How did the Holocaust happen?

The Holocaust did not begin as a plan for systematic extermination — it evolved through stages of escalating persecution and radicalization, each step making the next seem possible to those carrying it out. Understanding this process is essential for comprehending how a modern, educated society could commit industrialized genocide.

The first phase (1933–1938) was legal persecution. After taking power, the Nazis systematically excluded Jews from German life through legislation. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 stripped Jews of citizenship and prohibited marriage or sexual relations between Jews and non-Jews. Jews were progressively barred from professions, schools, and public spaces. The goal at this stage appeared to be forced emigration — making life so intolerable that Jews would leave Germany. About half of Germany's 525,000 Jews did emigrate, but many countries, including the United States, restricted immigration.

Kristallnacht (November 9–10, 1938) marked the transition to organized violence. Nazi paramilitaries destroyed over 7,000 Jewish businesses, burned 267 synagogues, killed at least 91 Jews, and arrested 30,000 Jewish men. After this, the regime shifted from legal discrimination to physical persecution. When the war began in 1939, Jews in occupied Poland were herded into overcrowded ghettos where starvation and disease killed thousands.

The systematic killing began with the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. Einsatzgruppen — mobile killing squads — followed the advancing German army, shooting entire Jewish communities in ravines, forests, and fields. At Babi Yar near Kyiv, over 33,000 Jews were shot in two days. But mass shooting was psychologically difficult for the killers and logistically inefficient for the scale the Nazis envisioned. The Wannsee Conference of January 1942 coordinated the 'Final Solution' — the deportation of Europe's 11 million Jews to extermination camps in occupied Poland.

The camps represented the industrialization of murder. Victims arrived by train, were subjected to 'selections' (those deemed fit for labor were temporarily spared; the rest were killed immediately), stripped of possessions and identity, and murdered in gas chambers disguised as shower rooms. Their bodies were burned in crematoria. At Auschwitz-Birkenau alone, over 1.1 million people were killed, roughly 90% of them Jews.

The Holocaust required the participation of an entire bureaucratic apparatus — railway officials who scheduled deportation trains, clerks who processed property confiscations, factory managers who exploited slave labor, and soldiers who guarded camps. It also required the complicity of occupied populations and the passivity of bystanders. How ordinary people became participants in genocide — through ideology, obedience, careerism, peer pressure, and the gradual normalization of violence — remains among the most important questions for understanding human nature and the fragility of civilization.