Making People Disappear
History is not just what happened. It's what keeps trying to happen.
Before the arrests, before the camps, before the smoke—there were signs.
Not warning signs. Literal signs. Names removed. Titles crossed out. Offices reassigned. Teachers dismissed. Doctors erased from hospital directories. Athletes kept from playing sports. Their crime? Being born Jewish.
When we think of the Holocaust, we often skip ahead to the worst chapters. Those have pictures and movies. We can see them—the trains, the wire, the ashes, the ovens, the gas chambers. They were physical, tangible evidence.
But that's not how it started. It began slowly. Bureaucratically. Incredibly legally.
In April 1933, just weeks after Hitler became Chancellor, the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service was passed. It sounded tame. Administrative, even. But what it meant was that Jewish civil servants, teachers, and judges were to be dismissed. Exceptions were made for World War I veterans—for the time being—but the principle had been set: a category of person could be excluded from public life, not for anything they'd done, but for who they were. They were no longer to be seen in those roles.
And then came the Nazi Sports Office. It mandated an "Aryans only" policy across all public sports and gymnastics organizations. Jewish athletes were immediately expelled from clubs and competitions, severing their ties to the nation's athletic life. Stripped of their titles and barred from events, many were denied even the use of training fields.
There was a brief, misleading reprieve. The 1936 Berlin Olympics became a global stage for Nazi propaganda. To blunt international criticism, the regime included Helene Mayer, a fencer of partial Jewish descent, as a token athlete on the German team. She won silver. But her inclusion was not a concession—it was camouflage.
And all of this was just the beginning.
The Nazis understood something most of us would rather not: before you can destroy a people, you must first make them disappear. You don't do it with bullets at first. You do it with exclusion and absence. You take away their jobs. Their books. Their voices. Their presence in schools, in courts, in medicine, in media, in sports. You paint them as predators, perverts, or threats to the children. And once society stops seeing them as fully human—what happens next barely raises an eyebrow.
Jews were fired from universities. Removed from libraries. Banned from journalism. Forbidden to own businesses. Barred from marrying "Aryans." Removed from sports. The walls kept closing in. And every time, it was done with paperwork—not pitchforks.
There was no single moment when the Holocaust began. It happened in a series of quiet decisions made by people who told themselves they were just following policy. And it came, cloaked in banality, from the policymakers who made it dry enough to chew and swallow.
And as history reminds us, you don't need millions of people cheering for atrocity. You just need enough people to look away.
Language matters. Laws matter. The way we talk about each other—what's "normal," what's "acceptable" to say in public—matters.
A society doesn't go from tolerance to tyranny overnight. It drifts there, inch by inch, sign by sign.
History is not just what happened. It's what keeps trying to happen.
And if you want to know where it starts, look for the people we're being told to stop seeing.
Sources:
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: The Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service (April 7, 1933)
Richard J. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich (Penguin, 2003)
Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, Vol. 1: The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939 (HarperCollins, 1997)
Deborah Lipstadt, Antisemitism: Here and Now (Schocken, 2019)
Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre: The Aryanization of Sport
https://vhec.org/1936_olympics/aryanization_of_sport.htm