ABSTRACT
IN 1916, in the middle of the First World War, at a convention of the Freideutsche youth, a certain Franz Rust declared that the Jewish question was the most important problem facing mankind.1 He was by no means alone in that assumption; Bliiher (‘the Jewish question is at the very centre of all political questions’) and many others shared his views. It may appear somewhat incongruous in retrospect that Franz Rust and his comrades should have been con cerned about a minority of less than one per cent of the German population, at a time when the very existence of their country was at stake. But concerned they were, and they spent much time discussing what to do about German Jews in general and those in the youth movement in particular.
