The administratable definition-registration-segregation-eviction sequence escalated to extermination.

Evidence

It so happened in Germany half a century ago that bureaucracy was given the task of making Germany judenrein – clean of Jews. Bureaucracy started from what bureaucracies start with: the formulation of a precise definition of the object, then registering those who fitted the definition and opening a file for each. It proceeded to segregate those in the files from the rest of the population, to which the received brief did not apply. Finally, it moved to evicting the segregated category from the land of the Aryans which was to be cleansed – by nudging it to emigrate first, and deporting it to non-German territories once such territories found themselves under German control. By that time bureaucracy developed wonderful cleansing skills, not to be wasted and left to rust. Bureaucracy which acquitted itself so well of the task of cleansing Germany made more ambitious tasks feasible, and their choice well-nigh natural. With such a superb cleaning facility, why stop at the Heimat of the Aryans? Why refrain from cleaning the whole of their empire? True, as the empire was now ecumenical, it had no ‘outside’ left where the dumping ground for the Jewish litter could be disposed of. Only one direction of deportation remained; upward, in smoke. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 305

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The chilling stepwise chain from definition to registration to eviction to extermination — ‘only one direction of deportation remained; upward, in smoke’ — is a paradigm-shifting causal account.
• XREF: Echoes the imagined-community logic of who belongs; the definition-then-register process parallels how modern states classify populations.