They beat up and killed anyone who disagreed with their politics, if you weren't a nazi, you were against the nazis and liable to suffer the consequences: conservative, traditionalist, liberalist, communist, completely apathetic, didn't matter - if you openly dissented their politics (or even dissented amongst the wrong people) your life was basically forfeit to either forced slave labour or one of the camps. Of course, your problems were two-fold if you were Jewish, handicapped (either physically or mentally), foreign (although they made concessions to the usefulness of the English and the Russians to some extent), non-Germanic slavic, or non-Prussian Polish; then it didn't matter what you thought cause you were below the level of human.
Of course, the beatings and murders and purges and pogroms were drops in the pail compared to the death camps. The truly sickening thing was the systematic liquidation of people. The fact that 6 million Jews died is sickening to most, but regardless of the fact that it was a single group of people; the fact that on a daily basis there were tens of thousands of people being gassed and burnt in Third Reich death camps alone should cause people to cringe.
Although few people shed tears for the Russians as far as I've been able to tell, even though their civilian casualties during the war were higher than all the other countries' combined military and civilian losses combined... but hey. It's just people's lives, nothing too major. Collateral damage is more acceptable than systematic murder, right? Ah, the wonders of war, and the excuses we make. That's a different topic altogether.
Some ideas that people like to cling onto from the nazi regime are the idea that someone's just propagandizing the people and ignoring the facts or making sweeping statements that are logically flawed but win over the crowd... Like the situation above, where nazi policy was basically 'if you're not with us, you're against us', and I've seen the argument been made 'if you're not with us, you're with the terrorists'. The thing to note here is that the link is the propaganda, and not the Nazism. If you associate it with Nazism then you're giving privilege to propaganda as if the Nazi propaganda machine outweighs the attrocities committed, as though you were saying Nazism is propaganda and nothing else. If you were to take this as truth and say 'he's using propaganda and therefore a nazi', you'd be spreading your own propaganda through the blatant falsehoods of your statement -- which, if you're saying propaganda is equal to nazism, makes you a nazi also by the same association. To call someone a nazi, then, is to call yourself a nazi - and that's just lunacy. Just because someone uses terrible syllogisms doesn't mean they're a nazi, it just means they don't understand (or choose to ignore) the fundemental processes of proper reasoning. People are entitled to make stupid statements, and others are entitled to believe them; you don't have to like that fact, but it doesn't make it any less true.
Like someone else already said: People can throw around Nazi and pretend to be educated and edgy as if they're making a point - to be a shock jock, as it were - but if they understood what they were saying, they wouldn't do it, because they'd realise how it makes them look like an idiot. Nazism isn't nazism without fascism/totalitarianism, racial hatred and aryan supremecy, dehumanization and merciless murder, etc, etc, etc. You can't take one of those peices and call it nazism without redefining nazism, and you just can't go around redefining words willy nilly because its convenient for you in one instance, that's not how language works.
