Complex events--full of sound and fury--can sometimes be understood in terms of simple explanatory principles. 

The Final Solution

The Final Solution—systematic extermination of the Jewish people—began before the construction of death camps and gas chambers. As the German army moved eastward into the Soviet Union in late 1941 and early 1942, they were followed by the Einsatzgruppen or mobile killing units.

Approximately 1.5 million Jews were shot and killed, many of them buried in gorges that bear a striking resemblance to the trenches of the First World War. Hitler professed to be undisturbed by the extermination of men, women, and children, providing the following rationale:

Nature if cruel. Therefore, we too, may be cruel. If I don’t mind sending the pick of the German people into the hell of war without regret for the shedding of valuable German blood, then I have naturally the right to destroy millions of men of inferior races who increase like vermin. (Meltzer, 1976).

Here is another translation of this crucial passage:

Nature is cruel; therefore we also are entitled to be cruel. When I send the flower of German youth into the steel hail of the next war without feeling the slightest regret over the precious German blood that is being spilled, should I not also have the right to eliminate millions of an inferior race that multiplies like vermin? (Fest, 1974)

The Holocaust represented an extension of the logic that allows leaders of nation-states to sacrifice the lives of their own soldiers. Hitler understood the reality of a nation's "right to kill." He had witnessed this in the First World War--when he the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of his comrades; at the end of the war, he knew that two million German Soldiers had died.

Hitler reflected that if national leaders had the right to ruthlessly send their own soldiers to die, so they must have the right to be equally ruthless in sending the mortal enemies of Germany to die.

The "logic" of the Holocaust followed from the "logic" of warfare: Nations have the right to kill. If Germany could compel its best people to die, surely it had the right to send the worst people to die.