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[AlleeCat]

The people in the middle ages weren't much better. Replace "Jew" with "Witch" and it's just as arbitrary.

[Lord Shonus]

The people in the middle ages weren't much better. Replace "Jew" with "Witch" and it's just as arbitrary.

This isn't quite true. Witch hunts were actually incredibly rare - something like .1% of the more popularly cited figures, and the majority of these can be readily proven to be frame-ups. Indeed, for large portions of the medieval era, belief in witches was considered to be heresy against the Roman Catholic Church, and the authors of the best known witch-hunting manual were excommunicated for spreading superstition.

Are you homosexual?

This only really applied to males - as long as a woman fulfilled her duty of making more Germans, what she did with other women didn't matter, as women were not considered important enough to bother with.

[KingofstarrySkies]

At some point, the Nazis killed Catholics, too. Because yes.

[scrdest]

At some point, the Nazis killed Catholics, too. Because yes.

I imagine that there are non-zero instances of Nazis killing members of any category that was within their reach. Because, yanno. Nazis. Rule of big numbers.

[Helgoland]

They targeted Catholics, scrdest. I went on a rant about that recently, I think.

[Yoink]

My life is decidedly mediocre at present, and has been so for quite some time.

[penguinofhonor]

.

[ChairmanPoo]

The people in the middle ages weren't much better. Replace "Jew" with "Witch" and it's just as arbitrary.

Replace "Jew" with "Jew who didn't convert for realz"

Funny thing is that this dude made his own % of jewish ancestors needed to be considered a jew rule, just like the nazis did centuries later... and HIS rule was tailored so that he fell just short of the mark. Antisemitism is rife with hypocrisy

[Rolan7]

They targeted Catholics, scrdest. I went on a rant about that recently, I think.

They threatened Catholics into cooperating, like everyone else.  The Church did cooperate to avoid pointless deaths, which is understandable.  A lot of the brave people who stood up to the Nazis were Catholic priests, dissenting.  A lot of them were captured.

But being a Catholic wasn't on the death list, was it?  Hitler was (nominally) Catholic, and the Church was supporting the regime (under extreme duress).

It's not nearly as simple as I used to think though, that's for sure.  You could even say that those Catholics who did resist were *more* commendable because they weren't targeted.  They could have played a long, like so many people did.

[Helgoland]

Well yeah, you can't just kill ~1/3 of your population. Unless you're Cambodian, I guess

[MetalSlimeHunt]

If you answered yes to any of these questions, the Nazis would consider you a Jew. If you answered no to all of these questions, the Nazis might still consider you a Jew for other arbitrary reasons that they may just make up on the spot.

They wouldn't consider you a Jew for offenses other than being a Jew. This is a pervasively inaccurate attitude about the Holocaust, one which makes it all about the extermination of Jews when it targeted several other groups as well. The Nazis are plenty horrible as they were, there's no need to lie on top of that.

Are you Jewish?
Was anyone as far as four generations back in your family Jewish?
Are you homosexual? (Or any other kind of sex criminal.)
Are you infirm? (Partially accurate, Action T4 was a distinct sterilization and involuntary euthanasia program which handled a lot of these cases and was ran out of psychiatric hospitals or death vans. Some, mostly the mentally instead of physically ill, ended up in the camps instead.)
Does someone high up in the Nazi hierarchy just dislike you? (This almost certainly happened, but I doubt it was ever recorded. Nazi Germany also still had regular prisons that could have taken this sort of thing.)
Are you, or is your family even from Israel? (Israel founded 1948)

In addition:
Are you a social democrat, socialist (Such as the very unfortunate members of SDP?), trade unionist, Freemason, communist, liberal or anarchist?
Are you an actual criminal?
Are you a foreigner or emigrant?
Are you Roma?
Are you asocial? What's asocial? Well, obviously it's being a alcoholic, vagrant, pacifist, draft dodger, prostitute, or drug addict.
Are you a prisoner of war, that war being World War II, or a deserter?
Are you, of all things, a Jehova's Witness?

But being a Catholic wasn't on the death list, was it?

Don't think so. Remember, "Gott mit uns."

[Aqizzar]

It's worth pointing out that the Nazi's weren't even consistent with their jackassery.  Being a Jew was a death sentence... unless you had some well-connected Nazi who was willing to sponsor you as 'trustworthy'.  Even at the end of the war there were still quite a few Jews (and all other verboten denominations for that matter) still living in Germany because the Nazis gave themselves so many different priorities and were so riven with personal politics.  It's estimated that as many as 100,000 people would have been killed in the 1940s survived because they were friends with the right people in the 1930s.

I'm not even sure what started this argument (is that what's going on? I can even tell), I just think it's enlightening history.

[TD1]

I thought Hitler favoured paganism and encouraged its growth?

[Lord Shonus]

Hitler was (nominally) Catholic, and the Church was supporting the regime (under extreme duress).

This doesn't sound quite right. Germany was historically a Protestant country, not a Catholic one, and it is well known that Nazi corruption of the German Protestant churches was a major aid to his rise to power. What is certain is that the Polish priesthood was targeted for extermination, but in Germany and several other conquered nations Hitler feared to act too aggressively against the Catholic church (to the point where some institutions were able to hide Jews nearly openly) because he feared what the power and influence of Rome could do if turned against him in allied Italy, in conquered France, and a great many then-neutral nations such as all of South America, Spain, etc.

This tendency faded a lot as more and more of the world turned against him (and he turned ever more insane), and the restraint was pretty much gone by '43 or '44, but it did last for quite some time.


@Th4DwArfY1: That was actually Goering, I believe.

[NullForceOmega]

More like an extremely distorted version of Judeo-Christian beliefs, with a touch of paganism thrown in because crazy.