“The best way to take control over a people and control them utterly is to take a little of their freedom at a time, to erode rights by a thousand tiny and almost imperceptible reductions. In this way, the people will not see those rights and freedoms being removed until past the point at which these changes cannot be reversed.”
- Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf, describing how to achieve control of a populace, 1925
- Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf, describing how to achieve control of a populace, 1925
The Nazi party had radical anti-Semitic views, but Hitler took it to the extreme. He thought of the Jews as a disease to the world and wanted to remove them. Over the course of a decade, Hitler passed several laws taking away the rights of Jews and other groups deemed 'undesirable'. These rules, called the Nuremberg Laws, were the beginning of the Final Solution; the extermination the Jews. The Nazi Gestapo, the secret police, and the Schutzstaffel (SS), a major paramilitary organization, were responsible for enforcing these laws. They imprisoned Jews and destroyed their properties. The Jews were forced to live in ghettos, to eventually be deported to concentration camps. The first such camp was in Dachau, Germany, where human experimentation later took place. The Nazi's intention to eliminate all Jews and other 'undesirables' as well as the need of medical data by the military led to the experiments.
“...our clothes and our needs. That was all. Everything else had to be left behind.”
- Ruth Elias, Holocaust survivor, describing her family moving to a ghetto, 1998
- Ruth Elias, Holocaust survivor, describing her family moving to a ghetto, 1998