Thread by @MikeStuchbery_

In 1933, they made the laws before they had the infrastructure too.

They were placing those that had been criminalized by the regime in makeshift camps - old barracks, halls, etc.

It took a few months before a new administration was put in place to oversee 'permanent' camps.

Once they had a new administration in place, and contracts with suppliers, it wasn't hard to establish permanent camps for detaining those the state considered its enemies.

Dachau opened a few months after the Nazis took power. It began by taking in dissidents.

Dachau was a powerful reminder of the regime's grasp in the early days of the Nazi state. People would chide each other - you don't want to end up in Dachau!

Over time, more camps opened across Germany - Sachsenhausen, near Berlin, among others.

As time went on, it wasn't just dissidents who found themselves interned. By the mid 1930s, the Roma were rounded up and interred.

Many found themselves interred at Berlin-Marzahn camp, a boggy, horrid spot. They were made to complete forced labour on local projects.

They didn't start by herding off trainloads of Jews to the death camps either.

That took time.

First Germany's Jews were made uncomfortable, then they were legislated against, then deported - when it was possible - to the Polish border.

By the time war broke out, trains were rumbling through the night, and camps operating in full view of the German people.

Inmates from the camps were working in factories, before being taken back to their barracks every night, marched back through towns.

Nobody blinked.

Germans at home didn't ask many questions about what their sons, brothers, husbands and fathers went to war to do.

The army and SS went in to Poland with lists of those marked for incarceration and execution - these had been planned well in advance.

Following the army, the Einsatzgruppen followed, murdering those deemed 'enemies of the state' - this often meant murdering entire communities.

Jews in towns and cities were herded into ghettos. Some were even filmed as part of propaganda efforts.

Back in Germany, they didn't begin by killing the disabled.

That came after years of propaganda that put a price on a human life, about how many Germans could be helped with the money spent on the mentally ill or disabled.

Starting in 1940, Aktion T4 killed around 250,000.

You have to understand this - nobody flipped a switch and the Holocaust *happened*.

Sure, the Wansee Conference formulated the 'Final Solution', but mass killings had happened for years, the infrastructure was there.

It took surprisingly little to implement the death camps.

Even when the small crematoriums ran throughout the day, and a little ash rained down on fields by the German camps, the neighbours - and there were neighbours - didn't pry.

By the time this all began to take place, it was simply too late to protest.

The other thing you have to realise is that the Holocaust was enabled by human beings.

The guards who beat and kicked and shot were men who sang songs to their children, liked a drink, loved their pets.

They clocked off at the end of the day.

The men who enabled the Holocaust weren't born zealots or monsters.

They'd simply grown up against a background of rising hatred. They were told they were the victims, that rheir culture was being overrun.

They believed a guy when he said he'd Make Germany Great Again.

Nazi Germany doesn't stand out because of the sheer number it killed - you can make solid arguments in favour of the Soviet state there.

It stands out because there was no revolution, no sudden defining moment.

Slowly, but surely, men found themselves monsters. FIN.