The Hatred That Outlived the War

Why this Chapter exists

The ending was real in one place, and incomplete in others.

After 1945 came trials of Nazi leaders, payments to survivors, memorials and remembrance laws, and the Catholic Church’s 1965 rejection of the charge that the Jews killed Jesus. Each was a form of reckoning: an institution facing what had been done and answering for it. Parts of the hatred were never reached by any such process.

Antisemitism, hostility to Jews as Jews, is far older than the Nazis and outlasted them. Over many centuries it moved from a religious charge, to a racial theory, to a forged conspiracy, to industrialized murder. In Germany the Nazi defeat was total. The Allies forced a reckoning, and Nazi ideology was discredited in public life. That reckoning unfolded over decades and remained incomplete in many respects. By then, Nazi propaganda had already traveled beyond the reach of that process.

Different endings

What a public reckoning looked like.

After 1945, occupied Germany went through denazification, the Allied program to remove Nazis from public life and Nazi ideas from public institutions. Nazi symbols came down. The ideology was banned from public life. The crimes were tried in open court, and the evidence entered the permanent record. Over the following decades, German schools, memorials, and laws were built around an obligation to remember and teach what had happened. The process was slow and incomplete, but it was public.

Eastern Europe had its own postwar record. In Poland on July 4, 1946, a rumor drawn from the blood libel, the false charge that Jews murder Christians for ritual purposes, set off the Kielce pogrom. Soldiers, police, and civilians killed at least 42 Jews, most of them Holocaust survivors. In the Soviet Union, a campaign against “cosmopolitans” was under way by early 1949, aimed at Jews in culture and public life. On August 12, 1952, after a secret trial, the Soviet state executed thirteen defendants connected to the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, a wartime Soviet Jewish organization. Five of them were leading Yiddish writers. In January 1953 the Soviet press announced the “Doctors’ Plot,” a fabricated charge that a group of largely Jewish doctors had plotted to murder Soviet leaders. After the Six-Day War of 1967 the Soviet press turned on “Zionism,” the movement for a Jewish state, reviving antisemitic themes. In 1968, Poland’s communist government turned a campaign against “Zionists” on the country’s Jews, and about 13,000 were forced out. In 1975 the UN General Assembly declared Zionism “a form of racism,” a finding it revoked in 1991. The fuller stories are in the Liberation and the Displaced Persons and Soviet Jewry Chapters.

Denazification reached only the territory the Allies occupied. Nazi Germany had spent years broadcasting antisemitic propaganda beyond Europe. Where that propaganda landed, there was no denazification and no comparable public discrediting of what it had spread.

The strain that was never reckoned with

A documented channel, from Berlin outward.

The channel is documented in wartime records and in the work of historians such as Jeffrey Herf, cited below. It is told in the Unit 4 Chapter The Holocaust in the Middle East and North Africa. Through the 1930s and the war years, Nazi Germany deliberately broadcast antisemitic propaganda beyond Europe, including Arabic-language radio broadcasts from Berlin beginning in 1939. German diplomats cultivated antisemitic agitation in the region. In 1941 that atmosphere helped produce the Farhud, the mob violence against the Jews of Baghdad and the deadliest attack in the long history of Iraqi Jewry.

Historians draw a central distinction here. The Nazi role in the region built an atmosphere over years. The killing in Baghdad was done by Iraqis: soldiers, policemen, members of a pro-Nazi youth movement, and residents of the city. Nazi propaganda was one source among several. The region also had its own older record of Jews living under the special laws of the dhimma, and of violence against them. Other accusations had arrived from Europe, among them the blood libel that a French consul promoted in Damascus in 1840. The conflict over Palestine, and then over Israel, shaped attitudes as well. Between 1945 and 1972 roughly 850,000 Jews left or were forced out of the region’s Arab countries, as told in The Departure from MENA. The wartime propaganda did not pass through a postwar reckoning the way it did in Germany.

Object Spotlight

The voice of Radio Berlin.

Look at the man reading from the paper, in glasses and a dark suit. He is not a soldier and not a cleric. The uniforms and the robe belong to the men around him. He did a job the twentieth century had only recently invented: radio broadcaster. His name was Yunis Bahri, and his voice was one of the main ways Nazi propaganda reached the Arabic-speaking world.

Nazi Germany ran an Arabic-language radio service out of Berlin, and Bahri, an Iraqi, was its best-known announcer. Radio was the new mass medium of the 1930s and 1940s: the way news, music, and political messages reached ordinary households for the first time, all at once, in a familiar voice. A government that controlled a powerful transmitter could speak directly into homes across a region, in the listeners’ own language, every night. Bahri was the voice Berlin used.

The Mufti standing beside him, Amin al-Husseini, is the figure most often discussed when people describe Nazi ties in the region. Bahri shows the delivery system. The ideology traveled as a nightly broadcast in Arabic that carried European antisemitic conspiracy theories to audiences across the region. The broadcasts came from Berlin, but the voice was an Arab one.

The broadcasts stopped when the war ended in 1945. The ideas they carried were not publicly discredited in the region the way Nazi ideas were inside Germany.

Carried forward in print

The clearest single example is a book that never went out of print.

The continuation shows up in several forms, but one is clearer than the rest, because you can follow it object by object. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the forged document, manufactured in the early 1900s, that pretends to expose a Jewish plot for world domination, is the single most traceable carrier of the hatred from one century into the next. Its creation and exposure are documented in the Unit 3 Chapter on The Protocols Forgery. In 1921 The Times of London exposed it as a forgery. It stayed in print.

The Nazis embraced the Protocols. The text was also translated and circulated far beyond Europe, including into Arabic, and it has been printed and cited there long after its exposure. The 1988 charter of Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist movement, names the Protocols as the embodiment of a “Zionist plan” (Article 32).

The same continuity appears in other forms. One is the propaganda channel described above. Another is the old myths that keep returning in new dress, traced in the reference page The Recurring Cycle. A third appears in schools. In a 2026 UNESCO survey of 2,030 teachers in 23 European Union countries, 78 percent had encountered at least one antisemitic incident between students. Monitoring organizations report antisemitic incidents on school and college campuses in many countries.

What recurs, and what is new

Old myths, new costumes.

Step back from any single channel and a pattern appears, the one named in the reference page on The Recurring Cycle. Antisemitism rarely invents itself from scratch. It reaches for a small set of very old myths and dresses them for the moment: the Jew as poisoner, as conspirator, as disloyal outsider, as secret power behind events. The blood libel and the charge that Jews poisoned wells were built centuries ago. The Protocols conspiracy is more than a century old. Each returns, adapted to whatever a new audience already fears.

What changes is the costume and the delivery. A charge once carved into a church wall or printed in a forged book now moves through online networks. The myth that Jews secretly control finance, or media, or governments, is the accusation the Protocols spread a century ago. It now travels in memes, comment threads, and viral video, often stripped of any obvious link to its origins.

The shape of it today

What the present record shows.

Antisemitism in the present is not a single phenomenon. The historical record and the monitoring organizations that track it describe several distinct currents, which sometimes overlap and sometimes have little to do with one another:

• The far-right strain: the direct descendant of nineteenth- and twentieth-century racial and conspiracy theories, including the Protocols-style claim of hidden Jewish control.
• The strain carried through the never-reckoned channel: the propaganda tradition described above, still produced and circulated in parts of the world where it was never publicly discredited.
• Antisemitism that travels under the cover of political conflict: where hostility to the State of Israel slides into hostility to Jews as a people. Distinguishing legitimate political criticism from antisemitism is the difficult question the Contemporary Antisemitism Chapter addresses through its published frameworks.
• Everyday, ambient antisemitism: the casual conspiracy joke, the recycled stereotype, the myth absorbed without its history. It is often widespread, and often invisible to the people repeating it.

The bodies that track these currents, among them the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), government monitoring agencies, and international organizations, report that antisemitic incidents have risen in many countries in recent years. For the current figures, follow the dated, primary monitoring sources gathered under Learn more below, each of which reports its own year and method.

The register of that record, each incident ending with its verdict or finding, is The Incident Record.

The deadliest day since the Holocaust

October 7, 2023, and what followed.

Hamas governed Gaza, and the United States had designated it a terrorist organization in 1997. On October 7, 2023, Hamas attacked southern Israel, murdered about 1,200 people, and took 251 hostages. It was the deadliest single day for Jews since the Holocaust, documented in The Terror Record. Monitoring bodies then recorded sharp rises. In the United Kingdom, the Community Security Trust (CST) recorded 1,330 antisemitic incidents in October 2023, more than its three previous highest monthly totals combined. In the United States, the ADL counted 8,873 incidents in 2023, the highest since it began counting in 1979, and 5,204 of them came after October 7.

The currents described above did not begin in 2023. In the months after October 7, incidents were reported at universities, at schools, and in city streets. The Contemporary Antisemitism Chapter documents that record, the frameworks for judging it, and the legal outcomes that followed.

Where it could be headed

What history lets us say, and what it does not.

History cannot predict the future. The historical record does show some conditions that recur.

• Antisemitism has intensified under stress. In case after case, the charge has surged when societies were frightened, unstable, or looking for someone to blame: plague, economic collapse, lost wars, political upheaval. The reference page The Recurring Cycle traces this blame across five periods, under the pattern it calls Accused.
• New media have extended its reach. Print spread the Protocols, radio carried Berlin’s broadcasts, and online networks carry memes. In each case the medium carried accusations that already existed to more people.
• Exposure alone has not ended old accusations. The Protocols were exposed in 1921 and still circulate.

The analytical question

How to recognize it today.

The older material in this Chapter was carved in stone, printed in books, and broadcast on the radio. Its descendants travel differently. Antisemitic propaganda today often appears in ordinary online places. Examples include a short clip in a video feed, a comment under a post, a meme passed between friends, the chat of an online game, and an image board built for anonymity. Placing an old charge in a joke or a reaction image lets it spread fast and stay deniable.

The forms change, and the underlying claims stay the same. The Anti-Defamation League’s guide Antisemitism Uncovered, summarized in the Contemporary Antisemitism Chapter, groups them as seven recurring tropes. Three are the claims that Jews secretly hold power, that they are disloyal, and that they are uniquely greedy. Three more are the claims that they bear a collective guilt for the death of Jesus, that they commit ritual murder, and that the Holocaust was faked or inflated. The seventh concerns claims about the Jewish state, where the line between criticism of Israel and antisemitism is debated.

Three features recur. The first is a fixed structure under a changing target: the same script, a hidden group pulling the strings, is run with a new name dropped into the same slot. The second is the claim that cannot be disproven: every piece of contrary evidence is treated as further proof of the cover-up. That closed loop is the signature of a conspiracy theory rather than an argument. The third is two meanings at once: a line offered as innocent to outsiders while signaling to those who already know the trope.

Classroom Connections

Where this Chapter fits.

Teaching Connections

• World History. This concluding Chapter traces how the hatred behind the Holocaust persisted and mutated after 1945, the continuity-and-change question at the center of the postwar and contemporary record.
• Classroom Applications. Students can:
  • trace continuity and change across historical periods
  • distinguish historical evidence from contemporary advocacy
  • recognize recurring propaganda structures
  • evaluate primary and secondary sources
  • analyze historical patterns without assuming inevitability
  • construct evidence-based historical arguments.
• International Classroom Relevance. Because this Chapter examines how prejudice persists, mutates, and recurs, it supports Holocaust education, genocide and human-rights studies, media literacy, civic education, and source-based historical inquiry.

Standards Alignment

• NYS Social Studies Framework: NY Global History 10.10 (Human Rights Violations).
• NYS Holocaust Education Mandate, Education Law §801. Supports Holocaust instruction by teaching students to recognize the recurring structures of antisemitism, the “never again” purpose the mandate exists to serve.
• Common Core RH.11–12.6 & RH.11–12.9. Students analyze historical and contemporary sources, monitoring reports, and the recurring Protocols myth while evaluating perspective, purpose, and the difference between evidence and advocacy.
• C3 Framework, D2.His.1 & D2.His.14. Students investigate continuity and change, causation, and evidence-based interpretation while tracing a pattern across periods without assuming inevitability.

For further classroom use

• Synthesis lesson. This Chapter links to Chapters on the Protocols, the Holocaust in the Middle East and North Africa, and Contemporary Antisemitism, and to the Recurring Cycle reference page. That makes it usable as a closing or final-project lesson.
• Media-literacy crossover. The “old myth, new costume” framing is a ready bridge to digital-literacy instruction, teaching students to trace a claim to its origin rather than absorb it whole.
• Handle with care. The material reaches into the present and the political. Keep the discussion on documented history and recognition, and off collective blame.