There has long been an assertion, mostly advanced by people who also deny the scope of the Holocaust, that some Jews actually supported the Nazis in the early days.

It is mostly the stuff of anti-Semitic legend, although certainly Jews, like everyone else, did not really see the true dangers of the decades to come. 

I think about these mythical Jews when I view the scenes of protests on city streets and college campuses that are beginning to resemble pogroms and I am stunned to see, among the obvious haters of Jews and Israel, signs proudly announcing that they are Jewish supporters of Hamas, essentially calling for the destruction of their fellow Jews.  The self-loathing, ignorance, and naïveté that is on display is beyond belief.

It is as if a Jew in the early 1920s actually supported the German Workers Party -- before they added the National Socialists to their name -- because they supported increased old-age pensions (sounds a little like “Social Security”), or better healthcare, or a stronger middle class, political positions of the party all the while ignoring another political statement -- number four on the list: “Only those who are our fellow countrymen can become citizens. Only those who have German blood, regardless of creed, can be our countrymen. Hence, no Jew can be a countryman.”

This at a time that Jews in the Weimar Republic had gained an unprecedented freedom and equality and were growing somewhat more prominent in public life.

Paradoxically, or not, the more Jews removed the shackles that restricted them, the more they faced virulent and increasingly open Jew-hatred and discrimination.

Much like today, Jewish parents back then were probably stunned and frightened by what was going on in colleges their children attended. In 1920s Berlin, one headline screamed: “Anti-Semitism among German Students at its Height,” with a student group issuing an “edict” forbidding men from being “generally engaged or mingling with Jewish girls or those suspected of being of Jewish extraction on pain of being forever disgraced among their fellow students.”

Germany’s Jews were often modern, proud, assimilated, but not ignorant. Anti-Semitism reappeared across Europe in the aftermath of World War I.  Poland, Hungary, Austria, Romania, and others all discriminated against Jews as well as attacked them physically. And Jews from Eastern Europe, different in dress and custom -- more easily identifiable -- steadily migrated to Germany.  If German Jews didn’t experience the hatred directly, they certainly were aware of it; the violence was out in the open.

A shocking riot took place in a Jewish Berlin neighborhood as reported on November 6, 1923: “Howling mobs in all side streets. Looting is going on under cover of darkness. A shoe shop on the corner [a Berlin street] has been ransacked and shattered fragments of glass from the shop are littered on the street.  ‘…clear the street an officer calls. Everyone indoors.’ The crowd moves on slowly. On all sides the same cry: ‘Kill the Jews!’ If anyone with a Jewish appearance walks past, he is followed by a group of youngers who pick their moment and then fall on him.”

Let’s take a moment and consider. How much has really changed in one hundred years? Certainly, one thing is different. Jews now have enemies in their midst, collaborators who know very little history and combine self-hatred with resentment towards America.

Surely, their placards will protect them.

Jeremy B. Kay is the executive director of the Library of the Holocaust Foundation (HolocaustLibrary.org)

Image: Georg Pahl, Bundesarchiv