Why would the Nazis kill their own people in the Holocaust?

Answer 1

Like any group of people engaging in genocide, the Nazis did not consider the Holocaust victims to be "their own people". In order to engage in this type of killing of a group of people, it is necessary to cast them as different, and indeed, less than human. This can be seen in the extermination of native populations in America, recent mass murders in Rwanda and Darfur, the killings of Kurds in Iraq in the 1980s, etc. So when President George Bush was making the argument that Saddam Hussein "gassed his own people" (referring to the Kurds), it's worth noting that while that was technically accurate, Hussein did not consider the Kurds to be "his own people". In the same way, Nazis did not consider the victims of their own mass murders to be "their own people".