Why did the Nazis and their allies expend so much of their wartime resources to exterminate the Jewish People?
• Many answers to this question have been offered – theological, historical, philosophical, psychological, and Marxist – but none alone will ever be satisfactory. The historical answer might read something like this: In the 1930s, large segments of the German populace consented to live in a society based on the tenets of hatred, ethnic utopianism, and violence. They went to war to redress every wrong and every perceived wrong perpetrated against them over the previous 200 years, and to create their version of a better world. A central belief in the system by which they lived was that the Jews (or “The Jew”) represented everything diametrically opposed to them and, for this reason, had to be removed. This belief was closely connected to a racial worldview, shared by many, which defined the Germans as members of a master race – the Nordic Aryans – and the Jews as an “anti”-race befouled by destructive physical characteristics. The utopia toward which these Germans strove would be unattai
