The Jewish people are history’s favorite scapegoats. Through every generation, they’ve been blamed for everything you can imagine—from killing Jesus to controlling the world. Most of it is infuriating, and we’ve all heard the worst stories about how anti-Semitism has brought on some of history’s worst tragedies.

SEE ALSO: 10 Jews Who Fought In Hitler’s Nazi Army

There are some lesser-known ones, though, that take blaming Jews to whole new levels. In fact, some anti-Semitic conspiracy theories are so absurd that it’s almost hard to get mad about them.

10 Russians Accused Jews Of Hiding A Magic Vegetable That Keeps You From Getting Drunk

During a tour of Russia, writer Andrew Solomon once asked a man why the people there had such hateful feelings toward the Jews. The man answered him without even pausing for a beat: “It is because the Jews have a secret vegetable they eat so they don’t become alcoholics like the rest of us. And they refuse to share that vegetable with anyone else.”^[1]

This wasn’t the rambling of some lone nut. It’s a conspiracy theory that’s come up in a few Russian sources. For hundreds of years, a smattering of Russian voices insisted the same thing: that the Jews are hiding a secret, hairy vegetable that lets them drink all the alcohol they want without getting drunk.

It’s even shown up in Russian folktales, where it’s often listed among the two secrets weapons of those crafty Jews: the magical vegetable that keeps you from getting drunk and the Judas lips that let you get away with lying in court.

9 Hitler Thought Modern Art Was A Jewish Plot To Crush The German Spirit

According to Adolf Hitler, modern art was nothing more than “an act of aesthetic violence by the Jews against the German spirit.”

While writing his daily list of things to blame on the Jews, Hitler apparently reminisced on his failed art career and decided that the Elders of Zion must have been behind the rise of experimental art. He wrote up a paper slamming all modern art as “degenerate” and “Jewish.”

He even put on an exhibit of modern art in Berlin just to show everyone how terrible it was. He called it the “Degenerate Art” exhibition, complete with a whole wing dedicated to “Jewish sculptures.” He filled it with posters explaining how the Jews had created it to mock the German people.^[2]

Hitler couldn’t quite find enough Jewish modern artists to back up his point. Only 6 of the 112 artists featured in his exhibition were Jewish. Still, he insisted that Jews were to blame. As he explained in the posters, the other modern artists might not have been Jewish themselves, but they had been “distorted and influenced” by the Jews.

8 Medieval Catholics Accused Jews Of Torturing Bread

In the 13th century, the Catholic Church became convinced that Jews were up to the ultimate evil: torturing bread.

They believed that a group of Christian-hating Jews were stealing communion wafers just so that they could stab, torment, and burn them. To the Catholics, this was tantamount to torturing Jesus Christ himself. They believed that the communion wafers would actually transform into the physical body of Jesus and that these Jews hated him so much that they felt the need to torture him again in bread form.

Allegedly, the communion wafers would bleed and cry out in pain when their Jewish attackers tormented them. Some wafers would sprout legs and try to run away, but the hateful Jews would chase those wafers down and stab them.^[3]

Today, modern historians think that the whole panic started with a priest finding red fungus on an overly ripe stash of communion wafers. The church decided that the fungus could only be blood and let insanity take him where it would.

7 Henry Ford Accused Jews Of Making Candy Taste Bad

Henry Ford was a man of a few talents. He was better at selling cars than any other person in the world—and he was even better at finding things to blame on the Jews.

Ford had a whole newspaper called The Dearborn Independent that did nothing but blame Jews for everything under the sun. The paper ran the headline, “The International Jew: The World’s Problem,” and spread so many conspiracy theories that even Adolf Hitler described himself as a fan.

But some were a bit crazier than others. The Dearborn independent blamed Jews for everything you could imagine. According to the paper, Jews had invented jazz music. They were behind lynchings, which they provoked by poisoning normally sane white men with a secret concoction called “n—r gin.” And they deliberately sabotaged baseball just because they were too lazy to play sports.

It wasn’t just the paper, though. Henry Ford blamed everything imaginable on the Jews. He even blamed them when he bit into a candy bar and didn’t care for the taste. Reportedly, Ford frowned at the candy bar and declared, “The Jews have taken hold of it.”^[4]

6 Medieval Germany Accused Jews Of Causing The Black Plague

The Black Plague wiped out up to 200 million individuals in Eurasia, with the worst of it hitting Europe in 1347 to 1351. At that time, the people of Germany decided to get to the bottom of it. They already had a strong hunch they knew what was going on: It was probably those rascally Jews.

They didn’t exactly have any proof or reason to believe that Jews had caused the worst plague in recent history. But they knew that proof wasn’t important when you could torture people into confessing anything you wanted. So they beat and brutalized every Jew they could find until one, pleading for his life, agreed to put in writing that he’d been pouring poison into the wells.^[5]

Not everybody believed these stories, of course. Some people saw through the lies and knew that the Jews hadn’t done anything to the wells. These people insisted that the plague was nothing more than a divine curse from a furious God who was mad at them for letting Jews live.

The end result was the same either way. People across Germany—and later, the rest of Europe—slaughtered Jews en masse. In Frankfurt where the massacre was one of the worst, the Jewish population dropped almost overnight from 19,000 people to a mere 10.

5 An Egyptian Governor Accused Jews Of Attacking Them With Remote-Controlled Sharks

When a shark attacked tourists in Egypt, Governor Abdel-Fadeel Shosha was sure he knew what was afoot. This was nothing more than a Zionist plot to attack Egypt with remote-controlled cybersharks.

Shosha wasn’t completely ready to commit to the cybershark theory right away. He kept things balanced and timid, telling the press that it could also be a “specially indoctrinated Zionist shark” or even an “Israeli agent in a shark costume.”^[6]

It was just too early to say for sure, Shosha said. He wasn’t saying anything definite. He just wanted time to confirm.

He was pretty certain, though, that Israeli intelligence was behind the shark attacks. After all, he’d heard rumors that there was a GPS on the shark. Although conservationists kept trying to convince him that they used these devices as a way of tracking animal behavior and that a GPS couldn’t be used for mind control, Shosha knew better. He wouldn’t be fooled.

4 Wahhabis Accused Jews Of Conspiring With ‘Jew Trees’

According to a fundamentalist group of Muslims called the Wahhabis, the Jews have already started conspiring with a secret ally: the Gharqad tree, or as the Wahhabis call it, the “Jew tree.”

According to a man who’d grown up in a Saudia Arabian Wahhabi school, he was assigned to read a book in the ninth grade that his teacher told him was a statement from the prophet Muhammad. Inside, it outlined in brutal detail how the Muslims were going to murder every single Jew on the planet:

“The day of judgment will not arrive until Muslims fight Jews, and Muslim will kill Jews until the Jew hides behind a tree or a stone. Then the tree and the stone will say, ‘Oh Muslim, oh, servant of God, this is a Jew behind me. Come and kill him.’ ”

According to the book, the Jews would only have one ally in all of nature: the Gharqad tree. The next lines read: “Except one type of a tree, which is a Jew tree. That will not say that.”^[7]

The lesson was clear: It wasn’t just that good Wahhabis can’t trust Jews. They can’t even trust their dirty Jew trees.

3 A Palestinian Newspaper Accused Jews Of Breeding Killer Super Rats

According to one Palestinian newspaper, Israel created a race of super rats that grow twice as big as a normal rat, purely to chase the Arabs out of Jerusalem.

The paper claims that the super rats are vicious, trained killers that are big enough to kill a cat. Jews will bring them into town in cages and unleash them on the Arab population. Then they’ll let the rats swarm on the Palestinians who live there and attack Arab children.

The rats spread quickly, too. They’ve been genetically engineered to breed at four times the rate of a normal animal. Most impressively of all, the super rats have been trained to sniff out Arab blood. The rats will leave every Jewish person they find alone and move on to hunt and kill Arabs.^[8]

2 The Nation of Islam Accused Jews Of Tricking People Into Thinking Slavery Exists

According to the Nation of Islam’s Akbar Muhammed, the idea that slavery still exists in our world is nothing but a “big lie” started as part of a “Jewish conspiracy.”

Akbar was responding to news from Amnesty International that slavery and human bondage were still alive and well in places like Sudan, Mauritania, and Libya. He insisted that it was all a Zionist conspiracy, and Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan agreed.

“Where is the proof?” Farrakhan asked. “If slavery exists, why don’t you go as a member of the press, and you look inside Sudan, and if you find it, then you come back and tell the American people what you found?”^[9]

In response, The Baltimore Sun sent reporters into Sudan, bought two slave boys, ran a report on it, and won a Pulitzer Prize.

Still, even after the article came out, people continued to insist that it’s all made up. The government of Mauritania even released an official statement blaming The Baltimore Sun article on the Jews: “Slavery no longer exists, and talk of it suggests manipulation by the West, an act of enmity toward Islam, or influence from the worldwide Jewish conspiracy.”

1 Iraqi Security Thought Pokemon Was Part Of A Zionist Plot

Perhaps the greatest of all Jewish conspiracies is Pokemon. According to an Iraqi security services report written in 2001, the world’s most popular game was created as nothing more than a Zionist plot to overthrow Saddam Hussein.

Iraqi security services claimed that the name “Pokemon” was a Hebrew word that meant “I am a Jew.”^[10] Jewish conspirators supposedly created the game to infiltrate the minds of Iraqi children and turn them against Hussein. The report warned that the character Pokemon was already all over Iraqi markets and that the children “love it very much.”

It might seem a little unbelievable. One might cite petty details like “I am a Jew” in Hebrew isn’t pronounced “Pokemon,” Pokemon isn’t the name of a character, and Pokemon is Japanese.

Then again, how do you explain that Pokemon Mystery Dungeon came out in 2006, the very same year that Saddam Hussein was found in a mysterious underground dungeon?

Check and mate.

Roughly 150,000 men of Jewish descent fought in Hitler’s army. While their families back home were being corralled into ghettos and sent off to death camps, these men were in Poland, France, or Russia, spreading the fascist system that was killing their people across Europe.

It’s hard to understand, but many Jewish Germans signed up for military service. Each man had his own reason to do it—often one of necessity. Told together, their stories give an incredible insight into life for a German Jew at the break of World War II.

10 Werner Goldberg

There was a face you could find plastered on the walls of Nazi Germany: a swastika at his chest, standing proud over a proclamation that this was “The Ideal German Soldier.” But the ideal German soldier wasn’t a member of Hitler’s master race. He was half-Jewish.

Werner Goldberg had joined the army after years of struggling with his own identity. His father never told him he was Jewish; instead, Werner found out when he was 14 in the most humiliating way possible. His principal declared that their school would be Jew-free—and then publicly singled Goldberg out as the school’s Jewish problem.

In an instant, Goldberg found himself on the outside, and he was desperate to fit back in. He signed up for the army the first chance he could, getting in early enough to fight in the first invasion of Poland.

But back at home, his father struggled through the horrors of the Holocaust, and Goldberg was forced to use his influence to save his father more than once. At one point, after learning that his father was going to be sent to Auschwitz, Werner snuck into the building they were using as his prison and broke his father out.^[1]

It worked. At the end of the war, all but one member of his family had died. The only one left to greet Werner was the Jewish father he had saved from the death camps.

9 Nachemia Wurman

It has long been debated just how well the soldiers of the Nazi army understood what was happening behind the concentration camp walls, but among the Nazis’ 72nd Infantry, there was one man who definitely knew it firsthand: Nachemia Wurman.^[2]

Wurman was a Holocaust survivor. He was a Polish Jew who had been sent to labor camps in 1944, where he’d endured every horror imaginable. He’d seen his own father executed, and he’d even been forced to bathe using soap made from the bodies of his campmates.

In time, he managed to escape. He fled west, hoping to find the Soviet army—but instead, he ran directly into a Nazi battalion. Wurman knew he wouldn’t be able to sneak past them, so instead, he walked straight up to them, shook their hands, and introduced himself as “Marion Schmidt,” German-born chef.

Soon, Wurman was a part of the Nazi battalion. From then on, he spent the war with a swastika on his arm, feeding the soldiers and praying that nobody would realize who he really was. “The best hiding place,” Wurman said, “was in the mouth of the wolf.”

8 Arno Spitz

One of the more decorated men in the Nazi army was Arno Spitz. By the end of the war, he’d won three Iron Crosses, the highest award a Nazi could earn for bravery.

He was a paratrooper, one beloved by the Nazi army—even if they absolutely loathed his father. Spitz’s father was Jewish, and he’d suffered from such fierce persecution back home that, early on during the rise of Nazi Germany, he fled the country for the United States.

Spitz, however, stayed and made such an impression on his superiors that he didn’t even have to hide his parentage. In 1940, under Himmler’s orders, the Nazis kicked every half-Jewish soldier out of the army, but Spitz was such an effective soldier that he was allowed to stay.

To the end, he insisted that, by fighting with the Nazis, he did nothing wrong. He fought for Germany, not for Hitler, he told Dateline NBC in 2002, declaring: “There is a difference.”^[3]

Not everyone in his family, however, sees it the same way. Spitz said that his daughter has accused him of participating in the Nazis’ crimes against his own people. But despite her rebukes, Spitz refused to hide or apologize for his time fighting in Hitler’s military. “I don’t have to,” he said. “I didn’t do anything that is a crime.”

7 Hans-Geert Falkenberg

“I did not want to join the army,” Hans-Geert Falkenberg said. “I had to join the army.”

He joined the German army as soon as war was declared. Jews were already starting to see their shops destroyed and being harassed in the streets, and Falkenberg felt a need to connect himself to the German side of his identity to stay alive.

He’d heard his teachers tell his classes that the Jewish race was inferior, and, desperate to prove his equality, he’d spent his teenage years trying to be the best at everything the Nazis valued. Joining the army was just a natural next step for him.

But as he fought in France, his grandmother was sending him letters, letting him watch the Holocaust slowly unfold back home.^[4] Then, one day, the letters stopped. His grandmother, he would soon learn, had been sent to a concentration camp.

It was a shock—not just for him but for those who cared about him, as well. One friend of his wrote to him, with dismay: “I believe that the Jews are Germany’s misfortune, but that has nothing to do with grandmother!”

The rest of his family had already fled to England, and Falkenberg considered joining them. Trapped in the middle of Europe, surrounded by the Nazi army, however, he just didn’t know how it could be done. “The safest thing was to stay in the army,” Falkenberg would later say. “No question.”

6 Helmut Kopp

Helmut Kopp was the son of a German man and Jewish woman, but it was the Jewish side of his family that left him feeling persecuted.

As a boy, Kopp said, his maternal grandfather would openly disrespect him, refusing to view him as a part of his family. When he was chided by his wife and reminded that this was their daughter’s son, his grandfather snapped back that, no, this wasn’t his grandson—this was their son-in-law’s goy. “After how my grandfather had treated me,” Kopp said, “I didn’t want to own up to my Jewish past.”

When the war started, he signed up for the Wehrmacht, and when they handed him his papers, he marked himself down as “full Aryan.” For years, he fought with a Nazi artillery unit. Kopp was aware of the concentration camps, but he justified what he was doing by simply not thinking about it. “You didn’t think about the Fuhrer or the nation,” he said.^[5] “I thought only about myself—that either my tank or something will be hit and then I’ll be gone anyway, or I’ll make it through.”

5 Friedemann Lichtwitz

“In the German army, I was in a pretty good situation,” Friedemann Licthwitz said. “It was a good bunch of guys. I felt comfortable there.”

Litchwitz claimed that, when he joined up with the Nazi army, he had no idea how bad the persecution against the Jews in Germany was becoming.^[6] He only knew that, in the army, he was accepted and treated as an equal and that, when he was home in Germany, he was not.

After he was kicked out in the 1940 military purge, however, Litchwitz found out exactly how bad it was. He was sent to a forced labor camp and then, after a failed attempt to escape, into Dachau: one of Germany’s deadliest concentration camps.

An NBC reporter asked him how he felt, having gone from the inside of the Nazi army to a death camp. “I can’t say,” was all Lichtwitz could reply. “I don’t know how to answer that.”

4 Major Leo Skurnik

Major Leo Skurnik was working as a doctor in the Finnish 53rd Infantry. He was a Jew, but he was also a Finn—and that meant that, in the Soviet Union, he and the Nazis had a common enemy. That put him side by side with a German SS division, fighting against a Russian invasion and trying to help every man who was injured by the Russian shells, whether he was a Finnish soldier or a member of the SS.

“He had taken the Hippocratic oath,” Skrunik’s son told the National Post.^[7] “He wouldn’t turn away an injured man, whatever his nationality.” Skurnik, however, took it further than that. He helped clear paths for the German army to attack and, when a German soldier was in need, would rush into no man’s land, risking his own life to save wounded Nazis.

He saved the lives of more than 600 men, many of them members of the SS, by organizing an evacuation of a field hospital that was being bombarded by Russian shells. Skrunik led the wounded Germans across 8.9 kilometers (5.5 mi) of bogland and, when it was all over, was awarded with an Iron Cross.

Skurnik turned it down. He claimed that as soon as he got word that the Germans wanted to present him with their highest honor, he told his commanding officer: “Tell your German colleagues that I wipe my arse with it!”

3 Harry Matso

“We’ve been called ‘fascist,’ ” Harry Matso said, “which is a lie.”^[8]

He was a member of the Finnish army, a man who fought for a force allied with the Nazis. If the war had ended in their favor, his race—the Jewish race—would have been exterminated. Still, Matso insists that he was no fascist.

“Finnish Jews fought for Finland’s independence,” he said. “Not for Germany’s war aims.”

He’d joined the war after being conscripted by his nation. He answered their call—even though he knew that his nation was allied with the Nazis and though, by 1942, he’d started hearing rumors of the systematic extermination of Jews in Germany.

But Matso feared life under Soviet rule every bit as much. Caught between two tyrants, he sided with the one nation he believed would take care of him: his homeland of Finland. Still, Matso fought, rebelling in his own small, quiet way. When he saw a German soldier, he said, he would staunchly refuse to salute.

2 Emil Maurice

One of the founders of the SS was, by Heinrich Himmler’s standards, a Jew. His name was Emil Maurice, and he was classified as SS Member #2—second only to Adolf Hitler himself.

Maurice had been a part of the National Socialist Party from the start. He joined up with Hitler in 1919 and soon rose up to be the supreme leader of Hitler’s Sturmabteilung. He joined in the Beer Hall Putsch, Hitler’s failed coup d’etat in 1923, and sat with him in prison, where he even helped Hitler write Mein Kampf.^[9]

Maurice couldn’t have been closer to Hitler. The two even shared a lover: Geli Raubal, Hitler’s niece, had affairs with both men, a fact that would create the only split between them. Still, the bond between Hitler and his SS Member #2 was so strong that when Heinrich Himmler publicly exposed Maurice’s Jewish ancestry and demanded that he be expelled from the SS, Hitler had Maurice declared an “honorary Aryan” and saved his life.

1 Erhard Milch

There are Jews who fought for Hitler even though they knew the horrors of the Holocaust, but Erhard Milch went even further. He didn’t just fight for Germany despite the atrocities—he joined in. He was a member of the German War Cabinet and the Nazi Air Force’s chief of staff. Few were higher up in the Nazi party than he was, even though it was public knowledge that his father was Jewish.

Milch, however, had friends in powerful places. Hermann Goering saw him as his protege, and to keep his friend safe, he had Milch’s mother sign a statement saying that Erhard wasn’t truly his father’s son so that Goering could have him registered as “full Aryan.”

No part of Milch ever seems to have felt sympathy for his father’s people. During the Nuremberg trials, he was charged with experimenting on Jewish prisoners in Dachau. They accused him of playing a role in human experiments that sent Jewish prisoners into dangerous altitudes to see how high they could go before they died, as well as others that tested how cold water had to be before the temperature would kill someone.

Milch never apologized. When the trials came, he stayed true to his mentor, speaking out in Goering’s defense. In the end, he was prosecuted as a Nazi war criminal.^[10]