Was the Holocaust planned or a response to war?

Answer 1

No one person planned it. Racism to the extreme along with crippling unemployement set the stage. Hitler merely capitalized on the feelings of many. ___ The detailed planning and logistics were in the hands of Heydrich, Eichmann and Globocnik, among others. In fact, it was planned quite carefully.

Answer 2

Hitler planned the whole thing. He spent years planning and after he built up his social status then he unveiled his grewsome plan. The only thing that was not in the planed was getting caught.

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unlikely in the extreme. It is doubtful that Hitler was consulted in the planning process, it was not the kind of thing that he was interested in, he would have just wanted to know results.

Initially it was planned by Heydrich, he was soon assasinated. The Holocaust was less of one event, more of many different methods over a large area leading to one political and social ideal.

Answer 3

The Holocaust took place in stages, and these seem to have been planned one at a time. On the whole, historians have become increasingly skeptical about the notion of a 'master plan' or blueprint for the whole. After the Kristallnacht ('Night of the Broken Glass') Nazi policy was still to bully Jews into leaving Germany (which by then included Austria and the Sudetenland). Nazi expansion increased the number of Jews under German control. Until 1940 the plan was still 'territorial'; it involved 'resettlement', though under inhuman conditions and with poor planning. Stage 1: Isolation and ghettoization In Germany the remaining Jews were systematically isolated from the rest of the population after the outbreak of war. In Poland the Jews were herded into ghettos (Warsaw, Lodz, Krakow and others) and given insufficient food. Stage 2: Deportation Large numbers of Jews from various European countries were 'dumped' in Poland. As the numbers grew, the German authorities in Poland complained to the government in Berlin that the policy of dumping people was making it almost impossible to adminster Poland efficiently. Stage 3: Killing fields When Germany attacked the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941 death squads began to operate behind the lines and conducted mass open-air shootings. In addition to the Soviet Jews (and others) slaughtered, a large number of German Jews were transported to Riga, Latvia, which became a vast killing field. Stage 4: End of the Euthanasia Programme (the killing of incurables) in GermanyFollowing protests in Germany itself, the programme was greatly scaled down in the summer of 1941. The doctors involved (if one may call them such) were looking for work ... They already had some experience in large-scale killings. Stage 5: The 'final solution' After experiments at Chelmno, this started in December 1941 and the scale of the operation was accelerated. Planning was in the hands of Heinrich Himmler and especially Reinhard Heydrich until he was assassinated in May 1942. Obviously, Heydrich had a staff to plan matters like co-ordination with the German railways and so on. This is a brief account only and tends towards the 'functionalist' view of the Holocaust.

Answer 4

It was fully planned, executed with zeal and precision, and created by madmen.

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The general consensus among historians of the Holocaust is, however, that the decision to try to exterminate the Jews was taken during World War 2. Please see the related question.

Answer 5

To kill all the Jews on the planet Earth, followed by all the Christians on the planet Earth, since Jesus was a Jew.

The first answer is a lie. Hitler did want to kill all the Jews, but he did not want to kill the Christians. Hitler called himself a Christain; most likely a Protestant Christina; because Baptist Christians would never want the Jews to die. So, once again someone is lying about Hitler; I know he was bad, but there is no reason for people to mak up ridiculous lies.

Answer 6

While the Nazi party, in particular Hitler's SS and the Gestapo, were very organized in their activities, the Holocaust itself was not actually "organized." Rather, it developed. Early in the war, the Wehrmacht (German army) engaged in mass killing of populations in Poland and the Ukrain, while at the same time they grouped populations within ghettos. As the war progressed, the ghettos became overcrowded and Hitler demanded a "final solution to the Jewish problem" prior to the Wansee Conference. It was the attendees of the Wansee Conference that determined that wholesale slaughter of concentration camp prisoners would be that solution.

Answer 7

Hitler said that Jewish people are too smart and "rich" (im sure there was even middle class families) So he wanted to kill all of them so that's why he came with that plan.