Sinti and Roma (Gypsies)

The Nazis considered the Sinti and Roma a socio-racial problem to be expurgated from the German nation.
Nomadic Sinti and Roma were subjected to special depredations; their fate was tantamount to that of the Jews. Of
the 44,000 Sinti and Roma who lived in the Reich, thousands were sent to concentration camps after the war began.
Others were concentrated in transit camps before being sent to ghettos and extermination camps during the war.
Between 90,000-150,000 Sinti and Roma were murdered by the Germans throughout Europe.

Homosexuals
Homosexuals were stripped of their civil rights because the Nazis considered homosexuality an affront to their goal of
encouraging natural population growth and normal family life. Approximately 15,000 homosexuals were imprisoned in
camps and thousands perished.

The Disabled
Between 200,000-350,000 mentally and physically disabled individuals were forcibly sterilized until 1939. Beginning
in 1939, approximately 200,000 were murdered during the Euthanasia program either by gassing, lethal injection or
starvation. The Nazis sought to increase the proportion of healthy and racially superior members of the national
community (volksgemeinschaft) by quickly and unsentimentally eliminating the sick and the weak.

The Catholic Church

Beginning in 1933 the Nazi regime arrested thousands of members of the German Catholic central party, as well as
Catholic priests. They disbanded schools and Catholic institutions as part of the totalitarian policy of the regime and
its attempts to eliminate any competing authority. This took place despite the Concordat that had been signed with
the Vatican in 1933. During World War II Catholic organizations were oppressed and thousands of Catholic priests
were imprisoned and murdered throughout the areas occupied by the Nazis.

Another small minority that was oppressed because of their unique religious beliefs were the Jehovahs Witnesses.
They believed that in the eschaton non-members of the group would be judged, they opposed military service and
took a clear stance opposing the regime. As a result, many of the groups members were arrested and some were
incarcerated in concentration camps.

People with disabilities[edit]

Main article: Nazi eugenics

According to their eugenics policy, the Nazis believed that the disabled were a burden to society
because they needed care and were considered an affront to their notion of a society composed of a
perfect race. About 375,000 people were sterilized against their will due to their disabilities.[47]
Those with disabilities were among the first to be killed by the Nazis; according to the U.S. Holocaust
Memorial Museum (USHMM), the T-4 Program (established in 1939) was the model for future Nazi
exterminations and set a precedent for the genocide of what they described as the Jewish race.
[48]

The program attempted to maintain the "purity" of the Aryan race by systematically killing children

and adults with physical deformities or suffering from mental illness, using gas chambers for the first
time. Although Hitler formally halted the program in late August 1941, the killings secretly continued
until the end of the war and an estimated 275,000 people with congenital disabilities died. [49]

Non-Europeans[edit]
Main article: Racial policy of Nazi Germany
The Nazis promoted xenophobia and racism against all "non-Aryan" races. African (black subSaharan or North African) and Asian (East and South Asian) residents of Germany and black
prisoners of war, such as the French colonial troops captured in the Battle of France, were also
victims of Nazi racial policy.[50] When the Nazis came to power hundreds of African-German children,
the offspring of German mothers and African soldiers brought in during the French occupation, lived
in the Rhineland.[51] In Mein Kampf, Hitler described the children of marriages to African occupation
troops as a contamination of the white race "by Negro blood on the Rhine in the heart of
Europe"[52] who were "bastardising the European continent at its core".[51] According to Hitler, "Jews
were responsible for bringing Negroes into the Rhineland, with the ultimate idea of bastardising the
white race which they hate and thus lowering its cultural and political level so that the Jew might
dominate".[53]
Japan signed the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy on September 27, 1940, and was part of the
Axis. No Japanese people were known to be deliberately imprisoned or killed, since they were
considered "honorary Aryans". In The Political Testament of Adolf Hitler, he wrote:
I have never regarded the Chinese or the Japanese as being inferior to ourselves ... and I admit
freely that their past history is superior to our own. They have the right to be proud of their past, just
as we have the right to be proud of the civilisation to which we belong. [54]
South Africans, white people and Europeans of gentile ancestry from other continents were exempt,
as were Latin Americans of "evident" Germanic or "Aryan" (non-mestizo) ancestry.

Lesbians and gays[edit]

Main article: Persecution of homosexuals in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust
See also: Sexuality of Adolf Hitler
Non-heterosexual people were also targets of the Holocaust, since male homosexuality was deemed
incompatible with Nazism. The Nazis believed that gay men were weak, effeminate and unable to
fight for the German nation; homosexuals were unlikely to produce children and increase the
German birthrate. According to the Nazis, "inferior races" produced more children than Aryans, so
anything which diminished Germany's reproductive potential was considered a racial danger.
[55]

Homosexuality was also thought to be contagious by the Nazis.[56] By 1936, Heinrich Himmler was

leading efforts to persecute gay men under existing and new anti-homosexual laws. More than one
million gay Germans were targeted, of whom at least 100,000 were arrested and 50,000 were
convicted and imprisoned.[57] An unknown number were institutionalized in state-run mental hospitals.
Hundreds of European gay men living under Nazi occupation were chemically castrated by court
order.[58] Although an estimated 5,000 to 15,000 gay men were imprisoned in concentration camps, [58]
[59]

the number who died is uncertain. According to Austrian survivor Heinz Heger, gay men "suffered

a higher mortality rate than other relatively small victim groups, such as Jehovah's Witnesses and
political prisoners".[60] Gay men in Nazi concentration camps were identified by a pink triangle on their
shirts, along with men convicted of sexually assaulting children andbestiality.[61] Lesbians were not
usually treated as harshly as gay men; although they were labelled "asocial", they were rarely
imprisoned on sexual-orientation charges. In the concentration camps, they usually wore a black
triangle.[62] According to the USHMM website, "Nazi Germany did not seek to kill all homosexuals.
Nevertheless, the Nazi state, through active persecution, attempted to terrorise German
homosexuals into sexual and social conformity, leaving thousands dead and shattering the lives of
many more."[58]
Many homosexuals who were liberated from the concentration camps were persecuted in postwar
Germany. Survivors were subject to prosecution under Paragraph 175 (which forbade "lewdness
between men"), with time served in the concentration camps deducted from their sentences. This
contrasted with the treatment of other Holocaust victims, who were compensated for the loss of
family members and educational opportunities.[63]

Political victims[edit]

Political prisoners[edit]
Another large group of victims was composed of German and foreign civilian activists across the
political spectrum who opposed the Nazi regime, capturedresistance fighters (many of whom were
executed duringor immediately aftertheir interrogation, particularly in

occupied Poland and France) and, sometimes, their families. German political prisoners were a
substantial proportion of the first inmates at Dachau (the prototypical Nazi concentration camp). The
politicalPeople's Court was notorious for the number of its death sentences.[64]

Leftists[edit]
German Communists were among the first to be imprisoned in concentration camps.[65][66] Their ties to
the USSR concerned Hitler, and the Nazi Party was intractably opposed to communism. Rumors of
communist violence were spread by the Nazis to justify the Enabling Act of 1933, which gave Hitler
his first dictatorial powers. Hermann Gring testified at Nuremberg that Nazi willingness to repress
German Communists prompted Hindenburg and the old elite to cooperate with them. Hitler and the
Nazis also despised German leftists because of their resistance to Nazi racism. Many German leftist
leaders were Jews who had been prominent in the 1919 Spartacist uprising. Hitler referred to
Marxism and "Bolshevism" as means for "the international Jew" to undermine "racial purity", stir
up classtension and mobilize trade unions against the government and business. When the Nazis
occupied a territory, communists, socialists and anarchists were usually among the first to be
repressed; this included summary executions. An example is Hitler's Commissar Order, in which he
demanded the summary execution of all captured Soviet troops who were political commissars. [67]
Ukrainians[edit]
Main article: The Holocaust in Ukraine
Between 1941 and 1945, approximately three million Ukrainian and other gentiles were killed as part
of Nazi extermination policies in present-day Ukraine.[33][34]More Ukrainians were killed fighting
the Wehrmacht in the Red Army than American, British and French soldiers combined.[35] Original
Nazi plans called for the extermination of 65 percent of the nation's 23.2 million Ukrainians,[36][37] with
the survivors treated as slaves.[38] Over two million Ukrainians were deported to Germany as slave
labor.[39] The ten-year plan would have exterminated, expelled, Germanized or enslaved most (or all)
Ukrainians.