By the time holocaust was going on, it was too late.

Are you saying without free speech it wouldn't have happened?

"We enter the Reichstag to arm ourselves with democracy’s weapons. If democracy is foolish enough to give us free railway passes and salaries, that is its problem... We are coming neither as friends or neutrals. We come as enemies! As the wolf attacks the sheep, so come we."

-- Joseph Goebbels, 1928

There is no honest way to get from the exchange above to your comment.

In any case, it would not happened without people would defend them each time they could, who would made up what may opponents said just to make opponents sound bad, who pretended that nazi are not danger, that nazi are just little misguided young men meaning well or just trolls.

>You can either: believe people are inherently evil and will support genocide at the first opportunity; or people can be influenced by pointed words from a group intent on manipulating them.

It is also possible this was a prevailing thought, or that the environment was encouraging of such thoughts, in that nation at that time; that something caused division, and that the nazi used this as a way to assert power and spearhead their ideology.

To think people can just tell you to participate in a genocide and everyone will follow is not recognizing the agency of human beings. The WW2 was a dramatic period that had a lot of factors, but having restrictions on free speech is unlikely to be one that would or even did matter much.

Edit: plus, the restrictions on free speech are executed and decided by the oligarchy, and when the nazism was its most vicious it had little reason to restrict that kind of speech. The idea that free speech restriction help in preventing propaganda is wrong; it prevents only some subset of propaganda which does not further the elite, which imo is worse than not restricting it at all. And even then, free speech restrictions cannot stop the spread of ideas and prejudice, whatever they are.

> It is also possible this was a prevailing thought, or that the environment was encouraging of such thoughts, in that nation at that time; that something caused division, and that the nazi used this as a way to assert power and spearhead their ideology.

Doesn't this exactly confirm the original claim that words do lead to actions and therefore affect people's rights?

Words have the potential to affect action, that is their main purpose. But actions are not caused by words but influenced by them, which imo is a big difference