Timeline
The two timelines show the developments in Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1945. The upper timeline tells the story of the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft (people’s community) while the lower timeline illustrates the process of discrimination and persecution of those excluded from the ideal Nazi society.
The paradigm of a national community based on the idea of race was at the center of Nazi ideology. The Nazi ideologists wanted to erase regional, political, religious, and particularly social divides in the German society. The Nazi program had three key elements: the elimination of "internal enemies" and "aliens"; an upgrade of the worker’s status in society; and an ideological transformation of the traditional national identity into a racial community built around the ideas of Schicksalskampf (struggle and fate).
The Soviet state persecuted and killed millions of people, usually for political reasons. Some of the victims were real opponents of the regime, while others - probably the vast majority - were not . The Nazis, on the other hand, primarily defined their enemies in terms of “race”. The overwhelming majority of Nazi victims belonged to so-called inferior races: Jews, Roma, and Slavs (Poles, Russians, Ukrainians, Byelorussians, Serbs, and Czechs). Ethnic Germans who did not fit in the Nazi racial state, such as people with disabilities, were killed likewise. Many real or presumed political enemies were also executed, along with a few hundred Jehovah’s Witnesses who opposed the regime on religious grounds (homosexuals were routinely dispatched to concentration camps).