# Why did so many pre- WWII Europeans hate the Jews? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [September 28, 2009, 3:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-so-many-pre-wwii-europeans-hate-the-jews/511815 "2009-09-28T03:06:48Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 12\ **Page:** 6
**Author:** ![Paul\_in\_Qatar](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ccd318/32.png) [@Paul\_in\_Qatar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Paul_in_Qatar)\ **Post date:** [September 30, 2009, 2:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-so-many-pre-wwii-europeans-hate-the-jews/511815/101 "2009-09-30T14:48:49Z")
No, I did not know that. Thank you. The mercenaries I knew about. ---
**Author:** ![sleeping](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/839c29/32.png) [@sleeping](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/sleeping)\ **Post date:** [September 30, 2009, 11:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-so-many-pre-wwii-europeans-hate-the-jews/511815/102 "2009-09-30T23:27:59Z")
> [@constanze](#): > > Progroms happening in Russia because the Regime found them useful are not the same level as the Dreyfuss affair in France; in fact, part of the shock of the Dreyfuss affair was that until that point, Jews had considered France to be one of the most liberal and enlightened countries in Europe towards them. > > Again, if you are honestly trying to understand this, then the timeline is very roughly… Great post, **constanze**. I think you address a lot important points here. > [@](#): > > For example, the Nazis used to show the movie “Jud Süss” in villages right before a raid for free. At that time, people didn’t have TV, so a free movie, the cinema would be packed. And Jud Süss is propaganda of the worst, but technically finest, sort. It claims to be based on the true historical portrait of the Jew Süss, who was financial advisor to a weak lord. In the movie, Süss is the sinister figure pulling all the ropes to pass laws to suck the peasants money till they collapse to enrich himself, and then corrupts the fair german daughter of some guy, dishonors her, and she goes into the water of shame. Historically, it’s compleltly false, but people didn’t know that. > The Nazis did that becasue they saw that simply showing up in a village with a big truck to cart the jews away, the people would refuse and not aid, so they had to make a terrible lie of a movie to make people more enthusiastic. I agree with you overall, but, IIRC, _Jud Suss_ was _too_ heavy. It achieved its purpose in as much it complemented other Nazi propaganda, but Veit Harlan was no Riefenstahl. I have it on DVD and, even considering the background propaganda people would have been exposed to, its hard to imagine anyone taking it completely seriously. ---
**Author:** ![carnivorousplant](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/carnivorousplant/32/3563_2.png) [@carnivorousplant](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/carnivorousplant)\ **Post date:** [October 1, 2009, 12:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-so-many-pre-wwii-europeans-hate-the-jews/511815/103 "2009-10-01T00:49:58Z")
> [@sleeping](#): > > its hard to imagine anyone taking it completely seriously. Hey, my Grandmother born in 1900 thought the German Q boat crews ate babies. 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![ethelbert](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/958977/32.png) [@ethelbert](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ethelbert)\ **Post date:** [October 1, 2009, 7:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-so-many-pre-wwii-europeans-hate-the-jews/511815/104 "2009-10-01T19:31:44Z")
Any discussion of modern European antisemitism needs to give a long look at [Martin Luther](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther#Antijudaism_and_antisemitism), who many regard as its father. > [@](#): > > Luther argued that the Jews were no longer the chosen people but “the devil’s people”: he referred to them with violent, vile language Luther advocated setting synagogues on fire, destroying Jewish prayerbooks, forbidding rabbis from preaching, seizing Jews’ property and money, and smashing up their homes, so that these “poisonous envenomed worms” would be forced into labour or expelled “for all time”. In Robert Michael’s view, Luther’s words “We are at fault in not slaying them” amounted to a sanction for murder. Much Nazi propaganda was based on his writing. ---
**Author:** ![Malthus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/85f322/32.png) [@Malthus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Malthus)\ **Post date:** [October 1, 2009, 7:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-so-many-pre-wwii-europeans-hate-the-jews/511815/105 "2009-10-01T19:53:16Z")
> [@strqwert44](#): > > One factor: Jews were an economically dominant minority, having disproportionate influence in a number of trades/professions historically. I’m guessing that this bred resentment among “native” Europeans. …for more info see: > > see, [World on Fire (book) - Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market-dominant_minority) This is very interesting. When I was travelling in Indonesia, I was struck by the resemblence between the resentment of the native Indonesians for the overseas Chinese, and that traditionally in existence for Europe’s Jews. Perhaps the key to the different status of Jews in North America is that we in North America are a _patchwork_ of different “market dominant minorities”, and to a great extent, people here aspire to _be_ crafty, competitive in business, etc. and so don’t see these as _bad things_. 😉 ---
**Author:** ![constanze](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/f9ae1b/32.png) [@constanze](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/constanze)\ **Post date:** [October 1, 2009, 7:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-so-many-pre-wwii-europeans-hate-the-jews/511815/106 "2009-10-01T19:57:34Z")
> [@Paul\_in\_Qatar](#): > > Good point, look at the difference. The Americans killed people by the basketful to steal their land. Had the American Indians given up the land and moved someplace the white would not have killed them. It was robbery pure and simple. > > But had the Jews given the Germans something or another, that would not have saved their lives. They were killed for being Jews. As I said, it is hard to understand. > > The Jews did not have anything the Germans wanted. They did not so something that the Germans wanted to stop them from doing. They simply were Jews, that was enough. Wrong. First, the white Americans at that time believed - with the same sincerity as Europeans one century later - that there was a good reason to kill the Indians. Robbery needed to be justified with a theoretical framework because outside of, and contrary to Hollywood, people don’t want to be Evil, with a manical laugh. The justifications varied over time and adapted to the current trend in society, but it was still obvious as transparent disguise for the rational people, while good enough for those in power to use as manipulation for the masses. In case of the white Americans against the Natives, it was Manifest destiny: like God in the Bible had given Kanaan to the Israelites, he had given the US to the whites, and like in the Bible, they had to cleanse the country from the former inhabitants first. There was a lot of discussion at that time whether Indians were proper humans, who had a soul, and thus should be saved by missionaries, or simply animals, tailless monkeys (the same discussion was also around black-skinned people). Most people had no problem with inventing and falsifying atrocities committed by Indians against white women to illustrate their barbarous nature, while complelty ignoring the atrocities and massakers committed by soldiers and rabble against Indian women and children. Most people also had no problem with deliberatly wasting the buffaloes with the purpose of starving the Indians. “The only good Indian is a dead Indian” was a common sentiment. Even if the [smallpox](http://http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1088/did-whites-ever-give-native-americans-blankets-infected-with-smallpox) plan wasn’t put into practice, the hate evident in the letters from that time period is appalling today. > [@](#): > > ``` > P.S. I will try to inocculate the Indians by means of Blankets that may fall in their hands, taking care however not to get the disease myself. As it is pity to oppose good men against them, I wish we could make use of the Spaniard's Method, and hunt them with English Dogs. Supported by Rangers, and some Light Horse, who would I think effectively extirpate or remove that Vermine. > > ``` As for the Indians giving the whites simply what they wanted - no. It wasn’t that simple. Most of the last fights were about the Wild West, which wasn’t, and still isn’t today, farmland (as Cecil explained, it’s too dry beyond grass, which is why the herds migrated through). About 150 treaties were made between the Indians and the govt., and every one of them was broken by the whites. The Black Hills were promised to the Sioux in exchange of other good land, because they were holy to the tribe, but when gold was found, that treaty was worthless, too. The tribes were pushed from good land to bad land to worst land, and then expected to change from a hunting to a farming culture in places that didn’t support farming at all. The only reason that Indians weren’t completly killed was that slowly opposition raised against it, and that it wasn’t worth the trouble anymore. During the Holocaust, many people believed as sincerely the scientic theories of races that day, where Jews polluted and weakened the German race with their deformities and sleeping with good German maiden, producing mongrels. The anti-miscengenation laws in the US continued after WWII, until the civil rights movement. And then soldiers had to enforce a court edit that black children could got to a white school. As for the wealth motive of the Jews giving the Germans - beside the “purity” of the race, there was a good haul in robbing and killing the Jews. A large part of the boom between 1933 and 1939 was not the superior Nazi economy - it was actually worse than before, becaus a lot of bribing and dealing between party friends, and party loyalty trumping efficiceny and competence - but the laws that excluded Jews from certain professions, ownership of businesses, and the emigration laws that made sure that Jews who left the country in time had to sell their possesions at a fraction of the real value. ---
**Author:** ![constanze](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/f9ae1b/32.png) [@constanze](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/constanze)\ **Post date:** [October 1, 2009, 8:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-so-many-pre-wwii-europeans-hate-the-jews/511815/107 "2009-10-01T20:18:18Z")
> [@Paul\_in\_Qatar](#): > > As you said, until recently there was no nationalism as we now understand it. No, not as we now understand it; the whole concept and name of nationalism was coined and slowly came into being in the 18th and 19 th century. > [@](#): > > You say people identified with the local lord. I propose they identified with their language, culture and so on. Which do you think is more likely? This isn’t about what’s likely or what somebody is proposing. This is history, which deals with facts from sources, and mainstream history theory. You can propose all you like, but it’s not going to fly with any major history book or expert. > [@](#): > > I am fascinated that your understanding of the causes of the Thirty Years’ War is deeper and more insightful than the people actually there at the time. Please explain how you have come by this knowledge hidden for so long. Wuh? Are you saying that you really believe because people say it was about Protestants vs. Catholics, that was the main and only and real reason? Seriously? I guess you also believe that’s the reason for the Irish conflict? If you’re getting snarky about the people being there at the time, well, I presumed you weren’t there either. Moreover, being a peasant or soldier at that time, doesn’t mean you have a better deeper understanding of the real causes than the historians who go through the papers of the rulers and can see the aftereffects. As for how I come by this knowledge: it’s not really hidden because it’s common and accepted history. I don’t know what history books or theory you’ve read that claimed different. Swe > [@](#): > > den, you know the Swedish Empire. The ones who ruled the Finns and Norwegians. The fellows who invaded Germany. I suppose your way of looking at it is that the Swedes showed how cosmopolitan they were by ruling people not of their culture. Would you make the same case for the Germans or Soviets? The Swedens had an empire, yeah. They invaded Germany. That doesn’t make it ethnic cleansing. You seem to have a different understanding of that term. Simply fighting a war to grab some country and ruling over it isn’t automatically ethnic cleansing. Displacing the native population - yes. Fighting a war with despiccable means agains the civilians instead of the soldiers - yes. The Germans during the Nazis were ideologically ethnic cleansing, yes. But the Soviets? If you are referring to the Ukranians and Georgians, that was Stalin’s craziness. > [@](#): > > While appreciate your last paragraph comparing the slaughter of millions of Europeans to the murder of tens of thousands of Americans. DO you realize how close you are coming to Holocaust denial? Though you say, “People are not denying the Holocaust happened,” but you do seem to indicate it was not a special event even in European history. Shame on you. If you are going to take sincere attempts at explaining the question of what caused anti-semitism this way, then I can’t contribute anymore to this thread. I’m not comparing the extent of deaths in order to belittle; I was trying to make you see and understand that the _attitudes_ at the root of the problem, that pave the way for populists to misuse, are the same. I do think it’s not only sad but a big problem that so many Americans, like you, believe that fascim and nationalism only comes in one flavour, that of jack-booted, goose-stepping, accent-speaking, Germans. It can never happen to patriotic, militaristic, Americans. That wrong belief is what helps and aids the far-reaching spread of fascist thoughts and militaristic ideology in American society, esp. in the conservatives. [quote] American history is notable for the small scale of its ethnic hatred and it low body count. Find me an event in American history as violent as the Belgian occupation of Congo, or the Thirty Years War, or WWII, or the relocation of Germans after WWII. I admit we might have sometimes come up to the level of Srebrenica, where eight thousand were killed in a spasm. “Might,” because I challenge you to find a similar orgasm of killing of ethnics in American history. Again, the Thirty years war was **not** about ethnics, it was a simple war of who got to rule which area. Are you counting the Spanish-Dutch war, or the Seven years war, also? And of course America didn’t have to fight the same wars to own country as European rulers had: you either bought land for a piitance, or killed the Indians. Of course the numbers didn’t reach the same levels as densly populated Europe. I would have to look up the numbers of how many blacks were killed through slavery and Jim Crow, and how many Nisei exactly died in the interment camps during WWII. But you already said you wanted to exclude both of these groups - why exactly? ---
**Author:** ![constanze](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/f9ae1b/32.png) [@constanze](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/constanze)\ **Post date:** [October 1, 2009, 8:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-so-many-pre-wwii-europeans-hate-the-jews/511815/108 "2009-10-01T20:28:17Z")
> [@sleeping](#): > > I agree with you overall, but, IIRC, _Jud Suss_ was _too_ heavy. It achieved its purpose in as much it complemented other Nazi propaganda, but Veit Harlan was no Riefenstahl. I have it on DVD and, even considering the background propaganda people would have been exposed to, its hard to imagine anyone taking it completely seriously. That’s because you’re seeing it from a different standpoint than the Germans, who had been fed and believed the stereotypes shown. From the [English wiki](http://http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jud_S%C3%BC%C3%9F_(1940_film)) (the German one has cites from people at that time) > [@](#): > > The 1940 film achieved Nazi objectives and was a great success in Germany and abroad. Within the Third Reich, it was the number one film of the 1939-1940 season, seen by over twenty million people.[2] It was shown to SS units about to be sent against Jews, to non-Jewish populations of areas where Jews were about to be deported, and to concentration camp guards.[3] Anti-Jewish violence was reported after its projection in Marseille, for example. The impact of this movie was such that its director, Veit Harlan, received the 1943 Universum Film Archiv award (the UFA was the major commercial German film studio in the early part of the 20th century) at a time when the award was under Goebbels’ jurisdiction. ---
**Author:** ![constanze](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/f9ae1b/32.png) [@constanze](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/constanze)\ **Post date:** [October 1, 2009, 8:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-so-many-pre-wwii-europeans-hate-the-jews/511815/109 "2009-10-01T20:34:03Z")
> [@ethelbert](#): > > Any discussion of modern European antisemitism needs to give a long look at [Martin Luther](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther#Antijudaism_and_antisemitism), who many regard as its father. > > Much Nazi propaganda was based on his writing. That’s not really true. As I said upthread, originally Luther was friendly towards the Jews, expecting them to accept his new religion. When he got rejected and turned angry, he didn’t invent the racism, he simply repeated the common prejudices which were passed around at that time. In catholic regions, people believed the “Christ-killer” hate from the Catholic Church; if anything, the protestants were less likely to parrot blindly what Luther had written in the time of the 19th and 20th century. The Nazis used existing stereotypes, but their race ideology was the work not of Luther, but of a few guys, for example [Alfred Rosenberg.](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_the_Twentieth_Century) ---
**Author:** ![Paul\_in\_Qatar](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ccd318/32.png) [@Paul\_in\_Qatar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Paul_in_Qatar)\ **Post date:** [October 1, 2009, 9:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-so-many-pre-wwii-europeans-hate-the-jews/511815/110 "2009-10-01T21:39:06Z")
A Nazi is someone as physically fit as Goebbels, As thin as Goring, As blond as Hitler, As Christian as Rosenberg. ---
**Author:** ![constanze](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/f9ae1b/32.png) [@constanze](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/constanze)\ **Post date:** [October 1, 2009, 10:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-so-many-pre-wwii-europeans-hate-the-jews/511815/111 "2009-10-01T22:06:21Z")
> [@Paul\_in\_Qatar](#): > > A Nazi is someone as physically fit as Goebbels, > As thin as Goring, > As blond as Hitler, > As Christian as Rosenberg. The original joke was _Wie sieht ein echter Arier aus? – Blond wie Hitler, groß wie Goebbels, schlank wie Göring, keusch wie Röhm!“_ How does a real Aryan look like? Blond like Hitler, tall like Goebbels, think like Goebbels, chaste like Röhm. ---
**Author:** ![Henrichek](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/5daacb/32.png) [@Henrichek](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Henrichek)\ **Post date:** [October 1, 2009, 10:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-so-many-pre-wwii-europeans-hate-the-jews/511815/112 "2009-10-01T22:09:26Z")
> [@constanze](#): > > schlank wie Göring, > > think like Goebbels, Thin like Göring, that is. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-so-many-pre-wwii-europeans-hate-the-jews/511815.md?page=5)