Question

Why did many Germans believe (or go along with) Hitler’s anti-Jewish propaganda?: A. Hitler was the first person to be anti-Semitic. B. Anti-Semitism had been common in Europe for hundreds of years. C. Germans were less well educated than other Europeans. D. Most Germans did not have religious beliefs

Answer 1

This is a pretty tricky question and the answers gloss over most of the details that should be considered important. But going through each one, we can find out the reasons why.

Hitler was certainly not the first anti-semitic speaker in Germany, so (A) is out. Germans also had no problems in terms of education -- Germany led many scientific fields at the time, producing a great number of thinkers and scholars. Einstein originally came from Germany to America, staying only when it became clear that Hitler's Germany had no place for Jews himself...so (C) is definitely out. And a number of Germans were Christians, whether Protestant or Roman Catholic among other denominations, so that counts out (D)

That leaves (B) as the most likely answer, though it's not the entire story. When Hitler and the Nazis took power, they espoused a racial ideal that categorized Jews (among many others) as an inferior people. Anti-semitism had been around for awhile in Christian Europe, but in the Nazis' hands, they used it as a racial argument in trying to wipe them out.

Answer 2

Cap has done a first-rate analysis. I would also add, because I despise the multiple-choice problem, which often forces you to make false choices and leave important stuff out, that two additional very important factors are...

(1) Hitler made efforts to hide the ultimate goals of his viciousness. He did not speak *directly* of intentions to round up the Jews and kill them, and likewise a great deal of Nazi viciousness towards the Jews was cloaked in euphemism, deception, and secrecy. The Nazis spoke soothingly of "resettlement" -- not extinction. The trains were locked, unmarked, and traveled at night.

It's certainly true that many, and ultimately most Germans could have figured out what was going on. As Albert Speer pointed out in his famous memoirs, by the end of the war it was very clear that there was a dark curtain across a certain corner of German society, labeled "Don't Look Here" and many people could have easily looked, had they chosen to. But of course they had good reason not to, which brings me to...

(2) It was all legal. Hitler did nothing *outside* of German law. The expropriation and deportation and even execution of the Jews was all done legal and proper, under laws duly passed and signed off on by judges in formal and solemn legal documents. And it is very, very difficult for citizens to apply their conscience and defy the settled law of the land. You have to have an unusually strong conscience, and the ability to defy your neighbors' sentiment and the clear law -- and very few people have that.

Indeed, you will very often hear people in Western nations today speak of how this or that is right or wrong simply by virtue of whether it is legal or not. It is unusual for anybody to independently judge things, regardless of whether a judge, a lawmaker, or the President says it is right or wrong.

It is common for people to present the Holocaust as something that could only have happened in Nazi Germany, and the question you are answering seems to me to have that underlying assumption. But history suggests that assumption is naive, or deluded. There are *many* cases in which whole groups of people have been marked for ill-treatment, deportation, or death, and good and intelligent citizens have gone along with it, mostly for the reasons I note above: because the ruthless leaders are smart enough to lie about it, and because of the extreme difficulty of opposing your own individual conscience to the social pressure of law and custom around you. This is how the Armenians got slaughtered by the Turks, how the Kurds and Palestinians have suffered, how the Gulag persisted in the USSR, how Mao sent tens of millions to die in camps during the Great Leap Forward, how the Boat People came to die in the South China Sea by the thousands, how black people were brutalized in the American South during the heyday of Democratic Party dominance -- indeed how black slavery first established itself in the United States -- how gay men were once demonized as child molesters, how Hispanics have been demonized as shiftless dishonest wretches, and how divorced fathers are now demonized today as deadbeat dads and businessmen are demonized as soulless tree-cutting robber barons.

If there's one constant thing in human history, it's that when human beings act as a group, with respect to another group, it is sadly all too easy for common sense and common humanity to evaporate from the transaction.