They hated the Jews enough to exterminate them with obscene cruelty, while many among the German people remained silently complicit in the carnage. At the end, the Third Reich was kaput. What both political parties, the Nazis and today’s Democrats, had/have in common is the capability and desire to traffic in fake memes shaped to their advantage.  On 21 October 1918, a young German soldier named Adolf Hitler was recovering from a gas attack when he learned of the defeat of Germany that prompted a revolution. He called it “the greatest villainy of the century”.  Many Germans believed their Army did not lose the war, but had been “stabbed-in-the-back” by liberal politicians on the home front. That sentiment was popularly rendered in cartoons, like the two above.