Nazis

Nazis And What They Did

After a while Hitler seized power. The SA and Gestapo agents went from door to door looking and killing the enemies of Hitler. Communists, Socialists, trade union leaders and others were arrested for speaking about parties and any other things that had to do with that. In the middle of 1933 the Nazi party was the only political party and almost the only organized opposition to the regime that had been eliminated. The Democracy was already dead in Germany.

Then there was another important tool of the Nazi terror. That was the Protective Squads or SS. They were special guards for Hitler and other important party leaders. Some of the Protective Squads wore black shirts and were also auxiliary police,and when the concentration camps started they were guards. Some people were turned to fighting even though they hated it. There were many things that the Nazi's controlled. One of those things is there own use of language. They would take words or expressions with a generally neutral or positive meaning and change them to new words to designate acts of terror and destruction. They did this so that they could hide the nature of those actions and destructions from the world. For example instead of murder they used exterminate, liquidate, finish and treat appropriately. For murder they used evacuation and resettlement. Also for some longer expressions they used words like actions standing for missions to seek out Jews to murder them. Also for destruction they used the term final solution.

When the Nazis came to power the lives of the German Jews changed very drastically. On April 1, 1933 the Nazis carried out the first nationwide pogroms against the Jews. They planned a boycott on the Jewish businesses. The Nazi spokesman said the boycott was an act of revenge against German Jews and foreigners. They would put up signs to tell them not to buy from the Jewish businesses. The signs also read"The Jews are our misfortune." On the day that the boycott happened storm troopers stood in front of the shops owned by the Jews. However the boycott wasn't very successful, it lasted only a day. However it did mark the nationwide campaign by the Nazi party that was against the Jewish population.

The Nazis didn't just hate the Jews. Many other groups were persecuted.These groups were considered "undesirableÓ and "enemies of the state." Once the voices of the political opponents were silenced the Nazis stepped up their treatments against all the groups. The Nazis had group names for the specific groups, for example the Gypsies belonged to an ethnic group called Roma and Sinti. Since the 1400's they had been in Germany and had faced prejudice there for centuries. Also they had been victims of official discrimination long before 1933. Gypsy families under the Nazis power, were rounded up in some of the major cities. They were finger printed and photographed and forced to live in special camps with the police guarding them.

Poland during the German occupation was ruined by conflicting hatreds. The population was around 30,000,000 people. Most of them were Catholics and more than 3 million Jews. The Nazis hated the Jews. They hated the Jews more than they did the other Poles.