Nazism needed a scapegoat in order to lay blame for Germany's loss in World War I, the inefficiency of the fiscal system under the Weimar government, and the economic crisis that confronted them throughout the 1920s. The Nazis claimed that the Jews were the greatest threat to the German nation and the Aryan race. Their doctrine, so elaborated in Hitler's Mein Kampf, considered Jews a race of parasites that, throughout history, attached itself to various cultures and ideologies in order to preserve itself. Examples of this were wide and varied, for the Nazis could legitimately find Jews in numerous countries at numerous historical times espousing liberalism, democracy, capitalism, industrialism, Marxism, socialism, and even trade unionism (Ibid., 24; Dawidowicz, 1975).

One very seminal question often arises regarding this vast paranoid conspiracy. How did the Nazi Party manage to convince the German people of its veracity? The idea of a master-race was certainly not something new, there was plenty of literature to support that theory, and anti-Semitism in the form of pogroms existed all over Europe. Hitler defined Das Volk (The Nation) as the highest creation of a race, and therefore any polluting of that race was an act of betrayal. For many Germans during Weimar, the Jews controlled industry, banking, and suffered less in many ways due to their connections with international finance. Of course, this was just a small portion of Jews, but it became a mythos that many could believe in since it absolved Germany of fault and pointed it at a vast conspiracy. This was really the central core of the message delivered in schools, newspapers, over the radio and, after hearing it again and again, some accepted it as fact. Hitler went as far as declaring that racial conflict against Judaism was vital in order to save Germany: "We may be inhumane, but if we rescue Germany we have achieved the greatest deed in the world. We may work injustice, but if we rescue Germany then we have removed the greatest injustice in the world. We may be immoral, but if our people are rescued we have opened the way for morality" (Hitler in: Koenigsberg, 2007, 21).

This fervent hatred was quite unbelievable to many Jews who considered themselves to be "good Germans," who were doctors, lawyers, and professors -- some even in governmental service. Hertha Nathroff, Albert Einstein's niece, wrote in her diary on the Jewish boycott and mounting tensions, "This day is engraved in my heart in flames. To think that such things are still possible in the twentieth century" (Nathroff, 2000, 179). Explaining that even the kindnest gentiles who had been friends and colleagues prior to the 1933 Jewish boycott, Marta Apple, wife of a rabbi in the city