In postfeudal Europe, widely held and passionate antisemitism led to discriminatory legislation, physical attacks on Jews, and, on occasion, pogroms; however, until World War II, it never led to genocide. In the twentieth century, although every European state insisted on the monopoly of coercive power, no government until many years after the Nazis took power made the physical extermination of Jews a goal. Although the Holocaust was the work of the Germans, in the middle of the relatively stable 1920s, there was no more overt antisemitism in Germany than in most other countries of Europe. A crucial turning point on the road that led to the Holocaust took place in January 1933 when a group that would ultimately make killing Jews its central aim succeeded in capturing the machinery of the German state. The first step on the road to the Holocaust was Hitler's assumption of power.

Fascism

The ideology that drove the German National Socialist Party was a variety of fascism. The nature of fascism therefore has a decisively important role in our investigation of the history of Holocaust. Unfortunately it is not easy to find a definition of fascism that is acceptable to most observers. Unlike Marxism, socialism, and communism, fascism has not produced an ideological superstructure. This is hardly surprising because fascism almost by necessity was anti-intellectual. Asking for a fascist ideology was asking the fascists to be other than who they want to be. Any definition of fascism is therefore based on imagining an ideal type and describing it, and because reality is messy, no ideal type could ever satisfy all people concerned. Furthermore, unlike Marxism, which proudly claimed to be internationalist, the fascists passionately objected to internationalism and mythologized the national community, the uniqueness of the nation-state. It is therefore not surprising that the European states that we consider fascist greatly differed from each other, and consequently generalizations on the basis of individual examples are hazardous. Indeed, it is very much open to question whether it is proper to describe, for example, the authoritarian Spanish state under Francisco Franco or Romania under Ion Antonescu as “fascist.” As a result, historians have come up with a variety of definitions of fascism.