Nazi Germany persecuted, brutalized, and murdered groups of people whom they saw as enemies or threats. The Nazis saw Jews as their primary enemy. They targeted Jewish men, women, and children with unrelenting focus. The scope of terror and the scale of human loss raise the questions: What groups did the Nazis target? And why did they target these specific groups of people? Nazi Germany targeted Jews because the Nazis were radically antisemitic.
From the very beginning, the Nazi German regime took steps to ruthlessly and tirelessly isolate, impoverish, and discriminate against Jewish people in Germany. During World War II, this policy escalated to mass murder. In total, the Nazis and their allies and collaborators murdered six million Jews in a genocide now known as the Holocaust.
In some cases, they did so with the help of their allies and collaborators. The Nazis targeted people as members of the following groups listed in alphabetical order for ease of reference :. A chart of prisoner markings used in German concentration camps. Dachau , Germany, ca. Beginning in β, the SS created a system of marking prisoners in concentration camps. The Nazis used this chart illustrating prisoner markings in the Dachau concentration camp.
Nazi Germany dehumanized and devalued entire groups of people on the basis of Nazi ideology. Ideology is a set of beliefs about how the world operates. Nazi ideology was racist, antisemitic, and ultra-nationalist. It drew on a number of existing concepts. These concepts included racism, nationalism, antisemitism, anticommunism, antigypsyism, and eugenics. The Nazis combined these concepts and took them to destructive, murderous extremes. The Nazis evaluated people according to biological, racial, political, and social criteria.
According to Nazi ideology, certain groups of peopleβsuch as Jews and Romaβwere racial threats that undermined the racial purity of the German people. Othersβsuch as people with disabilitiesβwere considered biological threats. The Nazis believed they compromised the genetic health of the German people. They treated real and supposed enemies as existential threats.
