Yeah, N word is a slur for National socialists, we have to stop discriminating them, right OP?

Actually, no. They were far better organized. Initially, you had to get an Arier-Nachweis (certificate of being aryan) to do a lot of things, and Jews and others were excluded from getting those.

Then, later, they basically took anyone without a certificate.

They worked towards this using the Nuremberg Laws and the Kennkarte. Most Jews identified themselves as Jewish because the alternative was worse.

Anyways, suspicion was good enough to jail possible Jews. And it got worse and worse in the lead up to the war.

Why are you censoring nazi? Aren’t we all adults here?

This is not YouTube, you can say nazi here.

I’m genuinely curious: Why censor the word “Nazi”?

Jews were less than 1% of the German population, not even 500k.

ICE is curb stomping 20-30% of the US population … currently.

You can say Nazi on the Internet.

You can say “Nazi”. When I first read that title I filled in a different N-word and was very confused.

Do you mean the Nazis?

You know you can type Nazi right?

Nazi Nazi Nazi Nazi Nazi Nazi Nazi Nazi Nazi Nazi Nazi Nazi Nazi Nazi Nazi Nazi Nazi Nazi Nazi Nazi Nazi Nazi Nazi Nazi Nazi Nazi Nazi Nazi Nazi Nazi Nazi Nazi Nazi Nazi Nazi Nazi Nazi Nazi Nazi Nazi Nazi Nazi Nazi Nazi Nazi Nazi Nazi Nazi

As there are not many useful answers here yet, let me try.

From 1933 on, the N…-Regime* required a so called “Aryan certificate” (Ariernachweis) from employees in the public sector. Who and what is Aryan is a debate by itself so I will leave this out, but Jews were a group that were explicitly excluded from that group.

So how would you get this certificate? You needed to proof this with the birth and/or marriage certificates of your ancestors, specifically those of your parent and your grand parents. In special cases you needed even more (like applying for SS/NSDAP), but in general that was it.

Now, the authority issuing these certificates are the Standesämter (Civil registration offices), but they did only issue then from 1876 in the areas on the right of the river Rhine and from about 1807/1815 in the left of the Rhine. This has to do with Napoleon, but that’s a story for another day. Now before the Standesamt, it was basically the protestant and catholic churches that recorded births/baptisms, marriages and deaths and they were required to do so by law. So the churches had to actively help with those certificates.

It was not always a clear line, as obviously, you cannot see if someone is a Jew (even if some very stupid people thought so back then). Also, if as a Jew, your great grand kids were baptized as Christians, they were officially of Aryan origin. So even if the Nazis talked a lot about race, it was more a decision based on religion.

But like I said, this was only required for people working in the public sector and education, but also doctors, lawyers, scientists etc. (which were a couple of millions as you can imagine).

From 1935, with the Nuremberg laws (also called Nuremberg Race laws), every German was required to get an Aryan certificate. However, in 1935 the life as a Jew In Germany was already very hard and complicated, these laws basically stripped them from their last rights that were left. The story is much, much longer and I really recommend you to read about it for example in Wikipedia, as it is excellently documented.

*or Nazi-Regime how I am calling it (because this is not some kind of Lord-Voldemort-Situation)

Edit: I forgot to answer your last question! No, not like ICE in the US. The circumstances are not comparable, and the Antisemitism In Germany was much more systematic and pseudoscientifically profound. Like there were whole disciplines of sciences researching why and which race was better than the other, which resulted from the race theories in the 19the century.

There are definitely parallels and I know Americans are suffering under the fascist regime that is developing at the moment. I am not an expert of US domestic politics, but if I see it correctly, the way ICE is conduction their hunt on humans is unlawful, while the German persecution of Jews was particularly promoted by the German judical system. However, I am not a historian and I guess there are others who are better able to compare these things. As a German, there is something what we call Uniqueness in the context of the Holocaust, which was always the total and absolute aim of the persecution of Jews.

When Hitler took power in 1933, he didn’t actually start with the Jews, & they weren’t kidnapped off the streets. The first concentration camp was at Dachau, & the first prisoners were political enemies - trade unionists (union organizers and members), Socialists & Communists. [Conveniently, not only were these groups Hitler’s political enemies, each was a group used to working with it’s own large membership to accomplish their goals; by imprisoning these people, Hitler not only neutered the political opposition, but he struck a heavy blow against civilian resistance as well.] Originally, they were simply arrested & disappeared, but yes, eventually the Gestapo became increasingly aggressive & did plain kidnappings.

Dachau was originally intended as a prison camp, but it needed to be expanded very quickly to accommodate all the newly arriving prisoners, & the ever-efficient Nazis (remember, they came to power because of the onerous penalties inflicted by the Treaty of Versailles, - the world was in the Great Depression, so the government really couldn’t afford to spend any money) decided the best way to build out the camp was to not-spend much money doing that. Instead of hiring outside workers (who might also bring out word of conditions in the camp, be inclined to transmit messages/contraband in & out of the camp, & potentially hear messages of solidarity from union workers), they decided to have the prisoners build out the camp instead. And why pay the prisoners, when they should be glad to be getting their lodging & food provided for them? The camps were destined to become slave labor camps.

Some companies, still in the throes of the Depression, & with some portion of their workforce now inside the camps & no immediate candidates to replace them, asked the German government if they could hire workers from the camps. The government agreed. The companies got cheap labor & stopped struggling in the Depression, the government got the money to spend on governing, & life improved for those outside the camps - you just had to ignore the camps & slaves themselves. And over time, other industrial-scale companies that didn’t have skilled workers in the camps turned to hiring other workers from the camps; if they didn’t they couldn’t compete in the marketplace.

Meanwhile, having neutered the political opposition, the Nazis started turning to “undesirables”. Even here, the immediate targets weren’t the Jews; the next targets were gypsies (Roma & Sinti), gay men, & Jehovah’s Witnesses, all of whom were thought to be “soiling” German civil society. Lesser targets who didn’t always end up in the camps included immigrants & the homeless; & later targets also included people with mental /physical disabilities, & in some cases just abnormalities (ie, dwarves).

Please note that I’m not saying that the Jews weren’t being targeted by the government & civilians, just that in the early days of the Hitler regime, those actions were a series of increasingly restrictive laws & increasingly-frequent/severe stochastic attacks encouraged by the government. However, Jews originally weren’t interned in the camps to the scale they were imprisoned later on; they were “encouraged” to emigrate. The major turning point against the German Jews is generally accepted as Kristallnacht (Night of the Broken Glass), in 1938, five years after Hitler took power.

Remember that, in the 1930’s, the majority of formal political & economic organizing was done by men, so the majority of the original prisoners were also men. The government did imprison women & children, but not originally at the scale later seen, so the imprisoned women & children were a necessary burden to “cleanse” German society. It was only after Germany started World War II by invading Poland (1939), that things turned dire.

In the newly-occupied territories, yes, the occupying forces kidnapped & killed/imprisoned those suspected of being enemies of the Germans, or just against what Germans thought their society approved of. They established camps for those they targeted in occupied territories, & forced occupied Jews into ghettoes, which were eventually “liquidated” either directly (mass killings) or indirectly (the people in the ghettoes sent to camps).

The camps became a problem. Established quickly, there were too many people to properly feed or care for. Medical attention was essentially non-existent. Conditions in the camps meant that diseases periodically ripped through the populations there. Since the Germans determined to imprison everyone in their target groups, that included young children, the very old & infirm, the chronically ill, etc. The camps became crowded, with a noticable percentage of people who simply couldn’t work to “earn their keep”. In merciless fascist logic, it was more “efficient” to kill those people and direct whatever meagre resources they were willing to allot to the camps to go their slave laborers.

The Jews were pretty far down on the list in actuality. The first people they went for were the queer people and trans people, then it was the communists, and then the socialists, and then the labor unions, and then the Jews after that, then any Germans who opposed hitler. They started from the smallest and worked their way up.

You can say Nazi here.

What’s the N… regime?