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Notes -
I mean gun to head I’d point to several things:
Scientific hubris abroad in much of Western Europe at the time which assumed that humans in their infinite wisdom had the ability and thus the duty to reshape humanity and human genetics to create better humans.
Nationalistic fervor that resulted from the loss in WWI and the desire to reassert Germany as a major power in Europe.
Reparations demanded added to the global economic crisis of the Great Depression meant that the median population was experiencing hyperinflation and unemployment and so on. This lead to people being willing to look for anything and anyone who had some sort of plan to make things better before bread cost 2 wheelbarrows of marks instead of one.
Jews were pretty easy pickings at the time. Many were immigrants who had fled Eastern Europe during the Russian revolution, they were isolated, they did weird things in their religion. They were already seen as enemies because of blood libels based on Christian beliefs from earlier centuries. They didn’t have a lot of political power. They were “those weirdos over there who dress funny and nod while they pray.” Getting people to not like them isn’t hard.
Moral relativism that meant that people were no longer beholden to ideas of Good and Evil.
As opposed to at some other point in the previous thousand years?
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