Was the Holocaust objectively wrong

Answer 1

Being Objective does not mean being amoral. Rather, it refers to a dispassionate assessment of the facts of something, and then judging the action according to a moral framework based solely on those factual assessments, leaving emotion and (cultural) bias out of the judgement.

By those means, I see no rational basis for claiming that the Holocaust served any valid moral purpose or necessity, based on the basic moral code that Western civilization has used for the past 2,000 years. So, yes, the Holocaust was most certainly objectively wrong.

The fact that the Nazis were able to justify it as right (and necessary) to their own people shows exactly how twisted and far removed their moral code was from that of the baseline Western morality.

Answer 2

morally they were wrong, but they were done in accordance with the law.

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I don't think so ... There was no law or decree that ordered, or even provided for, the Holocaust.

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The Holocaust was a series of actions, starting with the restriction and segregation of Jews, though after the war these were deemed illegal, at the time there was no law against tham. The most dubious action was the Kommisar order, as it was illegal to execute combatants, but this was attempted to be justified by the fact that they would have been a danger in the camps.

The point is that during the Holocaust everyone who perpetrated the crimes (excluding the cases of extreme brutality, for which the Nazis did punish them), everyone from the local native police to the train drivers and the camp guards thought that they were following legal orders, which indeed they were.

When one speaks of something as being "right" or "wrong", a moral judgement is being implied. When discussing whether an action contravenes a law, the terms "illegal" and "legal" are used.

In this context, there is no possible moral justification for the Holocaust, assuming we are using the baseline morality that Western (and, even Eastern) civilizations have used for at least 2,000 years prior.

So, yes, the actions of those involved in the Holocaust are most certainly morally wrong. Even those who had no direct knowledge of what the fate of the victims would be should be judged as morally wrong, given that the actions of rounding up people for deportation for no reason other than membership in a specific ethnic group is morally reprehensible. Remember, it is entirely possible for something to be immoral and legal at the same time.