The Holocaust was Nazi Germany’s planned total destruction of the Jewish people and the actual murder of nearly six million of them. That genocidal campaign—the most systematic, bureaucratic, and unrelenting the world has seen—also destroyed millions of non-Jewish civilians. They included Gypsies (Roma and Sinti), Slavs, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Freemasons, homosexuals, the intellectually disabled, the physically handicapped, and the insane. The Nazis believed that their threat to the Third Reich approached, though it could never equal, the one posed by Jews.
QUESTION: What were the causes of the Holocaust and how did it develop?