How many people were involved in the holocaust? Where does personal responsibility for your actions begin? Does operating a locomotive hauling jews, pows, homosexuals, and assorted other undesirables make you a party to the crime of mass murder? Suppose you had six kids to feed, and Adolf Hitler was the first political person to put you back to work to feed those kids. You can see what's going on in your neighborhood and your city. People are being arrested and taken away to re-education camps, or being moved to areas where your told they will be better off. Yet, you know the truth, you are able to actually see the places they are going to. Suppose you don't know any other languages except your native german. It's not like you can just up and leave to go make a start in another country. The name of game quickly becomes survival; Your survival, the survival of your family and friends. Terror works, and idealogical meglomanics like Adolf Hitler completely understand this concept.
Ultimately, the question itself spans time and encompasses ideas and concepts which are the products of the human ego's desire to believe in its own superiority to other human beings. Who does not believe themselves the better of even their close friends? For example, "Yea, so and so is a good guy, but he is a dummy when it comes to politics." Adolf Hitler understood this completely.
Perhaps no other nation has ever existed where pride was represented in military traditions of loyality, honor, and duty, and, yet, was so injured in its preceived injustices put upon the nation by the victors of the First World War. This too Adolf Hitler understood completely and saw opportunity in that injured pride.
In the final analysis, there is only one individual who was involved in the Holocaust: "Adolf Hitler"
Adolf Hitler knew how to achieve power. Hitler's co-conspiritors were unscruplous criminals. No, it is "Adolf Hitler" who alone is the single individual involved in the "Holocaust" and, indeed, the entire "Second World War."
Further more, if Adolf Hitler had been killed by a well placed bullet from a policmans rifle in the aborted attempt to overthrow the Repubic, then, there is little doubt that the Nazi Party would have lost its guiding light and subsequently have been greatly deminished or destroyed.
It would be a serious mistake to think the holocaust was, as a result of said argument, something of an aberation and, as a result of a single individuals actions, something which can be tossed in to the dust bin. Nothing could be more dangerous because the rise of the Nazis and the ensuing Holocaust are road maps for future operations. They hold our attention, now, as they will for a thousand more years. So Hitler was right, the Third Reich will last a thousand years, just not the way he envisioned it. I strongly recommend "The Cunning of History; The Holocaust and the American Future." by Richard L. Rubenstein.
Between about 1942 and the early 1945 the total number of personnel running the concentration camps was 55,000-60,000 at any given time. Of these, about 3,000 (?) were women.
Their was
1,500 concentration camps in total
900-1000 was for people who was not the German Aryan ideal (Blond hair, tall, white) blacks was quite common in these camps. their was 10,000 - 18,000people involved in the killings in in each of these camps
20 concentration/extermination camps such as Auschwitz was for soviet POW, Jews, gypsies, physically disabled people. their was about 55,000- 68,000 in each
40 were extermination camps for mass murder only. their was approximately 50,000 people involved in the killings in in each of these camps
rest was concentration camps, Physical labour. their was about 20,000 in each of these camps.
NOTE: According to the holocaust facts from the allies after the war, the records recovered was shown that 13% of these people involved was actually the prisoners themselves who got rid off the bodies burying/burning them.
The total of people involved in the killings anyway, even guards is 20 million between 1933 - 1945 but 2.6 million of these was the actual prisoners.
So people has got the right to call the holocaust a blood time in history where their was approximately 6.6 million - 7 million people killed.