German racism defined national socialism in Austria and Germany after the fall of the house of Hapsburg. The Germanic peoples saw themselves as being destined to rule Central Europe and to dominate Eastern Europe. The racism that promised that dominance coagulated around a virulent anti-Semitism.
The irony is that this very racism, which associated national and global ambitions to a particular race of people rather than to an ideology or to a geographic/territorial understanding of a national destiny, has come to define the self-understanding of the Jewish people in their own homeland.
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