The Holocaust: History’s Most “Efficient” Failure of Humanity

If humanity had a “Do's and Dont's” manual, the Holocaust would occupy the first hundred pages — annotated, underlined, and probably glowing red of the Dont's. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany — led by the self-proclaimed genius Adolf Hitler — decided that the solution to Europe’s problems was to murder approximately six million Jews, along with Roma people, disabled individuals, Poles, and others who didn’t fit their ideal fantasy of “racial purity.”

The official reason? Hitler’s twisted vision of a pure Aryan race — blonde, blue-eyed, and, ironically, not even resembling Hitler himself. He blamed the Jews for Germany’s economic struggles after World War I, because it’s easier to spin stories than to fix hyperinflation. Nazi propaganda painted Jews as villains of every possible problem — from capitalism to communism, from unemployment to bad weather. 

The real “why” is uglier: fear, prejudice, and the seductive simplicity of blaming “the other.” It was politics weaponised by paranoia — and millions paid with their lives.

The Holocaust wasn’t chaos. It was horrifyingly organised. The Nazis brought machine-like efficiency to mass murder. First came discriminatory laws like the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, which stripped Jews of citizenship. Then came Kristallnacht in 1938 — a “Night of Broken Glass” where Jewish homes, synagogues, and shops were destroyed under the feigned “spontaneous public outrage.” (It was government-orchestrated.)

After the outbreak of World War II in 1939, Hitler’s regime escalated. Ghettos were established in cities like Warsaw, turning societies and communities into barbed prisons. From there, the Nazis engineered what they called the “Final Solution” — a phrase that sounds like a beacon of hope but translates to industrialised genocide.

Killing centres such as Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, and Sobibor used gas chambers disguised as showers. Victims were transported by train — not to safety, but to slaughter — all documented with German precision. Bureaucrats stamped forms, scheduled transports, and filed reports, as if murder were just another government department. It was evil with a filing cabinet.

The Holocaust took place roughly between 1941 and 1945, during the height of World War II. But persecution had been brewing since Hitler’s rise to power in 1933. The genocide reached its monstrous peak after Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, when the Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing squads) began mass shootings in occupied territories before the "upgrade” to gas chambers.

The world eventually caught on — though far too late. Reports of atrocities trickled out, but disbelief, denial, and wartime chaos muffled the response. When Allied forces liberated the camps in 1945, they found evidence so horrific that even hardened soldiers were shattered.

The Holocaust gave birth to the word “genocide” and led to the creation of the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The Nuremberg Trials held Nazi leaders accountable, coining another famous phrase: “crimes against humanity.”

Israel was established in 1948, partly as a refuge for survivors and as recognition of the unspeakable injustice done to Jews across Europe.

And yet, echoes remain. Neo-Nazis, Holocaust deniers, and hate groups still lurk. The Holocaust wasn’t just an event — it was a warning. One written in ash, barbed wire, and the unbearable silence of those who didn’t make it out.

The Holocaust showed how a civilised society can implode not through chaos, but through obedience. Ordinary people — clerks, engineers, soldiers — followed orders, processed paperwork, and built mechanisms of murder, all while convincing themselves it was “just duty.” Evil rarely looks like a monster; sometimes it looks like a man with a stubby moustache and an army.

The Holocaust showed us that even the most advanced nation in Europe turned science and law into tools of destruction.

Because in the end, the Holocaust didn’t purify humanity — it crumbled it.