Final answer:
Totalitarian leaders targeted religious or ethnic groups to maintain uniformity and control, as these groups could pose a threat to the total power of the state by offering alternate sources of loyalty or resistance. Through systematic violence and scapegoating, totalitarian regimes sought to repress and sometimes eliminate these groups to prevent challenges to their authority.
Step-by-step explanation:
Totalitarian leaders targeted religious or ethnic groups because these groups often represented a threat to the uniformity and homogeneity that totalitarian regimes sought to create. Totalitarian governments aim to exert complete control over every aspect of people's lives, which means that any form of diversity or nonconformity, including religious and ethnic differences, could undermine the government's authority.
This control is reinforced through the use of systematic violence and terror to maintain power and suppress opposition. Religious and ethnic groups, with their own distinct identities and ideologies, could mobilize resistance or inspire loyalty that competed with the state. As a result, these groups were frequently targeted for repression, displacement, or even genocide, as seen in the historical examples of the Jewish and Romani people during the Holocaust, or the religious and ethnic purges under Stalin and Pol Pot.
Moreover, totalitarian regimes often used these groups as scapegoats, blaming them for economic hardships and social problems, thus directing public dissatisfaction away from the state and onto marginalized populations.