First They Came for the Opposition, and then the Weakest and the Most Vulnerable

It is surprising how many people do not know about, have never even heard about, the first victims of the Nazi concentration camps and Euthanasia programs.
The first victims of the Konzentrationslager, concentration camps, were largely the political opposition to Hitler: the Social Democrats, the intellectuals, the communists.
“The first concentration camps in Germany were established soon after Hitler’s appointment as chancellor in January 1933. In the weeks after the Nazis came to power, The SA (Sturmabteilungen; commonly known as Storm Troopers), the SS (Schutzstaffel; Protection Squadrons – the elite guard of the Nazi party), the police, and local civilian authorities organized numerous detention camps to incarcerate real and perceived political opponents of Nazi policy.
German authorities established camps all over Germany on an ad hoc basis to handle the masses of people arrested as alleged subversives. The SS established larger camps in Oranienburg, north of Berlin; Esterwegen, near Hamburg; Dachau, northwest of Munich; and Lichtenburg, in Saxony. In Berlin itself, the Columbia Haus facility held prisoners under investigation by the Gestapo, the German secret state police, until 1936.”
But as brutal as they were, these first concentration camps were meant to remove and intimidate opposition to the regime. We must never forget how the people of conscience among the German people were cowed into submission, to remove and silence their voices and serve as an example to the rest.
The first victims of mass murder were the disabled, the emotionally impaired, and the unproductive. Hitler personally signed an order to begin the ‘mercy killings’ of men, women and children who were in state run hospitals and schools, and even in private care. The reason they were murdered is that they were deemed to be too expensive to live, too unrproductive, too much of a drain on the people and the state. This even included people with what today might be considered treatable and transitory mental illnesses such as depression. If you showed the wrong kinds of weakness, you were disposed of, and often brutally by starvation.
Why have most of us never heard about this? For two or three reasons perhaps.

This post was published at Jesses Crossroads Cafe on 10 AUGUST 2015.