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Explain why and how the Nazis carried out the Holocaust.
Machinery of Death: The Ideology and Systems of the Holocaust
The Holocaust is one of the most catastrophic events of modern history. The ruthless determination
with which the Nazis persecuted and exterminated Jews, Gypsies, and other groups deemed sub-
human, as well as the sheer scope of the genocide, meant that in early historiography it was written
off as a savage anomaly, the result of racist insanity gone unchecked. However, the need to
understand the apparently senseless murder of millions of innocent people has led historians to
more closely examine the reasons for the genocide and the methods with which the Nazis carried it
out. The Holocaust was the result of a number of factors, the most powerful of which was the Nazis
ideology. The Jews were seen as a threat to Germany and its people and were described as a plague
to be wiped out. In addition to this belief in the Jewish peril was the idea that the Aryan race
needed to be purified of any, such as Gypsies or the physically or mentally disabled, who would
pollute its gene pool. The Nazis efforts to fulfil their racial ideology evolved before and during the
war from attempts to deport undesirables, to the Einsatzgruppen shooting squads of the Eastern
Front, and finally to systemised extermination in the camps. The Holocaust, as conceived and
implemented by the Nazis, was the complete removal of racial pollution from the Reich by the
most efficient means possible.
Asking why the Holocaust happened is an immensely complicated question, and the Nazis reasons
for carrying out the systematic extermination of 11 million people are wide-ranging and complex.
Historiography in the 1960s through to the 1980s was divided into so-called intentionalism and
functionalism, with the former arguing that the Holocaust was a result of Hitlers long-term plan for
the annihilation of European Jewry and the latter maintaining that the Final Solution was a
cumulative radicalisation of Jewish policy produced by the disorganised government structure of
the Third Reich.
1
Historians such as Christopher Browning have argued that the war, especially the
brutality of the Eastern Front, facilitated mass murder, while others, such as Gtz Aly, have
advocated the economy of the Holocaust, arguing that it was a result of population resettlement
policy.
2
However, the most important driving factor in the Nazis decision to commit genocide was
their often fanatic racial ideology and belief in the need to purify and protect the Aryan race. A
genocidal consensus, the hallucinatory ideology of Jews and other sub-human groups as threats
to Germany, existed prior to 1939 and was a central factor in the instigation and course of the
Holocaust.
3
Although there were a number of forces driving the Nazis towards genocide, mass
murder would have been impossible without a powerful racial ideology to motivate it.

1
Christopher R. Browning, The Path to Genocide, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992, p. 86.
2
Alon Confino, Fantasies about the Jews: Cultural Reflections on the Holocaust, History & Memory, 17:1/2 (2005), p. 299,
319; Omer Bartov, Introduction to Gtz Alys The Planning Intelligentsia and the Final Solution in Omer Bartov (ed.), The
Holocaust, London: Routledge, 2000, p. 92.
3
Confino, pg. 300-301, 305; Geoffrey Scarre, Understanding the Moral Phenomenology of the Third Reich, Ethical Theory
and Moral Practice, 1:4 (1998), p. 433.
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One of the most ubiquitous elements of the Nazis genocidal ideology was the belief in the Jewish
peril. Judaism was seen as a direct threat to the health and stability of the Reich, and it was
popularly believed that the worlds Jews were conspiring against Germany and had been doing so for
many years. Both Germanys defeat in the First World War and its subsequent economic struggle
were blamed on Jews, and the idea that the Jews, conspiring with the communists, had stabbed
Germany in the back during the war was a common theme in Nazi propaganda from an early stage.
4

Hitler believed that in order to destroy the Third Reich the Jews had formed a fifth column within
Germany, which was responsible not only for Germany losing WWI but also for starting WWII.
5
A
note written in December 1941 by Alfred Rosenberg states that Hitler said the Jews brought the war
down on us, they had started all the destruction, so it should come as no surprise if they become its
first victims.
6
Anti-Semitism had become deeply ingrained in the German popular imagination and it
was expressed in the idea that Jews were not just different from Germans, but were their
malevolent and corrosive polar opposites.
7
For the Nazis, this perceived Jewish threat was very
real, and they believed the German people needed to be protected from it. It is an oversimplification
to say so, but the Final Solution was, in many ways, the Nazis grotesque method of self-defence
against the encroaching Jewish peril.
The other significant element of Nazi ideology connected to the Holocaust was the belief that the so-
called Aryan race needed to be purified. The threat of racial corruption came not only from the
Jews but also from Gypsies, the physically disabled and mentally ill. The Jews however, as the
worlds enemy, bore the brunt of this ideology. Hitler believed it was his mission to purify
Germany and redeem the Aryan race from the poison of the Jews.
8
The Nazis under Hitler literally
had racism down to a science, claiming that every Jew was an infection risk and the need to remove
them from Aryan society was a hygienic one.
9
The head of the Health Department in the
Generalgouvernement, Jost Walbaum, stated that it was a responsibility to ensure that the German
people are not infected and endangered by these parasites and in order to do so any means must
be acceptable.
10
Gypsies, though not a threat on the level of the Jews, were a social menace and,
like Jews, were considered a race of different blood who had to be separated from Aryans to
prevent inferior and superior races becoming mixed. By 1942, Gypsies were being killed at Chelmno

4
Scarre, p. 432; Robert S. Wistrich, Hitler and the Holocaust, New York: Modern Library, 2001, p. 18-19.
5
Mark Roseman, The Villa, The Lake, The Meeting, London: Penguin, 2002, p. 19.
6
Christian Gerlach, The Wannsee Conference, The Fate of the German Jews, and Hitlers Decision In Principle to
Exterminate All European Jews in Omer Bartov (ed.), The Holocaust, London: Routledge, 2000, p. 121.
7
Scarre, p. 432.
8
Wistrich, p. xii; Konnilyn G. Feig, Hitlers Death Camps, USA: Holmes & Meier Publishers, 1981, p. 9.
9
Confino, p. 314; Wistrich, p. 114.
10
Gtz Aly, Final Solution: Nazi Population Policy and the Murder of the European Jews, trans. Belinda Cooper and Allison
Brown, London: Arnold, 1999, p. 235.
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extermination camp alongside Jews and according to Robert S. Wistrich, there was a clear
ideological link between the murder of Jews and Gypsies in the Nazi vision of radical ethnic
cleansing.
11

Operation T-4, the sterilisation and euthanisation of physically disabled and mentally ill or
handicapped Germans, was the Nazis first attempt at racial cleansing, and resulted in the deaths of
70,000 people.
12
The adults and children targeted by this practice were seen as a drain on societys
resources and depicted in propaganda as an exponential threat to the hereditary health of the racial
collective.
13
The Nazis belief in a need to purify the Aryan race was the catalyst for this
programme of murderous eugenics, and racial ideology facilitated Operation T-4 by undermining
moral and legal barriers.
14
Henry Friedlander defines the Holocaust as the mass murder of
biologically defined group[s] and argues that the Nazi ideology divided people into worthy and
unworthy populations.
15
The Nazis believed it was their duty to purge Germanys gene pool of
those deemed unworthy and create a race of blond, blue-eyed Germanic heroes.
16
It was this vision
of a racially pure Aryan Germany that was the key driving force in the Nazis decision to carry out the
Holocaust.
The phrase Final Solution did not originate as a euphemism for the institutional mass murder of
Jews. The Nazis attempts to resolve the Jewish question evolved during the course of the war, and
at first consisted of efforts to remove Jews from Germany through forced deportations. It was
planned at first that Jews would be sent to a remote corner of Poland, then the invasion of the
Soviet Union made it theoretically possible to send Jews from the Reich into Russia.
17
In late 1941
German Jews began to be transported to the east.
18
This was an attempt to remove undesirables
from German society rather than a deliberate effort to exterminate the Jewish (and small Gypsy)
population, yet the deportations were consciously genocidal.
19
It was expected that large numbers
of deportees would die of hunger, exposure, lack of medical care, or being overworked, and when
Jews were deposited and abandoned in hostile terrain they were not expected to thrive.
20
Joseph
Goebbels wrote that these forced deportations were in many cases synonymous with the death

11
Wistwrich, p. 4, 5.
12
Michael Burleigh, Psychiatry, German Society and the Nazi Euthanasia Programme in Omer Bartov (ed.), The
Holocaust, London: Routledge, 2000, p. 56.
13
Ibid., p. 50.
14
Aly, p. 29.
15
Henry Friedlander, Step by Step: The Expansion of Murder, 1939-1941 in Omer Bartov (ed.), The Holocaust, London:
Routledge, 2000, p. 65-66.
16
Wistrich, p. 115.
17
Aly, p. 15-16; Gerlach, p. 110.
18
Gerlach, p. 110.
19
Roseman, p. 39.
20
Aly, p. 17; Roseman, p. 39.
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penalty.
21
The ghettoes where many Polish Jews were sent also facilitated massive fatalities (an
estimated 500,000 people), as they were deliberately overcrowded, undersupplied, and lacked
sanitation.
22
Driving undesirables out of the Reich was difficult and technical and organisational
problems meant that the actual number of German Jews deported was comparatively small.
23

Eliminating the Jews through deportation was proving inefficient and unfeasible, and there was,
according to Mark Roseman, a growing sense of grimness about the need to get the task sorted.
24

Deportation was thus one of the early methods used by the Nazis to try and cleanse Germany of
Jews and other undesirables which paved the way for the systemised efficiency of the gas
chambers.
As the home of an imagined Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy against Germany, it was the Soviet Union
that saw the Nazis first attempts to exterminate the Jewish population. During Operation
Barbarossa in 1941, the Einsatzgruppen killing squads followed the Wehrmacht, shooting Russian
commanders and intelligentsia and Jewish men of military age, the political and biological
manifestations of the conspiracy.
25
By August women and children were being included in the
shootings and by September entire communities were being massacred.
26
Men, women and children
were rounded up, counted, stripped of clothes and valuables, and shot.
27
A report by Karl Jager,
commander of Einsatzgruppe 3, detailed how the systematic clearing of each area required a
suitable site to be chosen and burial pits dug for the 500 Jews that were shot at a time.
28
The
method of the Einsatzgruppen was crude but by no means ineffective: in this way, at least one
million people were killed by only 3000 men in two years.
29
However, the amount of ammunition
and time required, as well as the psychological effects on the men carrying out the massacres,
meant that by late 1941 Himmler was looking for an easier way of exterminating Jews.
30
Thus the
stage was set for the introduction of the Nazis murder infrastructure which became the centre of
the Holocaust.
As the war continued the Nazis fight against racial impurity stepped up and it became increasingly
important to build an efficient extermination system. By the time of the Wannsee Conference of 20
January 1942, the experiences of the Operation T-4 enactors (the first to use industrial gas killing

21
Roseman, p. 51.
22
Wistrich, p. 97.
23
Gerlach, p. 110.
24
Browning, p. 52; Roseman, p. 27.
25
Donald Bloxham, Europe, the Final Solution and the Dynamics of Intent, Patterns of Prejudice, 44:4 (2010), p. 325;
Browning, p. 25.
26
Roseman, p. 30.
27
Feig, p. 21.
28
Wistrich, p. 93-94.
29
Feig, p. 21.
30
Wistrich, p. 99.
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centres) and the Einsatzgruppens experiments with gas vans had brought Nazi mass murder to the
point where it could develop into full-scale industrialised extermination and various relevant parties
began to co-operate in the organisation of the final solution.
31
Chelmno, the first death camp,
gassed its first Jews in vans in December of 1941 and was followed by the first use of permanent gas
chambers in March 1942 at Belzec.
32
Along with Sobibor and Treblinka, these were the
extermination camps of Operation Reinhardt, the sole purpose of which was the murder of Jews
and Gypsies.
33
In addition to these were two labour/extermination camps (Auschwitz/Birkenau and
Majdanek) and eleven concentration camps.
34
On arrival at the combined complexes, Jews and other
victims were divided into those fit to work and those who were not.
35
Incorporation into the work
programme only served to postpone death, as the Nazis conflicting need for wartime work and
desire to eliminate undesirables inspired the supremely practical and efficient concept of
extermination through labour.
36
Those deemed unfit to work were herded into the gas chambers
and killed within minutes. The entire process was carried out, according to SS-Sturmbannfhrer
Franke-Gricksch, in a perfectly orderly fashion.
37
This was how the Nazis envisioned the Holocaust
systematic, modern, conveyer belt killing. Germanys highly organised bureaucracy was combined
with its industrial and technological might in order to facilitate the liquidation of unprecedented
numbers of people as quickly as possible.
38
Through experimentation and improvisation the Nazis
developed a genocidal infrastructure of frightening efficiency.
The Holocaust was a cataclysmic event which had a profound effect on the course of modern
history. Millions of innocent people were identified, transported, incarcerated and exterminated in
the name of the Nazis fanatic racist ideology in a system that made a science out of murder. The
image of the inherently malevolent Jew combined with a fixation on the purification of the Aryan
race to create an atmosphere in which the persecution of those deemed unworthy was able to
escalate from forced deportation to roving killing squads and finally to camps purpose-built to
exterminate enormous numbers of people as quickly as possible. The Nazis were constantly looking
for ways to maximise the efficiency with which they carried out their annihiltory ideas, and through
trial and error they perfected their institutional machinery of death. The Holocaust remains a subject
of horror and morbid fascination, and by examining how and why it was possible for such a

31
Friedlander, p. 67; Browning, p. 117; Roseman, p. 74.
32
Wistrich, p. 100.
33
Feig, p. 29.
34
Ibid., p. 26-27.
35
Aly, p. 170; Gerald Fleming, Hitler and the Final Solution, London: University of California Press, 1984, p. 142.
36
Roseman, p. 78.
37
Fleming, p. 143.
38
Wistwrich, p. 219.
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catastrophic event to occur perhaps it is possible to learn the lessons of history and attribute some
semblance of meaning to the lives and deaths of all those who became its victims.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Books

Aly, Gtz, Final Solution: Nazi Population Policy and the Murder of the European Jews, trans.
Belinda Cooper and Allison Brown, London: Arnold, 1999.

Browning, Christopher R., The Path to Genocide, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
Feig, Konnilyn G., Hitlers Death Camps, USA: Holmes & Meier Publishers, 1981.
Fleming, Gerald, Hitler and the Final Solution, London: University of California Press, 1984.

Roseman, Mark, The Villa, The Lake, The Meeting, London: Penguin, 2002.
Wistrich, Robert S., Hitler and the Holocaust, New York: Modern Library, 2001.
Articles and Book Chapters
Bartov, Omer, Introduction to Gtz Alys The Planning Intelligentsia and the Final Solution in Omer
Bartov (ed.), The Holocaust, London: Routledge, 2000, p. 92-93.
Bloxham, Donald, Europe, the Final Solution and the Dynamics of Intent, Patterns of Prejudice, 44:4
(2010), p. 317-335.
Burleigh, Michael, Psychiatry, German Society and the Nazi Euthanasia Programme in Omer
Bartov (ed.), The Holocaust, London: Routledge, 2000, p.45-62 .
Confino, Alon, Fantasies about the Jews: Cultural Reflections on the Holocaust, History & Memory,
17:1/2 (2005), p. 296-317.

Friedlander, Henry, Step by Step: The Expansion of Murder, 1939-1941 in Omer Bartov (ed.), The
Holocaust, London: Routledge, 2000, p. 65-76.
Gerlach, Christian, The Wannsee Conference, The Fate of the German Jews, and Hitlers Decision In
Principle to Exterminate All European Jews in Omer Bartov (ed.), The Holocaust, London:
Routledge, 2000, p. 108-161.
Scarre, Geoffrey, Understanding the Moral Phenomenology of the Third Reich, Ethical Theory and
Moral Practice, 1:4 (1998), p. 423-443.



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FEEDBACK AND GRADE
The essay demonstrated strong understanding of the Holocaust and also the historiography. It
worked well that you noted the different perspectives of the 1960/70s. There were a couple of
presentation issues to begin with, including that you neglected to provide 1.5 or 2.0 line spacing.
Also, you claimed that 11 million people were exterminated; this is the number of Jews in Europe at
the time, and the accepted figure is more in the order of 6 million. Also, remember to briefly explain
who a person was to remind the reader and to show that you know; when you mentioned Alfred
Rosenberg, I couldnt remember who he was, and this could have been fixed that with: in
December 1941 by Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazis chief racial theorist, states that
These quibbles aside, this was a strong essay that made good use of your research. The essay didnt
get stuck on the why, which is a common trap for this essay, and it covered the how well. What
was not as strong was the argument, which seemed to be lacking, as if you holding back from
presenting one. I was struck by your statement that the Nazis made a science out of murder,
having earlier noted that Hitler literally had racism down to a science, and I wonder if this could
have been the crux of an argument that the Final Solution was the implementation of a scientific
approach to achieve the genocide. An argument often will seize on something, and I think you had
that something but missed the chance to run with it.
Finally, watch how you end your essays. You ended with: The Holocaust remains a subject of horror
and morbid fascination, and by examining how and why it was possible for such a catastrophic event
to occur perhaps it is possible to learn the lessons of history and attribute some semblance of
meaning to the lives and deaths of all those who became its victims. I was left asking, So what?
What was the point of that statement? It added nothing.
Grade: A 83%