Excerpt from:
TARGET
Adolph Hitler was walking the streets of Vienna's "Inner City" late one afternoon in 1907. As he passed a Lubavitcher Jew from Eastern Europe, it was as though he had run into the Devil himself. 
"I suddenly encountered this apparition in a black caftan and black hair locks," he noted in Mein Kampf. "My first thought was-Is this a Jew? I observed the man furtively and cautiously, but the longer I stared at this foreign face, scrutinizing feature for feature, the more my first question assumed a new form: Is this a German?
"I now began to relieve my doubts by books. I could no longer doubt that the objects of my study were not Germans of a special religion, but a people in themselves. Wherever I went, I began to see Jews, and the more I saw, the more sharply they became distinguished from the rest of humanity. Particularly the Inner City and the districts north of the Danube Canal swarmed with a people which even outwardly had lost all resemblance to Germans.
"The cleanliness of this people, moral and otherwise, is a point in itself. By their very exterior you could tell these were no lovers of water and, to your distress, you often knew it with your eyes closed. Later I often grew sick to my stomach from the smell of these caftan-wearers. Added to this, there was their unclean dress and generally unheroic appearance.
"In a short time I was made more thoughtful than ever by my slowly rising insight into the type of activity carried on by Jews in certain fields. Was there any form of filth or profligacy, particularly in cultural life, without at least one Jew involved in it? If you cut even cautiously into such an abscess, you found, like a maggot in a rotting body, often dazzled by the sudden light-a kike!"
So began Hitler's obsession with the Jews-specifically, the "caftan wearing, black bearded Jews" of Eastern Europe, centered in Poland, whom he saw as the "biological basis of the Jewish race." When November of 1938's "Kristallnacht" launched his "holy war" against the hated Jewish foe, obscured by talk of territory and conquest was the overriding frenzy of Hitler's greatest passion-to cleanse Europe once and forever of these "caftan-wearing devils" corrupting German blood and culture.
Aiming directly at the destruction of Ashkenazic Jews, the Nazi death machine left the Sephardic Jews relatively unmolested. Ashkenazics are Jews of European extraction, who overwhelmingly make up the Jewish population of the United States, Canada, South Africa and Russia. Sephardics are Jews deriving from Spanish, Portueguese, Middle Eastern or North African origin, who were among the early settlers in North and South America but who today represent less than 5% of all American Jews. Their major population centers today are in Israel, North Africa, Spain and France.
The fact that Hitler specifically targeted East European Ashkenazic Jews while pursuing with less zeal or frequently even ignoring and exempting Sephardics from the roundups was, and still is, one of the least widely known and discussed features of the Nazi "War Against The Jews." The big question remained-Why?
One afternoon I was at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles researching aspects of the Holocaust for a magazine article and I stopped off to talk to Aron Breitbart, the Center's senior investigator. In the course of our conversation, I put the question to him. Did the Center's research show significant differences between how the two major kinds of Jews-Sephardim and Ashkenazics-fared in the hands of the Nazi murder machine of World War Two?
His answer surprised me. "Sephardic Jews were by and large not molested by the Nazis," Breitbart told me. "Especially when you compare what happened to them to the near obliteration suffered by the Ashkenazics. As you know, Hitler's murderers killed over six million Jews-and ninety-nine percent of them were Ashkenazics."
"Why the huge discrepancy?" I asked, puzzled.
"That's a good question," he replied. "And I don't know if I have a really good answer for you. Some say it was a simple case of geography, that the European Ashkenazics were just easier to reach because they lived close to Germany. Others blame it on the fact that the Nazi armies occupied precisely those lands which just happened to have Ashkenazic Jews in them.
"But that really doesn't hold up," the researcher explained. "Rommel's troops took over most of North Africa and the Middle East, so they really had millions of Sephardics in their grasp." Breitbart shrugged. "In the end, I have to say we really don't know."
Over the next few weeks, that question continued to plague me. Why Ashkenazics and not Sephardics? Was there anything about these two major branches of the Jewish people, any real or perceived differences, that could account for this tragic oddity of Twentieth Century history?
Looking for answers to that question led me back through the tunnel of time, back to those mid-Twentieth Century years when the world was aflame with war, when Europe had turned into a living hell and the mere fact of Jewish ethnicity virtually assured one of a one-way ticket to a death camp.
Particularly if you happened to be an Ashkenazic-or European-Jew.
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