I’ve started reading Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101, and in the early chapters is details how many Axis soldiers and men were being utilised to round up Jewish populations, ensure they were kept in ghettos and eventually sent to camps to be killed.
The sheer manpower described to do this is more than I ever realised. I was wondering if this was in fact a small percentage of the Axis’ available manpower, or if their efforts to eradicate Jews may have superseded logical sense.
If they hadn’t focused on carrying out the Holocaust alongside their war efforts, would the numbers that could be used in direct combat have had a negligible impact on the war for them?
Here's the thing. Framing the Holocaust as separate from the German war effort is misunderstanding the mindset of Nazi Germany's leadership. u/commiespaceinvader addresses just this question, with another related answer linked further down the thread.