Equally superfluous was the lesson to the Jews in the Diaspora, who hardly needed the great catastrophe in which one-third of their people perished to be convinced of the world’s hostility. Not only has their conviction of the eternal and ubiquitous nature of anti-Semitism been the most potent ideological factor in the Zionist movement since the Dreyfus Affair; it was also the cause of the otherwise inexplicable readiness of the German Jewish community to negotiate with the Nazi authorities during the early stages of the regime.