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The carnage in the trenches may have been hard to bear in World War I, but first aid stations were set up to help the wounded, as shown in this 1918 photo.

had to be resisted, Americans felt—and they volunteered to fight for the freedom of Europe in the hundreds of thousands. Within a generation, Germany was on the march again, this time under the ruthless leadership of the dictator Adolf Hitler. With his creed of nationalistic hatred, he succeeded in mobilizing the mass of ordinary Germans, demoralized as they were by the years of economic stagnation and political powerlessness that had followed Germany’s defeat in 1918. The Jews, said the leader of the National Socialist (Nazi) Party, were the great sickness in German society, the source of all the country’s many woes. Without the Jews, he promised, Germany would be able to assume its rightful place in the world: anti-Semitism became the great cause around which Germans rallied.

H omeland S ecurity

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