Witch Hunt

While reading The Crucible, i started thinking about other "witch trials" that have gone on in the past. For example, In Germany during World War II, there was a kind of witch hunt going on after the jews. They were advertised as being evil and bad for the human race, they were even refered to as "bad mushrooms" in childrens books and movies. The main goal was to round up all the jews and despose of them, leaving a pure race. There was a mad hunt to find every jew in Europe. Another example of this was the armenian genocide. It was the deliberate destruction of the Armenian Population in the Ottoman Empire. This was the same goal that salem had. To get rid of the evil in their society, which in that case was the witches. Each of these societies "evil" had specific qualities that they told people to be looking out for so they could be identified. This also kind of made me wonder where these kind of things started. What made these societies take normal people and turn them into enemies? To make people so scared of these enemies that is starts a whole phenomenon just to get them out of their lives, and so they can feel safe. Was that one little thing worth all the innocent lives lost?