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[Liberal Dose]

March 22, 1933 - Dachau slave labor death camp established

The Hitler regime established the first concentration camp about 15 kilometers northwest of Munich, dedicated on March 20 by Heinrich Himmler. It held about 5,000 prisoners, mostly Communists, Social-Democrats, and homosexuals. Bavarian police guarded the prisoners until April 11, when the SS took over. The slave-labor death camps, so hideous in their reality that Germans didn't want to hear about them, became an efficient tool in silencing opponents of the regime. Dachau was a political camp and the first Jewish detainees were among the best-known political opponents of the Nazi regime. More than 10,000 Jews from all over Germany were interned there after Kristallnacht http://www.mtsu.edu/~baustin/knacht.html. When the systematic genocide of Jews began, the Jewish prisoners were deported from Dachau and other camps in the Reich to the extermination camps in the East.


Throughout 1933 and 1934, thousands of Communists, Social Democrats and Jews were arrested in various parts of Germany. There was no secret about these arrests. The German people made no effort to stop Hitler's terrorism. They allowed themselves to be brainwashed by his relentless propaganda and regarded their Fuhrer as making heroic efforts to re-establish order and decency.

On May 2, 1933, Hitler dissolved all the German trade unions and within six months he had destroyed the largest and best-organized workers' movement in the world at that time. This catastrophic defeat of the German workers had the worst possible psychological effect because throughout this entire time there was not even a single symbolic act of resistance. Had there been even an attempt at resisting the Nazi's relentless destruction of human freedoms, it would at least have allowed the workers to feel that they had not gone down without a struggle.

Throughout 1933 and 1934, the SS, Gestapo and police, often assisted by fire brigades and emergency services, regularly sealed off specific German housing estates and combed through them house by house for suspected enemies of the state. Local SA groups carried out beatings, arbitrary arrests and spontaneous vandalism, creating an atmosphere of terror and helplessness in working class strongholds Germans had believed to be safe. In this way the Nazi goons smashed any semblance of working class solidarity. The Gestapo built up its surveillance apparatus to make mass resistance impossible. So German people felt an ever-present sense of terror and fear, as if they were living in a country occupied by foreign troops.

The Nazi terror continued, unchallenged:

June 22, 1933: the Social Democrat party, the only opposition party to the Nazis, was banned

July 7, 1933: the elected Social Democrats were expelled from the government

July 14 1933: a law was passed making sterilization compulsory for those considered unfit

July 15, 1933: all political parties were banned except the Nazi party

July 1933: concentration camps were systematized

October 1933: the entire press was now under Nazi control

New laws destroyed editors' and journalists’ independence and expression of personal opinion

The film industries were taken over one by one

November, 1933:

General elections were held for a single-party parliament

The Nuremberg race laws were established

January 20, 1934: ‘Regulation of National Labor’ broke the power of all organized labor within German workplaces

January 30, 1934: the local governments were dissolved without provision for re-election; local commissioners were henceforth appointed by Reich ministers to whom they were beholden

February 1934: the Upper House of Parliament was dissolved

May 5, 1934: the German Protestant Church's ‘confessing synod’ made the ‘Barmen Theological Declaration’ against the totalitarian state; later in 1934, the Catholic Bishop Galen of Munster preached against the Nazi attacks on Christianity in a sermon widely disseminated

June 30, 1934: the ‘Night of the Long Knives' - hundreds of "enemies of the state" were murdered in cold blood

The massacre included several prominent non-Nazis, among them, the leader of Catholic action and two army generals

Among those murdered were socialist revolutionaries within the Nazi party.

People the world over were shocked at the mass bloodshed, but no reaction within Germany or elsewhere challenged the Nazi terror.

August 1934: Hitler became Der Führer as well as Chancellor; a plebiscite of the German people formally ratified his dictatorship
The German people had allowed this reign of terror to seize control of the entire nation without any significant resistance or expression of outrage.

The same thing can happen to any people who do not begin early to resist the attacks on their liberties.

Norman D. Livergood

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