority.

* Billinger, Robert D. Hitler's Soldiers in the Sunshine State: German Pows in Florida.

He believes that greatness is a marriage between the man and the times as was aptly represented by Churchill, who would very possibly have gone down in history as a political failure if it had not been for Hitler's war.

The Dolchstoß was a central image in propaganda produced by the many right-wing and traditionally conservative political parties that sprang up in the early days of the Weimar Republic, including Hitler's NSDAP.

During a tour of Germany in 1958, accompanied by then-wife Eden, daughter Melinda, Robert Dwan and Dwan's daughter Judith, he climbed a pile of rubble that marked the site of Adolf Hitler's bunker, the site of Hitler's death, and performed a two-minute Charleston.

All expressions of public opinion were controlled by Hitler's propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, who made effective use of film, mass rallies, and Hitler's hypnotic speaking.

Initially, he was not swept up by Hitler's charisma or the cult of Führer worship.

Finkelstein has published heavy criticisms of several books in his career, as he did to Hitler's Willing Executioners by Daniel Johnah Goldhagen, which he calls " replete with gross misinterpretations of source material and internal contradictions ", and says " the book is devoid of scholarly value ".

But Hitler, supported by Göring, resisted these demands, which he feared would weaken civilian morale and lead to a repetition of the debacle of 1918, when the German army had been undermined ( in Hitler's view ) by a collapse of the home front.

Ribbentrop became Hitler's favourite foreign-policy adviser, partly by dint of his familiarity with the world outside Germany, but also by shameless flattery and sycophancy.

Hitler's meeting with de Brinon had a huge impact on French public opinion, and helped to put an end to the calls for a preventive war by convincing many in France that Hitler was a man of peace who only wanted to do away with Part V.

In his early years, Hitler's aim in foreign affairs was to persuade the world that he wished to reduce military spending by making idealistic but very vague disarmament offers ( in the 1930s, the term disarmament was used to describe arms-limitation agreements ).

Following the lead of Andreas Hillgruber, who argued that Hitler had a Stufenplan ( stage by stage plan ) for world conquest, Hildebrand argued that Ribbentrop may not have fully understood what Hitler's Stufenplan was, or alternatively in pressing so hard for colonial restoration was trying to score a personal success that might improve his standing with Hitler.

Ribbentrop, for his part, because of his status as the Nazi British expert, resolved Hitler's dilemma by supporting the anti-British line and by repeatedly advising Hitler that Britain would not go to war for Poland in 1939.

The extent that Hitler was influenced by Ribbentrop's advice can be seen in Hitler's orders for a limited mobilization against Poland alone.

Gustav was alarmed at Hitler's aggressive foreign policy after the Munich Agreement, but by then he was fast succumbing to senility and was effectively displaced by his son Alfried.

The League was mostly silent in the face of major events leading to the Second World War, such as Hitler's re-militarization of the Rhineland, occupation of the Sudetenland and Anschluss of Austria, which had been forbidden by the Treaty of Versailles.

Two weeks after Soviet armies had entered the Baltic states, Berlin requested Finland to permit the transit of German troops, followed five weeks thereafter by Hitler's issuance of a secret directive " to take up the Russian problem, to think about war preparations ," a war whose objective would include establishment of a Baltic confederation.

Such distortions of Germanic mythology were denounced by J. R. R. Tolkien, e. g. in a 1941 letter where he speaks of Hitler's corruption of "... that noble northern spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe, which I have ever loved and tried to present in its true light.

While racial mysticism played a key role in his own worldview, Spengler had always been an outspoken critic of the pseudo-scientific racial theories professed by the Nazis and many others in his time, and was not inclined to change his views upon Hitler's rise to power.

* Bryan Perrett, Knights of the Black Cross: Hitler's Panzerwaffe and Its Leaders.

Incidentally, " Hitler's Downfall " is actually the instrumental " Bryan O ' Lynn ", already available in a studio recording.