The Holocaust’s ideological basis was National Socialism’s anti-Semitic and racial ideological worldview where the Aryan, Germanic race was described as superior, while the Jews were described as inferior and as participants in an evil world conspiracy.
A contributing cause was Darwinian explanatory models of social conditions with the emphasis on natural selection and the right of the strong. In addition, the Jewish legal consciousness challenged the lawlessness cultivated in Nazi Germany, and Hitler claimed that “conscience is a Jewish invention”. The Holocaust presupposed a long-term propaganda in which Jews were dehumanized step by step.

Replacement theology, anti-Semitism, and surrender to nationalist ideologies by Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant churches rendered the church powerless, clearing the way for National Socialism to carry out the holocaust unhindered. The indifference shown to the “Jewish refugee question” in Germany and Austria by the countries of the world during, for example, the Evian conference in the summer of 1938, confirmed that no one would intervene to prevent Hitler from proceeding with the “final solution”. Even Nazi Germany’s so-called Aktion T4 euthanasia program – which murdered tens of thousands of disabled people – initiated on September 1, 1939, was a test to see how German public opinion would react. After protests from the public and the church communities, Aktion T4 was cancelled in August 1941, but continued unofficially until the end of the war.

All sectors of society were involved in, or aware of, the Holocaust: media, judiciary, politics, business, education, culture and the church etc. The extensive bureaucracy and organization to facilitate the Holocaust’s genocide of millions of people on the European continent required the involvement of a large part of the society and required a majority of the countries of Europe to either be active in the project or to be passive without protest. Even the war situation in Europe itself and the terror that the police state of Nazi Germany exercised over its population created a widespread fear that paved the way for the Holocaust.