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Notes -
Yeah, a common revisionist argument is "why would Nazi Germany spend effort on killing Jews in the middle of an existential war?"
But this ignores the following:
Some of the camps were combined labor / death camps. The Nazis benefited from the Jewish slave labor.
To your point, the mainstream theory of the Holocaust is that Nazi Germany only spent a tiny fraction of its total resources on the Holocaust. The Einsatzgruppen were only a few thousand strong. The Nazi personnel in all of the camps put together were probably also only a few thousand strong. Rounding up and killing unarmed people is easy for a modern state, especially a state that has few forests or mountains for people to hide in, especially when the unarmed people are concentrated in cities and are ethnically distinct so have limited ability to blend in with others. To move six million Jews to camps* over the course of about three years would have taken about 1.5 train sets per day if we just divide six million by how many people the Nazis would pack into each train set. In practice of course Jews had to be gathered from multiple source points, so let us say an estimate of 5-10 train sets per day. By comparison, for Germany to supply its East Front alone required something like (200-300) train sets per day. Given the centrality of Jews in Nazi thought, this level of investment does not seem particularly large. Furthermore, from a resources perspective the Holocaust could largely be serviced using coal and coke, materials that Germany had in abundance. It did not require any resources that the Nazis had a shortage of.
The Nazis were not very efficient. Their political system was a bunch of overlapping fiefdoms that fought with each other and at no point during the war did they manage to standardize their weapons systems to simplify production.
*Edit: And not all Jews were moved to camps, many were killed on the spot.
I think the largest point you're missing is that in the eye of the Nazis, time spent killing Jews was not a distraction from existential war, but a fundamental part of it.
The Prussian officer corps had inherited a pathological fear of franc-tireurs from their experiences in 1870-71 and 1914. Nazi and reactionary political thought emphasized the duplicity of Jews, their creation and fundamental enmeshing with Bolshevism. The planned invasion of the Soviet Union was meant from its conception to be a Rassenkrieg. The Bolshevik system was to be torn out root and stem, and all its mouthpieces and enablers with it. To this extent Jews were a fundamental security risk to rear areas and a existential threat to the Heer's design for a rapid victory: they would be the inevitable saboteurs, partisans, Bolshevik agitators. That was the threat the Einsatzgruppen formations were meant to combat. Only the liquidation of the adult male Jewish population would secure the rear areas and ensure German victory. (Later this objective would be expanded incrementally to include all Jewish individuals in the Soviet Union).
After the failure of Operation Barbarossa the nature of the killing of Jews shifted more to that of retribution than immediate security concerns, but again this was in concordance with a future vision of a Europe that was Judenfrei.
edit: you get a sense of the Nazi perspective on this in Himmler's October 4 (1943) Posen speech. An excerpt:
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