How Jews, Socialists, Romans and more were targeted by Nazis
Jews were one of four groups racially targeted for persecution in Nazi Germany and in German-controlled Europe RACIALLY TARGETED GROUPS While Nazi ideology targeted Jews as the primary enemy of Germany, the Nazis also targeted Roma (Gypsies) on racial grounds. The 1935 Nuremberg Laws (which defined Jews by blood) were later applied to Roma . Drawing on traditional prejudices in German society, the Nazis termed Roma as prone by race to be "work-shy" and "asocial" with an inherited inclination to engage in petty crime. Among the first killed in the mobile gas vans at the Chelmno killing center in German-occupied Poland in early 1942 were Roma deported from the Greater German Reich to the Lodz ghetto. SS and police authorities deported more than 20,000 Roma to the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, where the camp authorities killed almost all of them in the gas chambers. In the German-occupied parts of the Sovi...