Quote Originally Posted by SteyrAUG View Post
Of course I can't find them now, but somewhere I have period photographs of WWI German Soldiers with swastika's painted on their helmets. Obviously this isn't "nazi" as the National Socialist German Workers Party wasn't even formed yet, but ideas of Tibetan "aryans" with blond hair and blue eyes and the hijacking of the swastika in relation to the imagined ideas of Russian mystic Madame Blavatsky were being fully embraced by most of Europe even during the first world war.

Using a extremely limited understanding of Darwinian theory, she declared "Aryans" (blond hair, blue eyes and healthy) to be the highest evolution of man and strongly suggested they were the descendants of the lost culture of Atlantis and of course jews, gypsies and slavs were the least evolved and one could argue they weren't even technically human.

We also have to remember that the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion seemed to have originated in Russia where hatred of the jews was all too common. The Europeans of course had little difficulty embracing these amazing new ideas.

So yeah, the seeds were there just waiting on the failure of the Weimar Republic and economic crash to follow, then they just needed a powerful leader who was willing to tell everyone he could fix it if they would just follow him and trust him to know what he is doing.
Cossack pogroms were all too common in Russia dating back to the 1800s. My paternal great grandfather left Russia in the late 1800s after a pogrom killed most of his village. The sentiment of anti-semitism has been strong for time immemorial.