How was the Holocaust like a witch hunt?

Answer 1

In some ways, yes.

• Long before the Jews were sent to extermination camps, Nazi Propaganda demonized them. There was a contradiction in Nazi propaganda: on the one hand, they claimed that the Jews were inferior, but on the other hand, they were also portrayed as extremely clever and diabolically cunning.
• The Nazis also had a preoccupation with 'secret Jews', by which they meant Jews who were indistinguishable from the rest of the population, so there was a lot of nasty 'Jew-spotting'. There was an obsession with the question: 'Is he/she "one" (that is, a Jew), so some people were gleefully 'sniffing' their neighbours and co-workers in a nasty, Nazi game of 'find the Jew'. Of course, there were also cases of people trying to get rivals labelled as Jews even if they were not Jewish.

Demonization and 'sniffing out' are characteristics of all witch-hunts.