• General_Effort@lemmy.world
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    21 hours ago

    The murder of political enemies by the Nazis is usually not considered part of the Holocaust.

    The Nazis created concentration camps to detain people immediately after they assumed power. The death camps in which millions were gassed were its own thing within that system.

    The detainment concentration camps were for leftists and democrats. Then also people from the margins of society. The so-called “work-shy”; meaning people who had for whatever reason troubles functioning. It would have included Hitler if he hadn’t succeeded with that politics grift. Gay people, of course. Jehovah’s Witnesses because they were conscientious objectors. Of course, people were tortured and maltreated in these camps, too. But how bad it was very much depended on the status of the prisoner.

    The first Holocaust killings are usually said to be the hospital patients who were victims of the Aktion T4 in September 1939 when the war started. Disabled people who needed care were murdered to free up resources for the war effort. One method was locking them in an idling truck and suffocating them with exhaust fumes.