Chris D. writes:
The rational, bureaucratic calculation was in the service of the extermination, not the cause of it. The cause of the extermination was the Nazis' extreme hatred and fear of Jews and corresponding belief that they should be removed from Europe. A belief that was so strong that accomplishing that goal was more important than winning the war. =========================================== Not really. Rather than subordinating the war effort to the extermination of the Jews, the Jewish slave labour force was seen as assisting it's prosecution. The elderly and the children who could not work but would otherwise have to be fed were dispatched to the gas chambers, while the younger men and women capable of surviving the brutal conditions of the camps, at least for a time, were sent to the workshops. That was the purpose of the "selektion" which met the incoming trains - trains which provided an inexhaustible supply of Jewish slave labour to replace previous contingents of inmates rapidly dying of disease, starvation, and exhaustion. Whether the the slave labour system objectively contributed or detracted from the war effort is open to debate, but the Nazi leadership believed it was a rational way to both organize production and solve the "Jewish problem" at the same time.
That so-called "problem" also had economic roots. Racial, ethnic and religious conflict is for the most part ultimately traceable to a struggle between adjacent or intertwined communities over scarce territory, resources, jobs, and assets. When a minority is perceived as alien, vulnerable and to have acquired a disproportionate share of the wealth, it invites pogroms and, on a grander scale, genocide. The Nazis, as we know, represented the culmination of a long historical tradition in Germany and elsewhere in Europe of "extreme hatred and fear of Jews" to which Chris alludes, but it was a hatred based on the commercial role assigned to the Jews by the Christian church and state.
The Nazis were unique only in that they were able to come to power by directing the latent anticapitalist resentment of a substantial part of the German working class at the Jewish fraction of the bourgeoisie - "the socialism of fools" as August Bebel put it. It's unlikely they could have done so without the tacit acceptance or active support of the majority of German capitalists who welcomed the Nazis' destruction of the country's powerful labour and socialist movement in the fight against "Jewish Bolshevism". It's even more unlikely that, absent the Great Depression and the preceding social and economic chaos of Weimar, the Nazis would have remained anything more than a footnote of history - no matter how fervent their beliefs.