Antisemitism was a widespread phenomenon
across Europe and the United States prior to World War II and the rise of the Nazi party. For
example, Polish authorities had been enacting oppression against Jewish people across Poland for
years leading up to the Holocaust through exclusionary policies and through right-wing Polish
politicians pushing for mass removal of Jewish Poles.
Antisemitism in the
United States also existed prior to World War II. From the Civil War, when Ulysses S. Grant
attempted to order the expulsion of all Jewish people from the Southern states that he
controlled, to World War I and the Great Depression, when Jewish people were scapegoated and
blamed for the economic collapse, the United States has had a consistent history of
antisemitism.
During World War II, word of mass displacement and imprisonment
of Jewish people became a widespread rumor that was quickly confirmed by eye-witness accounts of
Nazi soldiers murdering Jewish people and through the construction of ghettos and concentration
camps.
Just as Jewish people were scapegoated during the Great Depression in
the United States, Jewish folks were scapegoated for the financial crisis in Germany and across
Eastern Europe. Particularly, Hitler used the deep financial crisis and suffering of Germans to
fuel antisemitism by blaming German Jews for the financial crisis (immensely similar to current
US politicians who falsely blame immigrants for the financial issues that exist in the
US).
Overwhelmingly, those who were not directly active in persecuting Jews
chose to look the other way and ignore the immense violence being enacted upon their former
neighbors. In the United States, the government blocked ships of thousands of Jewish refugees
from being able to enter the United States, fully knowing that they would be exterminated upon
returning to Europe. The Holocaust was absolutely not a campaign of extermination that only
existed in an isolated vacuum. Rather, it required mass acceptance and
participation.
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