Who started the Holocaust?
There is no question that the people who started the Holocaust were the Nazis, backed by the vast majority of the German population. However, it’s important to point out that the Nazis would not have been able to carry out their plans to exterminate the Jewish people had they not had the support, and often the direct assistance, of the local population in the various countries the Germans invaded.
Gabriel Wilensky
The Perpetrators of the Holocaust
The Holocaust was a cataclysmic event that was triggered by the Germans during WWII. Fanatical antisemitic Nazis, led by the world’s greatest antisemite Adolf Hitler, were responsible for the persecution and accosting of Jews in Germany during the 1930s, and therefore are the ones who started the Holocaust. The antisemitic actions of the Nazis during that period constitute the protogenocidal preamble to what was to follow after the war began.
“There is no question that the people who started the Holocaust were the Nazis, backed by the vast majority of the German population.”
But once the mass murder began, the German perpetrators found willing and indeed eager collaborators in most of the countries they invaded. In most of the areas under German control, the local population eagerly and willingly helped the German overlords in denouncing, hunting down, and executing their Jewish neighbors.
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