This is the title of a new book by the German Holocaust researcher Götz Aly. It was published in August by S. Fischer Verlag. Here are some excerpts.
The Prussian reforms of 1808 to 1812 granted all citizens freedom of trade, and put an end to serfdom and what until then had been utterly unchecked arbitrariness towards the Jews. The Jews were still only allowed to become public servants in exceptional cases and certainly never officers in the military, but unlike the Christian majority, they made the most of the new opportunities. They emancipated themselves and at high speed. Germany, with its halfhearted reformism, sluggish economic development (until 1870), and strong legal security provided a fertile ground. To top it all, Germany had some of the best Gymnasiums and universities in Europe, as well as some of the worst primary education.
Unlike the majority of their Christian and still largely illiterate peers, Jewish boys as a rule had always been taught to read and write Hebrew. Their parents did not put silver spoons in their cradles, but all manner of educational nourishment.
This constellation led to huge differences in levels of education and rates of social advancement. In 1869, 14.8 of pupils in Berlin’s Gymnasium schools came from Jewish families, although only four percent of the population was Mosaic by confession. In 1886, 46.5 percent of Jewish pupils in Prussia continued their education beyond primary school, and by 1901, this number had risen to 56.3 percent. During the same period of time the Christian interest in higher education crept up from 6.3 to 7.3 percent. Eight times more Jewish schoolchildren completed middle school and high school than their Christian counterparts. Likewise in Berlin 1901, in terms of population percentages, 11.5 times more Jewish girls attended girls’ high schools than Christians.
Of course the successes in Gymnasium educations then translated to the universities. In Prussia, Jewish students made up just short of ten percent of university students in 1886/1887, and Jews constituted just short of one percent of the population. As a rule Jews went to university significantly earlier and completed their studies faster than their Christian peers, and as the Prussian statisticians confirmed: “On average Jewish students seem to possess more ability and to develop more diligence than the Christians.”
The gnawing envy which the individual is prepared neither to admit to himself nor others…led directly to racial theory. It came right on cue for the oppressed Germans so unhappy with themselves. Maladroit Christian students, businessmen who lacked ideas or salesmen who had miscalculated could not permanently complain about the superior results of their Jewish rivals. This was not only bad for morale, it also increased the fear of failure. It was an obvious step to transform envy and social anti-Semitism into racial defamation. Racial theory transformed weak Germans plagued by self-doubt and feelings of inferiority into members of a purportedly so strong and intellectually superior collective. Racism is nothing other than the flight into collectivism propelled by weakness.
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Eric Koch’s book, The Weimar Triangle, is available at Indigo-Chapters and in your local bookstore. 
The writer is a statistical illiterate, confusing number with proportion with mindless abandon. The underlying grounds for anti-Semitism may be as claimed but the statistical explanation is mush.
So, how many Jews were in gymnasium, as against how many Gentiles, in any given year, for example (i.e., what proportion of the total gymnasium population was Jewish, and what proportion Gentile, at any particular time – or, more properly, what was the Jews to Gentiles ratio in gymnasium)? And how did their grades compare?
The answers, might, indeed, – for all I know – underlie inter-ethnic jealousy in that era.
There may be some use in understanding some of the history. But Aly seems to be unaware of the greater history of ‘man’s inhumanity to man’.
“Racism is nothing other than the flight into collectivism propelled by weakness.” is so clearly untrue. Racism is a form of predjudice which all animals have as part of their survival equipment. It’s base in fear, also means it can so easily be moulded by others. And more useful would be the ‘history’ of how (in this case the German) people can turn the apparent success of one group of people into a hatred where those same people are made less than human.