It primarily attracted members from the anticommunist middle class, small business owners, self-employed professionals such as physicians and lawyers, national conservatives, and nationalist World War I veterans, many of whom believed that Nazi antisemitism was only a rhetorical tool used to "stir up the masses.
"[1][2][3] In 1935, the organization was outlawed, and its founder and leader Max Naumann was briefly imprisoned by the Gestapo at the Columbia concentration camp, but was released after only a few weeks; he died of cancer on May 18, 1939.
[4] The agitation carried out by the VnJ against the Ostjuden was particularly welcomed by the Nazis to point out the supposedly great dangers of Eastern Jewish immigration to Germany.
Thus, we greeted the results of January 1933, even though it has brought hardship for us personally.A reason why some German Jews supported Hitler was that they thought that his anti-Semitism was only for "stirring up the masses".
[1] Also, they adhered to a kind of respectability politics that led many non-Jews in the German Reich to congratulate the VnJ with the phrase, "If only all Jews were like you.