in response to a poster saying that The Holocaust was ideologically driven, not economical, and borne out of German racialism.

That's too simplistic. It fits in with the narrative we're taught at school - that Hitler and his ilk were the Great Satan of the twentieth century. Actually, the story is a bit more nuanced. Hitler believed that almost every race in the world could and should improve itself to the best of its abilities. In fact, he supposedly remarked that China's history was more dignified and deserving of respect than Europe's. At first, the Nazis did not seek to exterminate the Jews - instead, they sought an orderly expulsion. But as the war started sucking up too many resources and stories came out about high-ranking Jews in Allied nations stirring up hatred of Germany and aiding the Communists, the authorities decided that they needed a brutal, quick final solution.

In fact, the Nazis were not the only ones who believed in such theories. In the last months of the war, General Patton grew convinced that the Germans were respectable people and not the true enemy, and that a lot of people in Washington (most notably Morgenthau, a Jew who tried to push for effective democide against millions of Germans) were preventing him from taking Berlin and large parts of Eastern Europe because they wanted Germany to suffer. At the end of his life, Patton seems to have hated the Jews as much as Hitler did before the start of World War II. And then there's Churchill, who believed that a specific but powerful group of Jews had orchestrated the Bolshevik revolutions in Russia in a frontal attack on civilization.

There are a lot of things wrong with what the Nazis did, and the world would have been better off without them. But don't get too simplistic about them.