Why?: Explaining the Holocaust

by Peter Hayes

Nazi regime engaged in a three-stage discovery or learning process between 1933 and 1941. In the first phase, which lasted for just over five years from the time Hitler came to power until the annexation of Austria in March 1938, the so-called Third Reich learned what it could do, namely persecute the German Jews without encountering serious resistance from Germany’s other inhabitants or from other countries. In the second phase, which lasted for a bit more than three years from the takeover in Austria until the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, Nazi Germany learned what it nonetheless could not achieve—namely, the complete “removal” or expulsion of Jews from its territory. In the third phase, which lasted only five months from the attack on the Soviets to the fall of 1941, Hitler and his most important advisor and executor in this matter, Heinrich Himmler, recognized that they possessed not only the motive but also the means and the opportunity to murder the Jews in not only the newly occupied territories of Serbia and the Soviet Union under cover of war, but also in all of Europe.