In the last episode of this special series on the origins of anti-Semitism, Virginie Girod receives Pierre-Jérôme Biscarat, historian, specialist in the Shoah. The idea that Jews form a race appeared in the second half of the 19th century, in the wake of naturalists' efforts to classify and prioritize species.
In a Germany ravaged by the economic crisis of 1929 and the defeat in the First World War, the Nazi party made the Jew the scapegoat. During the Wannsee Conference in January 1942, a handful of Nazi officials set the terms for rationalizing the extermination of a people.