The Nazi claim that antisemitism was central is routinely dismissed as mere demagogy.

Evidence

MANY STILL consider it an accident that Nazi ideology centered around antisemitism and that Nazi policy, consistently and uncompromisingly, aimed at the persecution and finally the extermination of the Jews. Only the horror of the final catastrophe, and even more the homelessness and uprootedness of the survivors, made the “Jewish question” so prominent in our everyday political life. What the Nazis themselves claimed to be their chief discovery—the role of the Jewish people in world politics—and their chief interest—persecution of Jews all over the world—have been regarded by public opinion as a pretext for winning the masses or an interesting device of demagogy. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 58

Categorization

• XREF: Sets up the field’s foundational move of taking perpetrators’ own ideology seriously — parallels the later Islamophobia readings’ demand not to dismiss anti-Muslim rhetoric as ‘just prejudice’.