"...the war will not end as the Jews imagine it will, namely with the uprooting of the Aryans, but the result of this war will be the complete annihilation of the Jews."

Such harsh and violent rhetoric occurred at the same time as historians imply that the German population was completely unaware of the coming horrors the Jews and other minorities would and were already facing in Axis lands. Therefore, the "canonical" standard that Hitler committed such ruthless crimes as the Holocaust behind the eyes of the German people or had hidden his true intentions is inaccurate. The extent to which the "Jewish question" was "answered" could obviously not have been imagined by German citizens, but the intentions of the elected regime were clear and rife with popular support. As the German nation was clearly informed of such ruthless extents of anti-Semitism as annihilation, we can deduce that there was a blatant opposition to "Jewry" pervasively common throughout society. Further, no historic piece of evidence exists linking Adolf Hitler to the "Final Solution", that is, the national plan of [majority] Jewish extermination stipulated at the Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942. The program was initiated by Luftwaffe commander Hermann Göring and Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler. It is obvious that such an all-seeing and powerful dictator, having encouraged the program openly to the public, was highly aware of the coming genocide. The policy was widely accepted among the ruling regime, the public, and Germany's allies in Romania and Hungary. The slaughter also occurred in the Soviet Union that Germany considered a "Jewish empire". This should encourage historians to question the idea that the genocide was merely the work of the madman Adolf Hitler sentenced millions to their deaths in cold blood as nothing more than scapegoats.

Even before the Wannsee Conference the Wehrmacht (army) as a whole in the Third Reich was enthused with the apparently inevitable removal of Jews from the Axis territories, as seen by this speech to the Wehrmacht in Poland by Governor General Hans Frank on 16 December, 1941:

"One way or another, I will tell you quite openly, we must finish off the Jews. The Führer put it into words: should united Jewry again succeed in setting off a world war, then the blood sacrifice shall not be made only by the peoples driven into war, but the Jew of Europe will have met his end...We must destroy the Jews wherever we find them, and wherever it is at all possible, in order to maintain the whole structure of the Reich..."

In delineation of the "canonical" idea of a universal Jewish scapegoat, that is that the Jews were slain en masse solely as a justification for Hitler's election and consolidation at the same time as supposedly no one knew it would occur, historians must analyze the accepted Jewish characteristics in the Third Reich. Was there more criticism of Jews in Europe than simpleton stereotypes like frugality, big noses, curly hair, and theft? Or did they play some role in the reactive mass Antisemitism experienced all over Europe and the Middle East? National Socialists, right-wing radicals, Freikorps, monarchies, and nationalists throughout Europe characterized the Jews as an ultra-liberal, often anarchistic, subversive, "parasitic" people and, most important perhaps, the founders of the growing threats of socialism and Communism, the archnemeses of international Fascism and European heritage. They were often blamed for ending World War I early in the tumult of 1917-18, and also for forcing the liberalism, democracy, freedoms, and all-accepting tolerant governments that the Allies and United States demanded of the losers of the war. Without any attempt to justify the extermination of the Jews following World War I, historians must analyze the validity and source of such claims so prevalent in Europe, even among non-Axis nations.

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