Nazi Germanys goal was to kill all the Jews, blacks, gays, gypsies, ect. Why did it take so long?
Hi, I answered a similar question awhile back. I'll post my previous answer, but feel free to ask any other questions you might have.
There were a few reasons why survivors were kept alive by the Nazis rather than being killed outright, though those reasons varied depending on the time frame one is talking about, as well as who the survivors were in the custody of.
For the majority of the war, the most pressing reason why a large number of survivors were kept alive was their use as slave labor in the war industry and agriculture. This was done for a multitude of reasons, though the one key reason was that it allowed the Third Reich to free up able bodied men to enter the armed services. Also the Nazis would try keep a sharp eye out for skilled laborers in the occupied territories (as well as Germany) so that they could be utilized for Germany's war industry rather than being murdered outright or sent off to die in a labor camp. Though for obvious reasons, being a skilled tradesmen or craftworker wasn't a guarantee that one could avoid certain death or hardship while in Nazi captivity.
For example, the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp (a sub camp of Buchenwald) supplied slave labor for the Mittelwerk factory. Mittelwerk was the main production facility for the V-1 and V-2 Rocket programs.
Now, towards the very end of the war, slave labor still played a large role in why many Holocaust survivors were kept alive by their captors. Though by the beginning of 1945, ulterior motives began to take root as the writing on the wall became clearer and clearer for German leadership, specifically the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler.
Himmler (as well as Eichmann and other high ranking members of the SS) actually attempted to keep many Jews and other persecuted parties (specifically Jews and other persecuted parties from Western Europe) under his control alive towards the final stages of the war, but not out of some grand gesture of humanitarianism, but out of an attempt to use them as bargaining chips with the Allies in exchange for money and goods. Himmler made a number of gestures to the Allies, many of which were through a Swedish Red Cross representative, Folke Bernadotte (whom he also submitted a peace proposal directed at the Western Allies in April 1945 that would allow Germany to continue fighting against the Soviets), that he would be willing to ransom several thousand Jews in his custody. Himmler did this both as a way to gain money and material to continue the war effort, as well as to try gain favor with the Western Allies, whom he believed were indebted to the Jews, and as a result would allow him some form of power or leadership in Post-War Germany. This obviously did not work out the way Himmler had intended it to.
Another reason was that towards the very end of the war, command and communication began to breakdown to the point of not existing at all in some areas of the Third Reich. Many camp commanders were often given broad orders to evacuate their camps/facilities that were on the verge of being overrun and to proceed either to other camps or facilities to ensure they and their wards did not fall into Allied hands. This often resulted in brutal marches that lasted for days if not weeks in which hundreds of thousands of prisoners were marched around to the point that tens of thousands were killed either by the harsh nature of the march or by their captors during or at the end of their march. More often than not, many of these marches seemingly had no end point, and were seen as a final strike against the persecuted groups by the Nazis so that those groups would be unable to see the fall of the Nazi regime.
Sources: The End: The Defiance and Destruction of Hitler's Germany, 1944-1945 by Ian Kershaw
Hi! As this question pertains to basic, underlying facts of the Holocaust, I hope you can appreciate that it can be a fraught subject to deal with. While we want people to get the answers they are looking for, we also remain very conscious that threads of this nature can attract the very wrong kind of response. As such, this message is not intended to provide you with all of the answers, but simply to address some of the basic facts, as well as Holocaust Denial, and provide a short list of introductory reading. There is always more than can be said, but we hope this is a good starting point for you.
##What Was the Holocaust?
The Holocaust refers the genocidal deaths of 5-6 million European Jews carried out systematically by Nazi Germany as part of targeted policies of persecution and extermination during World War II. Some historians will also include the deaths of the Roma, Communists, Mentally Disabled, and other groups targeted by Nazi policies, which brings the total number of deaths to ~11 million. Debates about whether or not the Holocaust includes these deaths or not is a matter of definitions, but in no way a reflection on dispute that they occurred.
##But This Guy Says Otherwise!
Unfortunately, there is a small, but at times vocal, minority of persons who fall into the category of Holocaust Denial, attempting to minimize the deaths by orders of magnitude, impugn well proven facts, or even claim that the Holocaust is entirely a fabrication and never happened. Although they often self-style themselves as "Revisionists", they are not correctly described by the title. While revisionism is not inherently a dirty word, actual revision, to quote Michael Shermer, "entails refinement of detailed knowledge about events, rarely complete denial of the events themselves, and certainly not denial of the cumulation of events known as the Holocaust."
It is absolutely true that were you to read a book written in 1950 or so, you would find information which any decent scholar today might reject, and that is the result of good revisionism. But these changes, which even can be quite large, such as the reassessment of deaths at Auschwitz from ~4 million to ~1 million, are done within the bounds of respected, academic study, and reflect decades of work that builds upon the work of previous scholars, and certainly does not willfully disregard documented evidence and recollections. There are still plenty of questions within Holocaust Studies that are debated by scholars, and there may still be more out there for us to discover, and revise, but when it comes to the basic facts, there is simply no valid argument against them.
##So What Are the Basics?
Beginning with their rise to power in the 1930s, the Nazi Party, headed by Adolf Hitler, implemented a series of anti-Jewish policies within Germany, marginalizing Jews within society more and more, stripping them of their wealth, livelihoods, and their dignity. With the invasion of Poland in 1939, the number of Jews under Nazi control reached into the millions, and this number would again increase with the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. Shortly after the invasion of Poland, the Germans started to confine the Jewish population into squalid ghettos. After several plans on how to rid Europe of the Jews that all proved unfeasible, by the time of the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, ideological (Antisemitism) and pragmatic (Resources) considerations lead to mass-killings becoming the only viable option in the minds of the Nazi leadership. First only practiced in the USSR, it was influential groups such as the SS and the administration of the General Government that pushed to expand the killing operations to all of Europe and sometime at the end of 1941 met with Hitler’s approval.
The early killings were carried out foremost by the Einsatzgruppen, paramilitary groups organized under the aegis of the SS and tasked with carrying out the mass killings of Jews, Communists, and other 'undesirable elements' in the wake of the German military's advance. In what is often termed the 'Holocaust by Bullet', the Einsatzgruppen, with the assistance of the Wehrmacht, the SD, the Security Police, as well as local collaborators, would kill roughly two million persons, over half of them Jews. Most killings were carried out with mass shootings, but other methods such as gas vans - intended to spare the killers the trauma of shooting so many persons day after day - were utilized too.
By early 1942, the "Final Solution" to the so-called "Jewish Question" was essentially finalized at the Wannsee Conference under the direction of Reinhard Heydrich, where the plan to eliminate the Jewish population of Europe using a series of extermination camps set up in occupied Poland was presented and met with approval.
Construction of extermination camps had already begun the previous fall, and mass extermination, mostly as part of 'Operation Reinhard', had began operation by spring of 1942. Roughly 2 million persons, nearly all Jewish men, women, and children, were immediately gassed upon arrival at Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka over the next two years, when these "Reinhard" camps were closed and razed. More victims would meet their fate in additional extermination camps such as Chełmno, but most infamously at Auschwitz-Birkenau, where slightly over 1 million persons, mostly Jews, died. Under the plan set forth at Wannsee, exterminations were hardly limited to the Jews of Poland, but rather Jews from all over Europe were rounded up and sent east by rail like cattle to the slaughter. Although the victims of the Reinhard Camps were originally buried, they would later be exhumed and cremated, and cremation of the victims was normal procedure at later camps such as Auschwitz.
##The Camps
There were two main types of camps run by Nazi Germany, which is sometimes a source of confusion. Concentration Camps were well known means of extrajudicial control implemented by the Nazis shortly after taking power, beginning with the construction of Dachau in 1933. Political opponents of all type, not just Jews, could find themselves imprisoned in these camps during the pre-war years, and while conditions were often brutal and squalid, and numerous deaths did occur from mistreatment, they were not usually a death sentence and the population fluctuated greatly. Although Concentration Camps were later made part of the 'Final Solution', their purpose was not as immediate extermination centers. Some were 'way stations', and others were work camps, where Germany intended to eke out every last bit of productivity from them through what was known as "extermination through labor". Jews and other undesirable elements, if deemed healthy enough to work, could find themselves spared for a time and "allowed" to toil away like slaves until their usefulness was at an end.
Although some Concentration Camps, such as Mauthausen, did include small gas chambers, mass gassing was not the primary purpose of the camp. Many camps, becoming extremely overcrowded, nevertheless resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of inhabitants due to the outbreak of diseases such as typhus, or starvation, all of which the camp administrations did little to prevent. Bergen-Belsen, which was not a work camp but rather served as something of a way station for prisoners of the camp systems being moved about, is perhaps one of the most infamous of camps on this count, saw some 50,000 deaths caused by the conditions. Often located in the Reich, camps liberated by the Western forces were exclusively Concentration Camps, and many survivor testimonies come from these camps.
The Concentration Camps are contrasted with the Extermination Camps, which were purpose built for mass killing, with large gas chambers and later on, crematoria, but little or no facilities for inmates. Often they were disguised with false facades to lull the new arrivals into a false sense of security, even though rumors were of course rife for the fate that awaited the deportees. Almost all arrivals were killed upon arrival at these camps, and in many cases the number of survivors numbered in the single digits, such as at Bełżec, where only seven Jews, forced to assist in operation of the camp, were alive after the war.
Several camps, however, were 'Hybrids' of both types, the most famous being Auschwitz, which was a vast complex of subcamps. The infamous 'selection' of prisoners, conducted by SS doctors upon arrival, meant life or death, with those deemed unsuited for labor immediately gassed and the more healthy and robust given at least temporary reprieve. The death count at Auschwitz numbered around 1 million, but it is also the source of many survivor testimonies.
##How Do We Know?
Running through the evidence piece by piece would take more space than we have here, but suffice to say, there is a lot of evidence, and not just the (mountains of) survivor testimony. We have testimonies and writings from many who participated, as well German documentation of the programs. This site catalogs some of the evidence we have for mass extermination as it relates to Auschwitz. I'll close this out with a short list of excellent works that should help to introduce you to various aspects of Holocaust study.
##Further Reading