After that they continued to show bravery by establishing the White Rose. This was a secret rebellion organization used to announce the evils of Hitler’s plans to all of Europe. Hans and Sophie regularly volunteered to take the printed leaflets and carefully distribute them in mailboxes, trains, and local classrooms. Lastly, Hans and Sophie Scholl were arrested and sentenced to death for their protests but even then they showed courage. On February 18, 1943 they were spotted handing outs leaflets and taken in for interrogation.
The police and the SA arrested all the communist leaders, their meetings were broken up and newspapers closed down. Also the banning of the trade unions was a contributing factor. He filled all of the legal positions with Nazis so that they can get the results that they wanted. The judges who weren’t Nazis were only allowed to be reappointed if they took an oath of loyalty to Hitler. The enabling law gave him complete control when it was passed on the 23rd March 1933.
They orchestrated the majority of the Holocaust; the solution to the “Jewish question” as it was called by German forces (USHMM: SS and the Holocaust). The SS were known for their harsh, merciless brutality toward the prisoners in concentration camps and often abused them simply for their own personal enjoyment. The SS are covered extensively in the memoir Night by Elie Wiesel and other accounts of the Holocaust, and their acts can be divided into categories; including their rise to and fall from power, key figures in the establishment of the SS, and the treatment of prisoners at concentration camps. One category with major significance is the Nazis’ rise to and fall from power. The Nazis rose to governmental power through a long, thought-out series of actions that turned Hitler’s leadership into a dictatorship and started the Holocaust and World War II.
Hitler used the Jewish people as a scapegoat for the problems Germany had as a nation. They were his main targets throughout his reign of terror and the majority of those killed, approximately six million, in the Holocaust. However, Nazi ideology was not discriminatory to only Jews. Gypsies, homosexuals, handicapped, homeless people, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and communists were all targeted and killed or imprisoned, along with the Jews (Bergen
Concentration camps in Nazi Germany Concentration camps in Nazi Germany served a number of purposes. First, these camps were used to jail those who opposed Hitler’s government or were thought to threaten it. Second, knowledge of what life was like in a concentration camp was allowed to leak out – or came out when someone was released. The fear of ending up in such a camp was sufficient for a great many Germans to openly declare their loyalty to Hitler even if this was not the case. Therefore for the Nazi leaders, concentration camps served the dual purpose of controlling the majority of the population because of the fear they engendered and also locking away those who crossed the line- a line imposed by the Nazi government.
Moral Instinct The Holocaust was one of the most devastating times in history. The Jewish people endured more than just physical suffering but mental suffering. The Nazi Regime created many laws or “Anti-Jewish” decrees that deprived the Jewish people of any kind of civil rights or freedoms ("Holocaust Encyclopedia"). These Laws caused not only the Jewish people, but everyone in a German-occupied country to make decisions that not only affected themselves but their families and friends as well. One Jewish Decree caused all Jewish people to live in designated areas of German cities “Judenhauser”.
Within days of taking power Hitler banned all other political parties. The normal democratic right to oppose or protest against government was not going to be allowed. The Gestapo made it their business to find out about Nazi opponents. They tapped phones, opened letters and spied on suspects. A network of Nazi informers passed on information to them.
Concentration camps held Jews as well as criminals, political prisoners, gypsies, etcetera. Like the ghettos, concentration camps held the Jews and had terrible living conditions. At the camps the first thing the SS would do was take the prisoners clothing, shave their heads, and replace their name with a number (dehumanizing them). Prisoners of the camps were forced to work for the Germans, including putting people inside the gas chambers, removing the remains from the gas chambers and sorting through previously (Jewish) owned clothes that would be sent to German residents. Prisoners who were thought to be “unfit” for work (the weak, the ill, prisoners with a mental condition, etcetera) were brought to the gas chambers.
Although we know there was opposition against Hitler and the Nazi regime it is hard to assess who and how many people took a negative approach to him. Fear of the Gestapo (the secret police) was vast and always present as people were regularly being arrested for crimes of speaking out against Hitler and the Government and sent to the early concentration camps which were later became the ‘death camps’. After the war people were all too keen to announce their distrust and negative feelings towards Hitler as they were ashamed of what he had done, however during his regime many people did not openly oppose him. This makes it hard to know how many people really opposed Hitler. There were different types of opposition towards the Nazi
At the bottom of the front page of each issue, in bold letters, the paper proclaimed, "The Jews are our misfortune!" The newspaper also regularly featured cartoons of Jews in which they were caricatured as hooked-nosed and ape-like. The influence of the newspaper was far-reaching, by 1938 about a half million copies were distributed weekly. Soon after he became chancellor, Hitler called for new elections in an effort to get full control of the Reichstag, the German parliament, for the Nazis. The Nazis used the government apparatus to terrorize the other parties.