So far as I know, they went after the political opposition first, and it was this population that went to the camps first. Joanna
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I don't have time to go in to this in better detail, but there are very important distinctions to be made between the methods the third reich used against its political enemies and those used against special populations.
In the first case, the method amounted to criminalization of activites, conduct, and ideology. In the latter case it required first re-defining groups of people as inferior, defective, and defficient---the racialization process was used to de-Germanize already existing citizens. Then these groups were systematically reduced to the legal equivalent of stateless aliens on German soil.
These different methods may have resulted ultimately in the same fate, but it is still important to recognize these distinctions.
Chuck Grimes