Why did germans accept nazi anti semitism in 1932?
Nazi antisemitism was merely a particularly virulent form of the general European attitude towards Jews. Anti-Jewish legislation had existed in the German states since the Middle Ages. Some of this prefigured what the Nazis did such as the wearing of the Star of David. The Russian Tsarist regimes had regularly encouraged Pogroms as a way of diverting popular discontent. This had the side effect of increasing the numbers of Jews in Germany at the turn of the 19th century, particularly from Poland. These were often quite unassimilated compared to German Jews, who rather disdained their cousins. As late as 1933 Jews made up only 0.8% of the population. They were an invented threat. The new twist the Nazis brought to traditional antisemitism (although it was not their invention), was the application of racist theories based on a version of Social Darwinism, which was popular among many intellectuals at the time even on the Left. Eugenics was a major topic of interest with laws passed in ma
