How many People did Hitler Kill: Because of genocide, the murder of hostages, reprisal raids, forced labor, “euthanasia,” starvation, exposure, medical experiments, and terror bombing, and in the concentration and death camps, the Nazis murdered from 15,003,000 to 31,595,000 people, most likely 20,946,000 men, women, handicapped, aged, sick, prisoners of war, forced laborers, camp inmates, critics, homosexuals, Jews, Slavs, Serbs, Germans, Czechs, Italians, Poles, French, Ukrainians, and many others. Among them 1,000,000 were children under eighteen years of age.
In 1918, Germany lost the First World War. Right-wing extremists blamed the Jews for the losing war. They also accused the Jews of being capitalist exploiters who profited at the expense of others. At the same time, the Jews were accused of being followers of communism who were after world domination by means of a revolution.
Yet there is no straight line from the antisemitism of the Nazis to the Holocaust. In his autobiography book Mein Kampf and his speeches, Hitler never made a secret of his hatred of the Jews and his opinion that there was no place for them in Germany, but , he had no plans for mass murder initially. Only after the outbreak of the Second World War did the Nazi top conceive of the idea and the possibility of murdering the European Jews. The Holocaust can, therefore, best be seen as the outcome of a series of decisions, influenced by circumstances. Sometimes the initiative came from lower placed Nazis, who were looking for extreme solutions to the problems they faced. Competition between different government departments also led to increasingly radical measures against the Jews. But in the end, nothing went against Hitler’s wishes and he was the one who made the final decisions.