It didn’t happen overnight. People often think the Holocaust was a sudden explosion of violence, like a light switch flipping from "normal life" to "genocide." But history is a lot uglier and more complicated than that. If you really want to know how and why did the Holocaust start, you have to look at a slow, agonizing poison that seeped into German society over decades. It wasn't just one guy or one speech. It was a perfect storm of economic misery, deep-seated resentment, and a very deliberate, step-by-step campaign to strip people of their humanity before anyone even realized what was happening.
Hitler didn't seize power in a vacuum. Germany was a mess after World War I. They lost. They were humiliated by the Treaty of Versailles. The economy was basically in the toilet—we’re talking about people needing a wheelbarrow full of cash just to buy a loaf of bread because of hyperinflation. When people are desperate, hungry, and angry, they look for someone to blame. They look for a savior. And the Nazi party was more than happy to provide both a scapegoat and a "hero."
The long fuse: Antisemitism before the Nazis
The Holocaust didn't start in 1933. Honestly, the groundwork was laid centuries before. Antisemitism—prejudice against Jewish people—wasn't a Nazi invention. It was baked into European culture for ages, often fueled by religious myths and local superstitions. By the late 1800s, this shifted from religious "othering" to something supposedly "scientific."
Pseudoscientific theories about race became trendy. People like Houston Stewart Chamberlain were writing books claiming that "Aryans" were the pinnacle of humanity and that Jews were a "parasitic" threat to that purity. It sounds like sci-fi nonsense now, but back then, it was treated as legitimate intellectual thought.
When Hitler wrote Mein Kampf while sitting in a prison cell in 1924, he wasn't being original. He was just taking these existing, toxic ideas and turning them into a political platform. He told the German people they weren't losers; they were a "Master Race" that had been "stabbed in the back" by internal enemies. It was a seductive lie. It gave people their pride back, but that pride was built on the foundation of hating someone else.
Why did the Holocaust start? Follow the money and the fear
The Great Depression was the real catalyst. In 1928, the Nazis were a joke, getting barely 2% of the vote. Then the global economy collapsed in 1929. Suddenly, unemployment in Germany skyrocketed to six million people. Desperate people don't want nuanced policy debates. They want bread. They want jobs. They want someone to pay for their misery.
The Nazis promised all of it. They used high-tech (for the time) propaganda, led by Joseph Goebbels, to flood the streets with the message that Jewish bankers and communists were the ones stealing Germany's future. By 1932, the Nazis were the largest party in the Reichstag. Hitler didn't "take" power through a coup; he was appointed Chancellor in January 1933 because the traditional conservative politicians thought they could "tame" him.
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They were wrong.
Once he had his foot in the door, he kicked it wide open. The Reichstag Fire in February 1933 gave him the excuse to suspend civil liberties. Basically, in a matter of weeks, Germany went from a democracy to a police state. This is a crucial part of how and why did the Holocaust start: the dismantling of the law. You can't murder millions of people if the courts and the press are still functioning. So, he broke them first.
The progression of exclusion
It started with laws, not bullets. This is the "how" that most people forget. It was a legalistic, bureaucratic strangulation.
- 1933: The "Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service" kicks Jews out of government jobs. It seems small. It isn't. It’s the first step in making a group of people "non-citizens."
- 1935: The Nuremberg Laws. This was the turning point. These laws stripped Jews of their citizenship and forbade them from marrying or having relationships with "Aryans." It literally defined Jewishness based on your grandparents' bloodline, not your faith.
- The Social Death: Before the physical killing began, there was a "social death." Jewish kids were kicked out of schools. Jews couldn't go to parks, cinemas, or swimming pools. Imagine your neighbors slowly stopping to talk to you. Imagine your shop being boycotted. That isolation is how you prep a population to accept—or ignore—what comes next.
Kristallnacht and the shift to violence
For five years, the persecution was mostly "legal." Then came November 1938. Kristallnacht, the "Night of Broken Glass."
A Jewish teenager, distraught over his parents' deportation, shot a German diplomat in Paris. The Nazis used this as a pretext to launch a coordinated wave of state-sponsored violence. Synagogues were burned. Thousands of Jewish-owned businesses were smashed. About 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and sent to concentration camps like Dachau and Buchenwald.
This was a test. The Nazi leadership wanted to see how the German public and the international community would react to open, brutal violence.
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The world was "deeply concerned," but nobody really did anything. The German public mostly watched in silence. Some were horrified, but many were too scared to speak up, and others were happy to loot the remains. This green-lit the next phase. When you realize nobody is going to stop you, you keep going.
War as a cover for genocide
When World War II started in September 1939 with the invasion of Poland, the situation shifted from "persecution" to "mass murder." War provides a very convenient smoke screen. It’s a lot easier to kill people when the world is focused on front lines and falling bombs.
In Poland, the Nazis forced millions of Jews into ghettos. These weren't just neighborhoods; they were holding pens. They were overcrowded, filled with disease, and people were literally starving to death. But even this wasn't the "Final Solution" yet. That came when Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941.
Behind the regular army (the Wehrmacht) came the Einsatzgruppen. These were mobile killing squads. Their job was simple: find Jews, communists, and anyone else deemed "undesirable," march them to a pit, and shoot them. They murdered over a million people this way. But it was "messy" for the Nazis. It was hard on the soldiers' mental health to shoot women and children point-blank all day.
This led to the Wannsee Conference in January 1942. A group of high-ranking Nazi officials sat around a table in a villa outside Berlin and discussed "The Final Solution to the Jewish Question" like they were discussing a logistics problem for a factory. They decided on industrial-scale murder. Gas chambers. Crematoria. The machinery of death.
Why did people go along with it?
This is the hardest question. How did "normal" people become complicit? Historians like Christopher Browning, who wrote Ordinary Men, have looked into this deeply. Most of the people carrying out these atrocities weren't "monsters" in the Hollywood sense. They were accountants, police officers, and fathers.
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- Peer Pressure: It’s incredibly hard to be the one person who says "no" when everyone else is saying "yes."
- Dehumanization: Years of propaganda had taught Germans that Jews weren't really "people." If you don't view someone as human, you don't feel guilt for what happens to them.
- Careerism: For many, the SS or the Nazi party was a way to get a promotion, a better house, or more power. They traded their morality for a paycheck.
- Fear: By the time things got really bad, the Gestapo was everywhere. If you protested, you ended up in a camp too.
What we get wrong about the timeline
A common misconception is that the gas chambers were there from the start. They weren't. The Holocaust was an evolution. It started with words, then moved to laws, then to displacement, then to random violence, and finally to systematic extermination.
It's also a mistake to think it was "just" Hitler. He was the catalyst, sure. But it took thousands of bureaucrats to schedule the trains. It took thousands of engineers to design the camps. It took millions of citizens to look the other way.
Historian Raul Hilberg argued that the bureaucracy itself was a weapon. By breaking the killing down into small, administrative tasks—typing a list, driving a truck, guarding a gate—nobody felt like they were the one "doing" the killing. Everyone was just "doing their job."
How to engage with this history today
Understanding how and why did the Holocaust start isn't just about memorizing dates in the 1930s. It's about recognizing the patterns. Genocide doesn't start with a gas chamber; it starts with a "them vs. us" mentality. It starts when we decide certain groups of people don't deserve the same rights as others.
If you want to dive deeper into the reality of this period, you should look at the primary sources. They are haunting but necessary.
- Read the diaries. Beyond Anne Frank, read the diary of Victor Klemperer (I Will Bear Witness). He was a Jewish professor in Germany who survived and documented the slow, daily erosion of his rights. It’s chilling because it’s so mundane at first.
- Visit the sites (digitally or in person). Places like the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) or Yad Vashem have massive digital archives. Looking at the "ID Cards" of victims makes the "6 million" number feel real. It's not a statistic; it's 6 million individual stories.
- Watch the testimonies. The USC Shoah Foundation has thousands of hours of video interviews with survivors. Hearing a human voice describe the transition from a normal childhood to a ghetto is more impactful than any textbook.
- Identify the language. Pay attention to how political discourse today uses dehumanizing language. Whenever a group of people is compared to "vermin," "infestations," or "viruses," that is a red flag. History shows us exactly where that road leads.
The most actionable thing you can do is to be a "broken" part of the machine. The Holocaust required a perfectly functioning bureaucracy of silence. Breaking that silence—calling out "casual" prejudice, supporting civil liberties for everyone (not just people you like), and staying informed about how power is being used—is how you ensure "Never Again" actually means something.
History isn't a straight line. It’s a series of choices made by individuals. The Holocaust started because enough people chose to hate, chose to be quiet, or chose to prioritize their own comfort over their neighbor's life. Understanding those choices is the only way to make better ones today.