Read more and the Nazi Camps
For those unable or unwilling to offer manual labour in service of the Nazi volksgemeinschaftVolksgemeinschaft Full Description A German term meaning “people’s community,” central to Nazi social ideology. It described a racially defined national community from which Jews, Roma, the disabled, and political opponents were explicitly excluded. The Nazis used the concept to create a sense of belonging and solidarity among “racially acceptable” Germans, binding them to the regime through participation in mass rituals, welfare programmes, and collective labour. Critical Perspective Volksgemeinschaft was not only propaganda — it worked. Historians like Robert Gellately and Richard Evans have shown that large sections of the German population genuinely identified with this vision of community, at least in the 1930s. The exclusion of outsiders was not merely tolerated but actively endorsed by many ordinary Germans who benefited materially and socially from the persecution of their neighbours., mass arrests and imprisonment in the growing camp system was an ever present threat. The Nazi camps by 1938 were full of ‘asocial’ prisoners who were arrested largely on the basis of poverty, vagrancy or the inability to fit into the new world of the Third Reich.
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