Is Germany's xenophobia qualitatively different from everybody else's?

This paper grapples with a fundamental question that emerged repeatedly during the conference from which all of these papers are derived: is German antipathy to foreigners qualitatively different from that of other nations and ethnic groups? The paper provides an historical perspective on German immigration policy and on the recurrence of state-sanctioned killings from the witch hunts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to the Holocaust. This paper concludes that there is evidence to support that xenophobia and hostility to ethnic minorities may be more dangerous in Germany than in other Western nations.