As someone of partly Jewish ancestry I'm trying to understand their thinking behind starting the Holocaust while preparing/fighting a war. Why on earth would they waste all those resources on that when they could gone to better use helping the war effort? Why not postpone it until after winning? From most accounts it seems like the Germans had many of the best strategists of the day, but it just seems like they squandered it all. Were they that blinded by discrimination that they threw self-preservation out the window? They had to have known how much manpower and money they were wasting doing it.
The mass murder of Jews was not an especially wasteful operation from the point of view of the perpetrators. In terms of actual costs, the Operation Reinhard camps- Treblinka, Sobibor and Belzec - actually managed to return sizable resources and monies back to the Reich. The SS-Wirtschafts-Verwaltungshauptamt (SS Main Economic and Administrative Department/WVHA) would prove to be quite adept at finding ways to make genocide even out the books or even turn something of a profit. From the perspective of the Third Reich's leadership, the mass murder of Jews provided an immediate solution to a number of problems they faced around 1941/42.
Foremost among the minds of the planners for the Holocaust was the sense that exterminating the Jews immediately would benefit a war effort for a war that appeared to be much longer than they anticipated. Now there were already long-term plans in place for extermination- as Ian Kershaw aptly stated "genocide was in the air" throughout 1941- and the Einsatzgruppen killings represented a Rubicon for the Reich's Jewish policy. Prior plans for Europe's Jews involved either inactive genocide such as deporting them all to Madagascar where they would be starved to death or using them as a vast corvee labor where they would be worked to death. The move towards mass exterminations via assembly line methods such as gas was an evolution of a series of overlapping genocidal and murderous initiatives. Much of the pro-gassing party within the SS predicated their position on the idea that the efficiencies of killing would eliminate the wastage of bullets, free up SS men for the front and rear security, and remove the Jewish population quickly. The Reinhard camps employed only a few hundred SS guards and one to two thousand foreign auxiliaries, hardly a drain on manpower.
Mass murder disrupted very little of the economy of occupied Europe, most Jews had been their occupations and movements severely restricted (either through placement ghettos or social segregation). Additionally, the expropriation of Jewish property also was able to filter back into the German core lands and alleviate the increasing angst over the course of the war. Centralizing the process of stealing Jewish property rendered this spoils system more efficient. The gold and other profits could be used to alleviate the various bottleneck shortages by trade with Sweden. While the extermination process created Jewish partisans this exerted a largely negligible impact upon the wider war effort as a whole. This is a population that had been socially isolated and systematically starved by 1942.
There were also very little downsides to extermination from the perspective of Berlin. The brain drain of Jewish intellectuals, especially in the sciences, was palpable, but was something that had begun nearly a decade before the Wannsee Conference. German science and technical institutes had had nearly a decade to adjust to the loss of Jewish expertise and did fairly well under National Socialism as the state lavished state funds on research. Although some of this research money was spent on ideological dead ends, the German sciences were still relatively advanced in the 1940s. While the Final Solution necessitated manpower, it used far less than either enforcing ghettoization and using the Einsatzgruppen.
While it might be presumed that these Jews could be harnessed to serve the German war effort, such an option was not really possible in 1941/42. The Nazis had proven to be so ideologically poisonous by 1942 that very few Jews, let alone non-Germans, would willingly enlist in the German war effort. Although mass extermination diverted rolling stock, the German forces had experienced a considerable manpower shortfall in the Eastern Front. Had the deportations not taken place, they would likely not have alleviated this problem as German troops were needed in occupied Europe. Mass murder added an additional burden to Europe's rail system but not one that was fatal or an special drain.
The Third Reich's initial impulse was to work Jews to death in the General Government, but found that its Jewish population was far too large to manage this. It's important to realize the speed of Operation Reinhard. The camps, each operated for roughly 12 to 18 months and ceased operations in late 1943. Simultaneous to Germany's extermination of Jews, it was also simultaneously creating mechanisms to dragoon Europe's non-Jewish population as forced workers. While there were some within the WVHA who argued for retaining some Jews for work purposes, this was a minority position within the SS.
The fundamental problem with this line of questioning (i.e. why didn't the Third Reich act less genocidal) is that if it acted differently, then it would not have been the Third Reich. It is nearly impossible to disentangle the Third Reich's decision for war and its ideological principles which were underscored by a racialist Darwinism. By these standards, the Holocaust possessed a perverse logic to it. It resolved a problem- what to do with racial undesirables the Third Reich had conquered- in a quick manner that gave the state economy an immediate boost. To say that the Germans murdered their own citizens, while true for many cases (but keep in mind, they murdered many other non-German Jews too), is emphatically not what the leadership of the Third Reich believed. The ideology and mentality of National Socialism precluded any consideration that racial inferiors could ever enjoy the benefits of German citizenship. Ignoring this aspect of the Nazi Weltanschauung renders their action more confusing. The Holocaust was ultimately a rational act pursued by an irrational regime.
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