Answer:
Jews
Explanation:
Throughout history, Jews have been discriminated against, viewed as inferior to other
races, and blamed for hardships no matter how little evidence there may have been to support
these ideas. Whether it be blame for plagues, disappearances of children, financial hardships, or
violence, Germans and other Europeans had no qualms about turning against their Jewish
neighbors. For example, after the destruction of Jewish homes and a synagogue in
Leutershausen, Germany, the NSDAP chapter of the neighboring town of Windsbach published a
flyer which claimed that “in the past few weeks the Jew has been determined to bait some of the
peoples of the world into engaging in an awful war. The German nation was to be wrestled to its
knees and destroyed. Millions of people were to be slaughtered and murdered” (Probing the
Depths of German Anti-Semitism 196). However unfounded these statements may have been,
they and similar accusations were common claims among Germans who refused to take
responsibility for their own problems, and who adamantly denied their anti-Semitism.
Anti-Semitism has caused Jews to be used as scapegoats throughout history. A scapegoat
is a person or group who is “blamed for the wrongdoings, mistakes, or faults of others, especially
for reasons of expediency” (Oxford Dictionaries) despite having nothing to do with whatever the
problem may be. Ironically, the term itself originated from ancient Jewish religious practices:
Jewish religious leaders would ceremoniously place their sins upon the animal and then banish it
into the wilderness as a way of purging themselves from their own wrongdoing. Jews themselves
have been used as scapegoats by other groups of people so often and to such an extent that even
the statements quoted above are unsurprising.
However common such accusations against Jews are, the statement made in the
NSDAP’s flyer in particular makes ridiculous and completely unjustifiable accusations. The
author of the flyer blames the Jews for an attack on their own people, claiming that it was
somehow a Jewish attack on the German people instead. The attack in question was committed
in 1938, when Germans in Leutershausen broke the windows of a Jewish home and those of a
nearby synagogue, and then piled cow dung just outside of the temple. Two days later, German
anti-Semites broke into the synagogue again and destroyed all of its contents as well as those of
multiple other Jewish residences. Especially after such an incident, no part of the accusations
made by Windsbach’s reactionary flyer had any supporting evidence: the idea that the Jews were
planning an uprising had no factual basis, and the claim that Jews had committed the attacks in
Leutershausen was simply an act of turning the blame on the victims.
The mere concept that Jews in Leutershausen could have been plotting an uprising is
simply impractical: only about twenty Jews lived in the whole town (Probing the Depths of Anti-
Semitism 196). Such a number of people could not possibly have hoped to have any success in a
fight against German Christians, who made up the vast majority of the population, which had
reached 2000 in 1920 (Ingall 190). However, this sort of logic had no effect on how other
Germans responded to the Leutershausen attacks or on how Jews were viewed in Germany and
throughout the world. No amount of evidence or lack thereof seemed sufficient enough to
convince the Anti-Semites of their cruelty and misplaced blame.
