The thing that we ought to marvel about in terms of Nazi Germany wasn't persecution per se, but the lack of persecution in many areas of German society. Nazism got a thorough and complete grip over German society in a very short period of time because so many institutions -- including many that should damn well have known better -- were thoroughly accommodating without much of a threat at all. In fact, I would speculate that medical profession, academia, and even most religious leaders in Germany had sold out to the state long before the Nazis were even in power.
Persecution doesn't scare me. What really scares me is outright capitulation by people, leaders and institutions long before they're even facing a threat of persecution.
Its the centralization of power that does it. In the west, we experience today an unprecedented centralization of government authority. In Europe, everything today is more centrally controlled than even in the era of absolute monarchs. Rather than having a separation of power dispersed over a wide geographical area, we instead have ‘centers of power’ from where the corrupting influence spreads.
Today in America, that place is Mordor on the Potomac.