Ancient narratives authenticating the power and superiority of kings are full of fiction and fabrication. Accurate historical information was rarely available centuries ago and the line between fact and fiction was vague and imprecise. While unsupported narrative was an excusable instrument for building, maintaining, and projecting power, modern narratives of empowerment require more accurate analysis and judgment. Nevertheless, in recent times, a more insidious kind of narrative has emerged, sometimes with global results. Modern ideologies are often difficult to recognize because they mask as scientific analyses that attract the allegiance of millions, a phenomenon that makes objective analysis even more difficult. But often the science presented is pseudo-science, and fact is little more than private opinion. The results are narratives that become so deeply embedded in the consciousness of a people that they are mistaken for reality.

No other development in the twentieth century matches the shocking outcome of German Nazism, a movement that precipitated a World War that spread across three continents and three oceans and led to a loss of 30 million lives, to which we must add the systematic extermination of six million Jews in Europe. Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) is remembered as the agent of the greatest atrocity in human history. The devastation of the Holocaust has been so widely recognized that concentration and extermination camps have been preserved in Europe so that people will never forget, and more than 150 Holocaust memorials, museums, and study centers have been established around the world.

Hitler did not and could not accomplish this alone. He had assistance from people who were among the most educated and advanced in Europe. No scientific or social analysis alone of either Germans or Jews can explain what motivated tens of thousands to attempt the extermination of an entire people. But Hitler successfully mobilized huge numbers of Germans to build death camps, search out and detain Jews by the thousands, systematically loot their homes, steal their assets including collections of valuable art and artifacts, extract their gold dentures, transport them to the camps like Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, and dozens more, dehumanize them during imprisonment, execute them hundreds at a time, and bury their bodies by bulldozing them into huge mass graves.