Gov. Paul LePage has stated not once, but twice, that the Affordable Care Act puts our country on a path that may lead to a Nazi-like dictatorship in the United States, with the IRS as the new Gestapo.

I can only assume the governor has no understanding of what the Gestapo actually did, because no thinking, feeling human being who did understand would ever make such a claim.

The governor’s ignorance is understandable, though. In U.S. popular culture, the Gestapo is often presented as two-dimensional caricatures of evil, and even the best films depicting the era, such as Schindler’s List, can ever convey the horrors fully, for the simple reason that they are beyond imagination.

Most of the facts in this column are found in Richard Evans’ excellent three-volume study of the history of Third Reich, as well as in work by historian Timothy Snyder. The facts themselves are well-documented. The Nazis kept meticulous records. Many survivors can find out from the archives precisely when their loved ones were transported to which camp, when they arrived, and when they died.

The Gestapo was created in 1933, soon after Hitler took power, as an independent, political police force in the German province of Prussia under Hermann Goering. In 1936 it merged with the infamous SS (Schutzstaffel, or Protective Echelon), under the command of Heinrich Himmler.

A law passed that same year empowered these forces to act with utter impunity outside the jurisdiction of the courts. Within this command, the Gestapo tended to be the smaller, more professional force, involved in interrogations, executions and administration. In practice, the activities of the Gestapo and the SS were almost indistinguishable.

The Gestapo’s first targets were the Nazis’ political opponents, particularly Social Democrats and the Communists. Many thousands were arrested, tortured, sent to concentration camps or executed; many thousands simply disappeared. Homosexuals and other sexual minorities were also an early target.

By the late 1930s the Gestapo were arresting more and more Catholics who opposed the regime. But many innocent people were sent to jail for spreading “malicious gossip” about the regime, such as telling a joke critical of the regime.

The philosophical core of Nazism was racism. Hitler envisioned a master race of Germans ruling over much of Central and Eastern Europe, enslaving the Slavs and eliminating the Jews from Europe.

With the invasion of Poland in 1939, it was Himmler’s job, now appointed as Reich Commissioner for the Strengthening of the German Race, to make that vision a reality.

As the German army marched through Poland, they were closely followed by the Einsatzgruppen (Task Force) commanded by the SS and the Gestapo, whose task it was to round up “undesirables” and send them to concentration camps or kill them.

Among these victims were the mentally and physically disabled. The first victims of a Nazi gas chamber were the patients of a Polish mental hospital in 1939. Though the Nazis had sterilized individuals considered to be genetically deficient as early as 1933, the actual murder of the disabled began only in 1939. The victims were schizophrenics, epileptics, the “feeble minded,” and many others deemed unfit for productive employment. In addition, more than 5,000 “malformed children” were taken from their parents to special clinics, where they were allowed to starve to death.

Another task of the Gestapo and the SS was to reduce the Poles, Ukrainians, Belorussians and Russians to a state of barbarism that would justify their enslavement (with their eventual extinction as the ultimate goal).

Many of the elites in these societies were arrested, murdered or placed in concentration camps; hundreds of thousands were evicted from their land to make way for German colonists; and their crops were diverted to the German war effort, allowing many to die of starvation and disease.

The highest priority, though, was to eliminate the Jews (and the Roma, or Gypsies) from Europe altogether.

The initial plan was to deport the Jews deep into Russian territory (or, strangely, to Madagascar). In the meantime, the Gestapo oversaw the concentration of Jews into ghettos, where, again, hundreds of thousands died from starvation and disease.

When the German invasion of Russia bogged down in the winter of 1941, though, deportation became impossible and the regime began implementing the “Final Solution” under Gestapo supervision.

In Eastern Poland and the Soviet Union, most of the victims never made it to the camps. According to Snyder, as German troops advanced into the Soviet Union, the Einsatzgruppen murdered over a million Jews with a bullet to the head and left them in mass graves outside villages and towns. This method of murder, however, took up too much manpower, too much ammunition, and too much time. So the Gestapo shifted to the technique earlier devised to deal with the disabled, namely gas.

The most famous, and most lethal death camp was Auschwitz. This was the final destination for about 1.3 million people, 90 percent of them Jewish, along with thousands of Roma, Poles, Soviet prisoners of war, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and other groups.

Because Auschwitz was also a labor camp, however, some people arriving were selected for work and a small percentage of these survived. The weak, the elderly, and all children under 15 were taken directly to the gas chambers. (Anne Frank arrived in Auschwitz a few months after her 15th birthday, and so survived the initial selection, only to die of typhus at Bergen-Belsen a few weeks before the camp was liberated by the British).

Most of the Jews in Poland did not die in Auschwitz; they were sent to extermination camps — Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor and others. Almost 800,000 Jews were killed in Treblinka; only about 50 survived. Over 430,000 were murdered in Belzec; only two or three survived.

As the Russians advanced into Poland, the Gestapo did their best to hide traces of their crimes. The camps were dismantled, the bodies burned, the survivors sent on to other camps further West, usually on forced death marches. In Germany, the Gestapo continued to shoot dissidents, deserters and “defeatists” right up until the final capitulation.

This horrific catalog provides only the tiniest insight into the cruel atrocities perpetrated by the Gestapo. Does Gov. LePage really believe this represents a potential future for the United States, simply because a national health care bill, passed by both houses of Congress and upheld as constitutional by a majority of the justices in the Supreme Court, requires individuals who refuse to get health insurance to pay a (tax) penalty of no more than 2 percent of their salary?

I suspect not, but his rhetoric has no excuse, not only because it trivializes the fate of millions cruelly slaughtered by the Nazis, but also because it demeans the rule of law in this great country, and brutally insults those — in this case the IRS — who are charged to defend and enforce that law.

James Richter is professor of politics at Bates College, with a specialty in international politics and the politics of Eastern and Central Europe. He lives in Lewiston.