Nazis killed what kind of people

Its direct cause is the fact that the Nazis wanted to exterminate the Jews and that they were able to do so. But their lust for murder didn't come out of nowhere.

The antisemitic Nazi ideology must be considered in the broader context of the age-old hostility towards Jews, modern racism, and nationalism. Jews in Europe have been discriminated against and persecuted for hundreds of years, often for religious reasons. For a start, they were held responsible for the death of Christ. In the Middle Ages, they were often made to live outside the community in separate neighbourhoods or ghettos and were excluded from some professions.

In times of unrest, Jews were often singled out as scapegoats. During the plague pandemic around , Jews were expelled and persecuted. In Russia, after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in , there were outbreaks of violence in which groups of Jews were mistreated or murdered. With the rise of racially inspired ideologies in the nineteenth century, the idea arose that Jews belonged to a different race and were therefore not part of 'the people' or the nation.

In , Germany lost the First World War. Right-wing extremists blamed the Jews. They also accused the Jews of being capitalist exploiters who profited at the expense of others. At the same time, the Jews were accused of being followers of communism who were after world domination by means of a revolution.

Yet there is no straight line from the antisemitism of the Nazis to the Holocaust. In his book Mein Kampf and his speeches, Hitler never made a secret of his hatred of the Jews and his opinion that there was no place for them in Germany, but initially, he had no plans for mass murder.

Only after the outbreak of the Second World War did the Nazi top conceive of the idea and the possibility of murdering the European Jews. The Holocaust can, therefore, best be seen as the outcome of a series of decisions, influenced by circumstances. Sometimes the initiative came from lower placed Nazis, who were looking for extreme solutions to the problems they faced.

Competition between different government departments also led to increasingly radical measures against the Jews. But in the end, nothing went against Hitler's wishes and he was the one who made the final decisions. Between and , the Nazis made life in Germany increasingly impossible for the Jews.

Jews fell victim to discrimination, exclusion, robbery, and violence. The Nazis sometimes killed Jews, but not systematically or with the intention of killing all Jews. At that point, the main goal of the Nazis was to remove the Jews from Germany by allowing them to emigrate. To encourage them to do so, they took away their livelihoods.

Jews were no longer allowed to work in certain professions. They were no longer allowed in some pubs or public parks. In , the Nuremberg Racial Laws came into force. Jews were forbidden to marry non-Jews.

Jews also lost their citizenship, which officially turned them into second-class citizens with fewer rights than non-Jews. Jewish houses, synagogues, and shops were destroyed and thousands of Jewish people were imprisoned in concentration camps. When the war broke out in September , about , Jews fled Germany because of the violence and discrimination.

The German invasion of Poland in September heralded a new, more radical phase in the persecution of the Jews. The war had made emigration all but impossible. Beginning in , Jews from all over the continent, as well as hundreds of thousands of European Romani people, were transported to the Polish ghettoes.

The German invasion of the Soviet Union in June marked a new level of brutality in warfare. Mobile killing units called Einsatzgruppenwould murder more than , Soviet Jews and others usually by shooting over the course of the German occupation. Since June , experiments with mass killing methods had been ongoing at the concentration camp of Auschwitz , near Krakow.

The SS soon placed a huge order for the gas with a German pest-control firm, an ominous indicator of the coming Holocaust. Beginning in late , the Germans began mass transports from the ghettoes in Poland to the concentration camps, starting with those people viewed as the least useful: the sick, old and weak and the very young. The first mass gassings began at the camp of Belzec, near Lublin, on March 17, Five more mass killing centers were built at camps in occupied Poland, including Chelmno, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek and the largest of all, Auschwitz-Birkenau.

From to , Jews were deported to the camps from all over Europe, including German-controlled territory as well as those countries allied with Germany. The heaviest deportations took place during the summer and fall of , when more than , people were deported from the Warsaw ghetto alone. Fed up with the deportations, disease and constant hunger, the inhabitants of the Warsaw Ghetto rose up in armed revolt.

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising from April May 16, ended in the death of 7, Jews, with 50, survivors sent to extermination camps. But the resistance fighters had held off the Nazis for almost a month, and their revolt inspired revolts at camps and ghettos across German-occupied Europe.

Though the Nazis tried to keep operation of camps secret, the scale of the killing made this virtually impossible. Eyewitnesses brought reports of Nazi atrocities in Poland to the Allied governments, who were harshly criticized after the war for their failure to respond, or to publicize news of the mass slaughter. This lack of action was likely mostly due to the Allied focus on winning the war at hand, but was also a result of the general incomprehension with which news of the Holocaust was met and the denial and disbelief that such atrocities could be occurring on such a scale.

At Auschwitz alone, more than 2 million people were murdered in a process resembling a large-scale industrial operation. A large population of Jewish and non-Jewish inmates worked in the labor camp there; though only Jews were gassed, thousands of others died of starvation or disease. And in , eugenicist Josef Mengele arrived in Auschwitz to begin his infamous experiments on Jewish prisoners. His special area of focus was conducting medical experiments on twins , injecting them with everything from petrol to chloroform under the guise of giving them medical treatment.

By the spring of , German leadership was dissolving amid internal dissent, with Goering and Himmler both seeking to distance themselves from Hitler and take power.

The Holocaust was the systematic, state-sponsored, persecution and murder of six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators between and The Nazi Party quickly turned Germany from a weak new democracy into a one-party dictatorship.

The German government began persecuting German Jews almost immediately after Hitler became chancellor.

By , Jews were stripped of their German citizenship, and in , Jewish men began to be arrested and sent to concentration camps just for being Jewish. Nazi Germany also annexed, invaded, and occupied neighboring countries to obtain Lebensraum living space.

German authorities rounded up Jews and forced many of them into ghettos. The Holocaust was caused by many factors, including millions of individual decisions made by ordinary people who chose to actively participate in—or at least tolerate—the persecution and murder of their neighbors.

Antisemitism , the fear or hatred of Jews had existed in Europe for centuries. In the late 19th century, the pseudoscience of eugenics became popular. The Nazis promoted racial antisemitism. The Nazi regime economically, politically, and socially marginalized the Jewish community over a period of years, attempting to force Jews to emigrate out of German territory. In defiance of the Treaty of Versailles , Germany remilitarized and readied itself for war. The United States and other countries, still suffering under the Great Depression and remembering the needless destruction of World War I, did not meaningfully intervene to protest Nazi militarization or Nazi antisemitic policies until Germany invaded Poland in Nazi policy moved from forced emigration to mass murder.

The Holocaust could not have happened without the active or passive participation of millions of people, each of whom acted for their own reasons. Some people recognized that they could personally benefit from the persecution and murder of Jews. Sometimes that meant acquiring the property or homes of Jews who were deported or murdered, or the businesses of Jews forced to immigrate or sent to concentration camps.

Other people found jobs in the Nazi regime, which gave them newfound financial or political power and influence.

In countries that Germany invaded, many collaborators saw the benefit of assisting their new leaders and took advantage of the opportunity to take revenge on their Jewish neighbors by denouncing them. There was also a great deal of pressure to conform. Even if people were not antisemitic to begin with, Nazi leaders and propaganda provided ample reasons to help them, with time, to come around to this point of view. Few people were brave enough to publicly speak out or to help Jews, especially when they could be arrested or executed for doing so.

The Nazi Party was founded in It sought to lure German workers away from socialism and communism and commit them to its antisemitic and anti-Marxist ideology. It attracted support from influential people in the military, big business, and society. The Party also absorbed other radical right-wing groups.

Hitler emphasized propaganda to attract attention and interest. He used press and posters to create stirring slogans. He displayed eye-catching emblems and uniforms. The Party staged many meetings, parades, and rallies. In addition, it created auxiliary organizations to appeal to specific groups. For example, there were groups for youth, women, teachers, and doctors. The Party became particularly popular with German youth and university students. Other politicians thought they could control Hitler and his followers, but the Nazis used emergency decrees, violence, and intimidation to quickly seize control.

The Nazis abolished all other political parties and ruled the country as a one-party, totalitarian dictatorship from to The Party used its power to persecute Jews. It controlled all aspects of German life and waged a war of territorial conquest in Europe from World War II , during which it also carried out a genocide now known as the Holocaust. Antisemitism , the specific hatred of Jews, had existed in Europe for centuries.

The early Christian church had portrayed Jews as unwilling to accept the word of God, or as agents of the devil and murderers of Jesus. This accusation was renounced by the Vatican in the s. During the Middle Ages, State and Church laws restricted Jews, preventing them from owning land and holding public office.

Jews were excluded from most occupations, forcing them into pursuits like money-lending, trade, commerce. They were accused of causing plagues, of murdering children for religious rituals, and of secretly conspiring to dominate the world. None of these accusations were true. Tags Find topics of interest and explore encyclopedia content related to those topics.

Browse A-Z Find articles, photos, maps, films, and more listed alphabetically. For Teachers Recommended resources and topics if you have limited time to teach about the Holocaust. Wise — International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. About This Site. Glossary : Full Glossary.

Key Facts. More information about this image. Introduction The Holocaust was the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jewish men, women and children by the Nazi regime and its collaborators.

Documenting the Holocaust: Examples of Documents What follow are the current best estimates of civilians and captured soldiers killed by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. There are three obvious and interrelated reasons for the lack of a single document: Compilation of comprehensive statistics of Jews killed by German and other Axis authorities began in and It broke down during the last year and a half of the war.

Beginning in , as it became clear that they would lose the war, the Germans and their Axis partners destroyed much of the existing documentation. They also destroyed physical evidence of mass murder. No personnel were available or inclined to count Jewish deaths until the very end of World War II and the Nazi regime. Hence, total estimates are calculated only after the end of the war and are based on demographic loss data and the documents of the perpetrators.