Quite often people ask: why did the Holocaust start?

There are many reasons for the Holocaust,

just like there are usually several reasons for any genocide. The Holocaust started because of
ingrained antisemitism both in Germany and the countries it conquered, compounded by
propaganda and the resources of a powerful state, and the encouragement and leadership of
political leaders. It also started because the passive and active perpetrators held deep feelings of
animosity toward Jewsingrained by almost 2000 years of antisemitism in Christian
teachings which made them receptive to the message of the Nazis, and which made the idea of
eliminating Jews, even through extermination, reasonable and indeed desirable.

Start of the Holocaust

After the invasion of Poland in 1939 the Germans established ghettos in several Polish cities,
where Jews were effectively imprisoned. This is how the Holocaust started. Living conditions in
the cramped ghettos was appalling, and disease, hunger and overcrowding killed tens of
thousands. The Germans deported Jews from all over occupied Europe to these ghettos, modeled
after the ghettos the Catholic Church had established all over Europe since the middle Ages.
With the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 the Germans began the systematic extermination
of the Jews, the Final Solution of the Jewish Question. The Nazis established special mobile
killing squads called the Einsatzgruppen which were attached to the German armed forces and
whose only purpose was to follow the army into the Soviet Union and murder all Jews and
political undesirables in their wake. This they did with unrelenting efficiency, but shooting
thousands of men, women and children at close range every day, day after day, took a toll on the
German murderers. So, the Germans set up special camps where they could deport millions of
Jews and impersonally kill them systematically by cramming hundreds of them at a time into
specially constructed gas chambers, and dispose of their bodies in industrial crematoria.
At Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest of the 20,000 German concentration camps, the Germans
murdered about 10,000 Jews every day during the campaign to exterminate the Jews of Hungary
in 1944. In the end, between disease, starvation, forced labor, the killing squads, the
concentration and death camps and the death marches the Germans murdered 6,000,000 Jews.

The Reasons for the Holocaust

Why did the Holocaust start? Why didnt the Germans simply force all the Jews out of
Germany? Why did the feel they had to exterminate them?

The Germans, like the Poles, Austrians, French, Croats, Slovaks, Ukrainians, Lithuanians and
others, were all taught, almost from the moment they could understand language, that Jews were
evil, that they worked together with the Devil (indeed were minions of the Devil), that they were
bent on defiling the Christian mind, taking over the economies of the world to enslave
Christians, that they abducted and murdered little Christian boys to extract their blood to make

Passover bread, that they desecrated the host, that they rejected Christian revelation and in fact
murdered Jesus Christ.

After the Enlightenment, the old Christian anti-Jewish theology began to be replaced by an
updated, modern and secular antisemitism. In an attempt to reconcile the hatred with modern
ideas and science, antisemitism because racial, which at that time gave it a certain scientific
allure. Of course from a strict scientific point of view all this is nonsense, but for people already
prejudiced against Jews reason and truth were not compulsory requirements. Thus, long before
the time when the Nazis came to power in 1933, the various peoples of Europe already viscerally
hated Jews. Many times this feeling was fueled by noxious Christian beliefs about Jews spewed
from the pulpits, and was reinforced by the antisemitism in the New Testament.

Throughout history Jews were expelled from many countries, sometimes more than once. In the
fantastical platform of the Nazis, the desire to eliminate the Jews became a need, and they felt it
was not enough to expel them. The Nazis felt they had to find a permanent solution to what they
called the Jewish Problem, and that solution was extermination. Thus, when the circumstances
were ripe to make effective The Final Solution of the Jewish Question, as the Nazis
euphemistically called the Holocaust, they acted according to the plan Hitler had laid out years
before. They began the systematic extermination, which they managed to do thanks to the
acquiescence and often eager help of the local populations.

The Perpetrators of the Holocaust

The Holocaust was a cataclysmic event that was triggered by the Germans during WWII.
Fanatical anti-Semitic Nazis, led by the worlds greatest anti-Semite Adolf Hitler, were
responsible for the persecution
And accosting of Jews in Germany during the 1930s, and therefore are the ones who started the
Holocaust. The anti-Semitic actions of the Nazis during that period constitute the protogenocidal
preamble to what was to follow after the war began.

But once the mass murder began, the German perpetrators found willing and indeed eager
collaborators in most of the countries they invaded. In most of the areas under German control,
the local population eagerly and willingly helped the German overlords in denouncing, hunting
down, and executing their Jewish neighbors.