[Tainnor]

> The plainly explained point is that democratic backsliding is gradual. The road to 20 million dead isn't someone suddenly declaring "we are the baddies", then a week later they start digging the mass graves.

This is so important and so often overlooked. The Nazis took power in 1933, but the persecution of e.g. Jews ramped up very gradually. At first, it was mostly boycotts and prohibiting Jews from working in government jobs. In 1935, they were stripped of citizen rights. In 1938, Jews had to change their names and carry a mark in their passport and Jewish children couldn't attend school anymore, and later that year Jewish shops were systematically destroyed and many Jews rounded up and imprisoned. But it wasn't until the start of WWII in 1939 that mass killings actually started taking place, and only in 1942 at the Wannsee conference was the holocaust as we know it today actually planned.

Many Jews stayed in Germany until it was too late because they didn't think that it could get worse.