[scoundrel]

Exactly how and why the project evolved to murder a whole race of people is not definitively catalogued in terms of who decided what and when. But it seems clear enough that this project did evolve over time. Hitler's pathalogical hatred for Jews and others (Russians, Gypsies, homosexuals not the only ones) went back at least to Landsberg prison and the writing of Mein Kampf. But it is not clear that he had a plan to exterminate such people as far back as that.

I think there was a snowball effect as people with passionate hatreds gathered together under one banner. Not only was Hitler not the only murderous anti-semitic nut-job in the room, he was by no means the most stridently and energetically focused murderer in the room. He liked to signal direction and then let the minions do the hard work. In the hate tent he had Goebbels for the well-poisoning; Bormann as a bag carrier and Himmler and Heydrich to make the actual bad deeds happen. There were plenty of others helping to provide the suitable ambience; people like the odious Robert Ley, Alfred Rosenberg (who was garotted very slowly by the Nuremberg hangman but deserves no sympathy); Julius Streicher, who wrote prolifically on anti-semitic topics and would have dishonoured the noble word "scum". These people egged each other on and became cumulatively more open and brutal in their actions and thoughts as the time went by.