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Originally Posted by Blind Mapmaker
I attended a couple of lectures and seminars on these topics and while I agree that things were not always much better elsewhere there does seem to be an especially entrenched racist/anti-Semite element in German upper-class and upper middle-class (Bildungsbürgertum) thinking. Some of this was certainly due to pretty liberal treatment of Jews in post-1848 Germany.
Its manifestations might not have been so different from earlier anti-Jewish sentiment, but there was a strong biologist component to German racism. I don't want to say Goldhagen and Fischer are right, but there is certainly some continuity that makes me doubtful of a really positive German parallel.
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My personal thesis is that the sudden role reversal for the Jews (the German Jews, that is; nobody liked the Ostjuden, not even the German Jews) was part of a radical rethinking of how to define the group of "Germans." Sociology teaches that when we make a group, we not only define who is in a group, but who is NOT in a group, and with the creation of an independent Poland in Posen and Westpreussen (as opposed to just Congress Poland), the most obvious group for "non-Germans," the Poles, were no longer in Germany, which allowed the anti-Jewish stream of German nationalism to gain a foothold. This was helped by the stream of Ostjuden, radically different from the German Jews in every way but religion, migrating from Russia to Germany to escape the anti-Jewish pogroms that were basically a rite of passage for each generation of Russians until the Bolsheviks, making something akin to the immigration issues in today's America. Throw in a humiliating loss and having the nation (instead of the a segment of the nation, like the government or the aristocracy) blamed in a treaty for it.
Incidentally, I'm not sure the Nazis or some other far-right group were fated to rise to the top in Germany until the Dawes Plan in 1923. That brought an influx of American capital to Germany, and led to the conservative businessmen to manage the chaos that happened when the American stock market to collapse, and sided with a group of guys they would use as strike breakers and Commie-killers. If the German response to the French occupation of the Ruhr is more violent -- strangely, more in line with what Hitler wanted -- you could have less sympathy for Germany in England and America, reducing the amount of foreign capital to right-wing German businessmen. The German economy doesn't rebuild in part during the 1920s, and the KPD comes to power. It certainly doesn't change the prospect of a war, which became inevitable after the occupation of the Ruhr and the contrasting revocation of the Treaty of Sèvres after Turkey made an impressive show of force in the same year. You wouldn't have racial-based genocide, but the Bolsheviks were never ones to shirk from killing, so history might not have been that different. Have them win, and you do have the basic criteria satisfied: Germany dominant, not a Nazi state.