1. I argue that the Holocaust began in January of 1933, as the Nazi party rose to power.

Although the murder of 6 million Jews began much later, all that was predicated on the Reichstag Fire on 27 February 1933 and the subsequent Enabling act passed on March 23rd of that year. After a conflagration burned down the parliamentary building in Berlin, Adolph Hitler was able to garner enough votes to pass the Enabling Act with gave him certain dictatorial powers. Just a week after taking power the Nazi Party commenced anti-Semitic incitement of the German population on a macro level. On the 1st of April they organized a general national boycott of Jewish businesses, a clear indication of their anti-Semitic nature. While this was a far cry from murder, it would seem that the Nazi Party was setting the playing field for the progression towards the liquidation of the Jews. This first step, while seemingly not overly drastic in comparison to measures taken against Jews in historic Europe, psychologically aligned the German population against the Jews, in assigning them the blame for the loss of the first world war on the political front, while the Germans never actually endured a military loss according to Nazi leaders, and thus giving the Jews the blame for the poor economic conditions due to war reparations. With this newfound unison against the Jews, it became important for the Nazi Party to set a clear definition of who a Jew is. In November of 1935, the Nuremberg Laws were passed defining exactly who was and was not a Jew, and who was a mischlinge, or a partial Jew. The Nuremberg laws built upon the political sentiments Hitler instilled back in 1933 in his association between the Jews as the fiscal issues. Thus, Nuremberg does not exist in a vacuum. Alone, the prohibition of sexual relations with Jews were not nearly as significant as the definition of who was a Jew. These laws were a precursor and a necessity to continue with the premeditated final solution. The Nazis needed to identify the Jews before they could take legalized action against them. We already start to see the events of the Holocaust as an orchestrated progression, and not as isolated events. We see that these events we built upon one another in order to give the Nazi an opportunity exterminate the Jews. On the first of September 1939 when Hitler invaded Poland one sees what first appears as a deviation from what was a progressive slew of oppressive acts against the Jews, but this is not necessarily the case. Poland was one of the European countries with a high concentration of Jews, and by October of that year Hitler had begun to send eutanesia teams to experiment with extermination by gas, something the Nazis would perfect and then systematically use to murder Jews in the death camps an unprecedented rate. Also, once Hitler had entered Poland, he formed Gehttos to concentrate the Jews, and subsequently deport them in stages to concentration and death camps. In June 1941 Hitler had begun to send his Einsatzgruppen, his mobile killing squads to kill jews at the3 front lines. These groups killed over a million Jews by 1943. But once again, this was a event that existed only in orchestration with other events. A majority of the Jews who were killed were killed in the camps, and not by the killing squads. The holocaust did not comprise of one event, but a series of events which is even outlined to some degree way back in hitlers 1920s autobiography/ political manifesto, Mein Kampf.