Before Hitler, Germany was probably one of the least anti-Semitic countries in Europe, the Austrians, like Hitler, however, were always bad news, and they were the ones who eventually brought the poison into Germany with them.
Interesting. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised with a high-powered kingdom like Austria-Hungary (at least the spoils of it).
Germany, of course, was really only a recently created nation, out of many small duchies, which like little tribes, were often in turmoil amongst themselves. That may have contributed to the “openness” over so long a time, while other Europeans were long more solidified, powerful, and consolidated and could easily rule on “internal” issues like Jews amongst them, while tiny duchies involved in endless bickering couldn’t.
No, anti-semitism went back into the mists in Germany. It was already there when the Black Death showed up, and people began to blame the Plague on Jews who, they said, were poisoning wells. (They hadn't a clue about fleas and disease.)
The Black Death antisemitic frenzy led directly to laws prohibiting the Jews from owning real estate: that made them the urban bankers and ghetto-dwelling diamond merchants of early-modern history.
Nineteenth-century Germany was just as antisemitic as Germany had traditionally been, but the heat went up a notch with the arrival in the 1870's of Pan-Germanism, an intellectual movement that tended to increase antisemitic sentiment. Politics being a zero-sum game, if one wants to exalt the political position of Germans, then perforce that of Jews (bankers, merchants, etc.) must suffer.
Pan-Germanism and Socialism were the direct intellectual progenitors of National Socialism.