Hitler grew up in an age of massive anti-Jewish propaganda. He was intelligent and well-read, but uneducated and unable to distinguish proper intellectual discourse (e.g. Dawkins “The Selfish Gene”) from popular trash science (e.g. von Daniken’s “Chariots of the Gods”). There were lots of seemingly well written authors of the day who published a lot of works saying “Jews are bad” or “They’re responsible for everything bad”. Hell, we still see stuff on Quora like that here in 2023.
As a soldier in World War I he thought he had found his calling and was actually fairly competent - the army was a good fit for him. However, when Germany lost the war, Hitler and many other Germans at the time couldn’t figure out how. The war had been fought almost entirely outside Germany and when the cease fire took effect in 1918 Germany occupied a large portion of France. When Germany was completely screwed over at Versailles the next year (handing over massive amounts of territory and incredibly high war reparations) the populace was even more confused.
In fact, the ruling elite had scrambled to keep the truth from coming out - Germany had terrible logistics and in November 1918 was running out of food and ammunition. They had a month of both at the best. The military leaders had threatened to resign if a cease fire wasn’t forthcoming, the Kaiser abdicated, and a new social democratic government took over thanks to popular support.
But that wasn’t the prevailing narrative. Speculative politics took hold where the Bolsheviks who took over Russia also undermined the German government, essentially betraying the German people. In truth, the new German government was on the ropes and their choice was to accept bad terms or try to fight a war they had no supplies to pursue.
And when you looked at communist parties, both in the Soviet Union and elsewhere, you saw there were a lot of Jews involved.
Like Leon Trotsky here. Now, Trotsky wasn’t particularly observant, but he did observe basic customs like getting married in a synagogue.
However, the truth was rather different. Jews joined communist parties because other parties excluded them from membership. The fact Jews were not allowed any other political voice except inside the very open communist parties was used as proof that Jews ran communism.
In addition, looking for work and being a fairly good speaker, the German army often hired Hitler to speak to young people about the dangers of Bolshevism. Hitler was well versed in the propaganda about the subject, which also had anti-Semitic overtones.
In fact when you look at the early history of the Nazi party, a lot of the members had left-leaning tendencies (Hitler’s best buddy Ernst Rohm was an out-and-out socialist who wanted worker control of factories and a popular army to replace the professional one) but were desperately trying to separate their brand of socialism from “Bolshevism” or “bad Jewish socialism”. However, the Nazis also had very strong nationalistic tendencies which, of course meant Christian and German “ideals” should be at the heart of German socialism.
