I took a class on the rise and fall of the Nazis. Bear my long-winded reply. Okay, so there were about 9 million jews in Europe at the time. Bullets were too expensive and time consuming to destroy said people so the gas chambers came up with the most effective being Auschwitz - where 1,500,000 were murdered. Hitler believed that before monotheism and the Jewish ethical vision came along, the world operated according to the laws of nature and evolution: survival of the fittest. The strong survived and the weak perished. When the lion hunts the herd the young, the sick and weak are always the first victims. Nature is brutal but nature is balanced. There is no mercy. So too in antiquity-the great empires-the Babylonians, Greeks and Romans conquered, subjugated and destroyed other peoples. They respected no borders and showed no mercy. This too Hitler viewed as natural and correct. But in a world operating according to a Divinely-dictated ethical system—where a God-given standard applies and not anyone’s might—the weak did not need to fear the strong. As Hitler saw it, the strong were emasculated-this was neither normal nor natural and in Hitler’s eyes, the Jews were to blame.
His plan was to take over the world, set up a pagan master race and return the world to what he viewed was its ideal natural state; a world “unpolluted” by Jewish ideas and Jewish off-shoots such as Christianity.
On average 12,000 were killed via gas chambers and by the end of the war Hitler only killed 1/3 of the population of the jews and that never solved his desire goal to kill the world of jewish philosophy...God-given code of morality to the world. They were to be “the light unto the nations” in the words of prophet Isaiah.
And this is what Hitler wanted to bring an end to, because as long as there were even a few Jews left on earth, they were going to continue that God-given mission. Sir Martin Gilbert (in his work The Holocaust) finds that at least 5,950,000 Jews were murdered between 1939 and 1945.
This figure represents sixty nine percent of the entire Jewish population of Europe. Hundreds of communities, some of which were a thousand years old were completely obliterated. But in the end the Jews now have a state and Hitler would have hated that.