So, settling the Jewish question was more than just killing the jews from one day to the other - the concentration camps were "just" the culmination of years of systematic persecution, beginning with boycotts in 1933, the anti-interracial marriage laws 1935, Kristallnacht 1938. In 1933, 533,000 jews lived in Germany, by the time WWII commenced, it was down to 214,000 - almost all of which were subsequently murdered.

The majority of the jews killed in the Holocaust were not German, they were from all the occupied territories, most notably Poland.

Endlösung didn't kill anywhere near 1/4th of the population - it killed 1/3 %, and that fraction had already been systematically marginalised.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Germany...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust#Victims_and_deat...

Exactly, the efficiency had little to do with the method of death, the methods where simply the an example of said efficiency. It's a twisted blueprint. First vilify them, second remove them from anything approaching important positions (collage professors etc), third separate them from society (concentration camps), and finally murder them site unseen. Of course each of those steps where rather complex but the specifics are less important than the overall process. Because, it take a huge number of people willing to do horrible things to create atrocities on that scale.

Arguably step one had been occurring for hundreds of years before the Nazi's rise to power, but they really pushed the envelope.

What I find fascinating is I suspect for a great number of the leaders they really where just looking for something to vilify at the start and things just snowballed. It was only latter in the process as this huge segment of the population because less necessary that the idea of killing them showed up. Something like mass sterilization would have been as effective if there idea really was a twisted form of eugenics and they had been forcibly sterilizing people there and even in the US. However, while the initial idea may have been slave labor they kept sending so many people to these camps that they needed a 'solution'.

Where would the farmers get capital then? I think it's misinformed to claim that bankers are less important than farmers. There are clearly huge issues in the world of finance, but banking does serve an important and legitimate function.

Where do you think bankers get capital.

From farmers and other business people. I'm not claiming businesses are unimportant, simply that bankers are (because they redistribute that capital as loans to potentially successful new enterprises).

A less snippy response is bankers are distributing the same finite pool of money so having twice as many bankers might make thing more efficient but it's not going to increase the available Capitol any time soon, ditto for having half as many bankers. Banking is important, but it's also highly automated.