D-Day: A German Jew survives the Holocaust to fight the Nazis

[struggle4progress]

6. The Nazis, from the beginning, were willing to murder people

for political and propaganda purposes; and from 1933 on, when they had control of the government, numerous persons died in custody or in alleged security actions, as was, for example, the case with the purge of Rohm and his supporters in 1934

The rule of law essentially ended with grant of dictatorial powers by the Enabling Act after the Reichstag fire in 1933, and the first concentration camps were established almost immediately. Prisoners were at risk, when detained, since there were no guarantees of transparency or of any judicial intervention

But the doctrine that the state could exterminate certain people for "inferiority" seems to appear first in the murders of disabled people (including seriously injured WWI veterans) between 1939 and 1941, a policy not widely publicized. The first deliberate construction of facilities to exterminate the Jewish population and other "inferiors" dates to about 1941