Yes Don, quite right. WWI is one of my "fascinated" periods of history. The "stab in the back", Senoufou, really is a complete myth, perpetrated by the right wingers (not just the Nazis, it was just that they won the political battle) to explain Germany's defeat.

The notion that their post-war economy was dominated by Jewish financiers is a new one on me (I admit, I start getting a bit hazy about the inter-war years!). The "stab in the back", blamed on Jews, was about what happened during WWI. It's all nonsense, of course. Germany lost because it couldn't beat Britain & France combined. And the Yanks finally turned up to the party & the rest was inevitable.

What Hitler did was not to "hypnotise" or to tap into any particularly racist or anti-Semitic sentiment. Yes, there was a long under-current (and sometimes over-current) of anti-Semitism in Europe. It isn't terribly controversial to say that Jews contributed to that & always had done. If you insist on looking different, sounding different, being different... You are always making of your community a target, however inoffensive & well-meaning you may consider yourself. The real irony here being that the financiers who might have been complained of had been doing their best to be more English than the English, more German the Germans, etc, for a good 50 years or more. Oh, and look up the Dreyfuss Affair some time. Germany had no monopoly on anti-Semitism!

But what really happened is that Hitler tapped into a current of despair & resentment. Germany had lost. It had lost in such a way that people could pretend they hadn't *really* lost. Some of their prominent military leaders, such as Ludendorff fed the "International Jewry" (which was a notion that had also been around for 50+ years), "stab in the back" psychosis. And the Nazis, the majority of whom believed in it too, took advantage.

But the key factor is despair & resentment, not anti-Semitism. Many were undoubtedly attracted to the National Socialists who might not have been had the French been less inclined to grind Germany's face into the dirt. It's also worth remembering that when they won their election, I've forgotten the exact figure, but if memory serves, in a rather suspect election, the Nazi's shenaniganed their way into power on about 28% of the vote...