Intolerance and ignorance.

Anti-semitism was part of the cause of the holocaust, but the persecution of the Jewish people, by the third reich, was deplorable and the worst evil that can carried out toward a people. The Jewish however where not the only group to suffer in the concentration camps, romany gypsies, black people and the mentally hadicapped were also persecuted in the Nazi drive to produce the master or airean race (forgive my spelling i not english). This belief led to the extermination of a large number of people, the worst concentration camps within the third reich included Auschwitz and Bergen Belson a list can be found here:- http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/campmap1.html. Hitlers experience of being homeless bred prejudices toward the jewish, and this hatred toward jewish people manifested itself when he came to power and in essence he labelled the jewish as the reason that germany was in the mess that it was during the 20's and early 30's. I hope this helps.

The proximate cause of the Holocaust was the decision by the German government (and its collaborators elsewhere) to systematically exterminate people it deemed 'undesirable'. They were aided and abetted by the German (and other) people who carried out those orders or stood by and let it happen. As to the deeper social and psychological reasons that caused the German people and German government to develop this state of psychopathic psychosis, I don't think we have a clear understanding of all the factors involved. Some of those include: --Germans historically have had a greater tolerance for authoritarian governments than other cultures. --Prejudice against Jews goes back to Biblical times and was intensified over centuries by many policies of the Catholic church. --There is some evidence that many high-ranking Nazi officials were 'tweaking' on methamphetamine and similar drugs. --The German people wanted 'payback' for the perceived humiliation visited upon them after WW I. (Sounds kind of similar to the US invasion of Iraq...:-P...). There are many more reasons, none of which justify what happened. . . .

Ignorance and a peoples carelessness when selecting it's leadership. Pretty clear to me.

Nazi Germany's obsession with creating a 'master race'. To do this, they wanted to eradicate 'undesirable' groups of society, so that they would not 'pass on' their 'inferior' genes. These 'undesirable' groups included Jews, homosexuals, gypsies, people with disabilities, etc.

As with everything, there are both long term and short term causes. Long term ones include *fear of the different (dating from the time of the Roman Empire when the Jews, as monotheists, were accused of being disloyal to the emperor because they would not worship him as a god) *the consequent compartmentalising of the Jewish people into ghettos and restricted professions *medieval ignorance of the Bible teaching on love and the increased centralisation of power in the hands of the Pope. Short term causes include: *the dismembering of Germany post WW1, especially of its industrial areas eg the Ruhr *consequent economic depression and governments powerless to do anything about it *the need for a scapegoat for Germany's economic woes *the ability of the Nazis to take control of the economy eg taking back the Ruhr and the rising belief that they could solve all economic problems "caused" by Jewry

Hitler, a person who hated himself and took it out on the race he most related to the Jews. Hitler the stupid Jew.

the holocaust had mutiple causes. nothing can be isolated. it including ignorance misunderstanding intolerance powertripping fear and others

I personally believe that it started as an attempt to unify a Germany left in a terrible state after WWI. Hitler and his henchmen picked an internal foe... the Jews. The Jews were already disliked. Goebbels produced some horrible propaganda films to demonize them (I have some youtubes of a few of them if anyone is interested) and set up this unifying foe within Germany. This was also done later to the Gypsies when we were added to the Final Solution as were any others the Nazi party did not like. I have seen the propaganda films against us but there are not as many, nearly, as there were against the Jews. There were also propaganda films against the mentally disabled. Then the Jews were shunted into ghettos where they were bled dry of every last scrap of money and then... off to the Camps where they were stripped of everything from the gold in their teeth to their hair. These things were sold. All of the items of others, of course, were likewise sold, however, the Jews got the ghettos first whereas we, the Gypsies, did not. We did not have money. We just went to the Camps. The Reich denies financial gain from this but that is, to me, patent bullshit. I am undecided in my mind if Hitler believed his own propaganda in the beginning but, with the constant influence of his henchmen and the drugs being pumped into his system by an idiotic "personal physician" I believe he DID come to believe it himself. Hitler and his henchmen also used the Camps to get rid of anyone who was a threat to the Nazi regime. If you look at the list of peoples targeted, you can stick anyone in there you wish and they did. I personally believe that had Germany won the Nazis would not have stopped with the Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, Slavs, and all the rest.

1) "The Holocaust (from the Greek ὁλÏŒκαυστον (holókauston): holos, "completely" and kaustos, "burnt"), also known as Ha-Shoah (Hebrew: השואה), Churben (Yiddish: חורבן), is the term generally used to describe the killing of approximately six million European Jews during World War II, as part of a program of deliberate extermination planned and executed by the National Socialist (Nazi) regime in Germany led by Adolf Hitler. Other groups were persecuted and killed by the regime, including the Roma; Soviets, particularly prisoners of war; ethnic Poles; other Slavic people; the disabled; gay men; and political and religious dissidents, such as Jehovah's witnesses. Many scholars do not include these groups in the definition of the Holocaust, defining it as the genocide of the Jews, or what the Nazis called the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question." Taking into account all the victims of Nazi persecution, the death toll rises considerably: estimates generally place the total number of victims at nine to 11 million. The persecution and genocide were accomplished in stages. Legislation to remove the Jews from civil society was enacted years before the outbreak of World War II. Concentration camps were established in which inmates were used as slave labour until they died of exhaustion or disease. Where the Third Reich conquered new territory in eastern Europe, specialized units called Einsatzgruppen murdered Jews and political opponents in mass shootings. Jews and Roma were crammed into ghettos before being transported hundreds of miles by freight train to extermination camps where, if they survived the journey, the majority of them were killed in gas chambers. Every arm of Germany's bureaucracy was involved in the logistics of the mass murder, turning the country into what one Holocaust scholar has called "a genocidal state."" "The Nazi Party under Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany on January 30, 1933, and the persecution and exodus of Germany's 525,000 Jews began almost immediately. In his autobiography Mein Kampf (1925), Hitler had been open about his hatred of Jews, and gave ample warning of his intention to drive them from Germany's political, intellectual, and cultural life. He did not write that he would attempt to exterminate them, but he is reported to have been more explicit in private. As early as 1922, he allegedly told Major Joseph Hell, at the time a journalist: “ Once I really am in power, my first and foremost task will be the annihilation of the Jews. As soon as I have the power to do so, I will have gallows built in rows—at the Marienplatz in Munich, for example—as many as traffic allows. Then the Jews will be hanged indiscriminately, and they will remain hanging until they stink; they will hang there as long as the principles of hygiene permit. As soon as they have been untied, the next batch will be strung up, and so on down the line, until the last Jew in Munich has been exterminated. Other cities will follow suit, precisely in this fashion, until all Germany has been completely cleansed of Jews.”" Source and further information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust#Origins 2) Of course, Hitler was not the only Antisemit in the regions controlled by Nazi Germany. So his ideas received support from many people. Further information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism 3) German organisation and technology. 4) Propaganda, censure and terror through the state and paramilitary organisations. 5) What happened until the Wansee Conference (January 20, 1942) were some persecutions and pogroms like there had already been many of them in history. After this started a systematic mass extermination. Maybe many people were not immediatly aware of this because of the lack of information. Or they were just not able to understand that the system could have gone mad. 6) Hitler was a charismatic leader who had promised the German to give their country a lot of glory, suppress unemployment, etc; through the mobilisation of everyone's energy, he achieved also a lot of what he had promised them. So many of those who were following him saw only the positive sides, except if they had been themselves victims of the persecutions (or their friends). Or they considered that the positive sides could excuse some of the negative sides. A great proportion of the German (and others) had no idea of what has really been taking place especially after January 1942.

Ignorant people who wanted to create a perfect race, in their mind, that they could control.