What is the relationship between the holocaust and the world war 2?

Answer 1

The Holocaust in the sense of systematic genocide began in 1941, when the war in Europe had already been under way for two years. Other groups were also targeted.

The Holocaust, or systematic destruction of peoples which the Nazis considered undesirable, occurred in all areas the Germans captured during World War 2. It was a kind of subplot within the war.

If you are trying to establish a cause/effect relationship between WW2 and the Holocaust, I think you will have trouble doing so. The Holocaust did not lead to World War 2, and it was not one of the causes of the war. Similarly, World War 2 did not cause the Holocaust.

The German invasion of Poland and later of the Soviet Union did, of course, lead to a vast increase in the numbers of Jews under German rule and added to the Nazis' self-inflicted 'Jewish problem'. One may, of course, also take the view that the Nazis exploited the wartime inaccessibility of Eastern Europe to the outside world when carrying out the Holocaust, but that is not a cause-effect link.

Rate This Answer

_______________________________

Holocaust study is full of different opinions and an alternative is:

The Holocaust would not have happened without WWII, more specific than that; the trigger for the Holocaust was the invasion of the Soviet Union, without this there would not have been a need for a 'Final Solution' which included mass murder, into 1942 and the Wannsee Conference sterilisation was still a popular choice, without the pressures of war this may have held.

Though Hitler may have blamed the start of the war on the Jews, the Jewish issue had nothing to do with the war.