That is of course exactly what Christopher Browning argues. Again: "The war was a necessary condition for the Holocaust... The war opened up opportunities and created situations that were absolutely essential to the evolution of the Final Solution." The preeminent Holocaust scholar Christopher Browning argues that the war explicitly caused the Holocaust to happen in "Ordinary Men". Browning argues that the Nazi regime did not have a preconceived, unalterable master plan for mass extermination when they took power, but that the brutalizing conditions and geopolitical realities of the war drove them to it. The core argument of Christopher Browning's "Ordinary Men," detailing how the war conditioned actions, is summarized in Chapter 18, which appears on pages 184–190 of the 1998/2017 HarperPerennial editions and around page 185 of the 1992 original edition. Later anniversary editions also address this relationship in the afterword on pages 222–223. There is not a single reference in Mein Kampf to any of the major race scientists of Nazi Germany, not H.K.Guenther, not Keiter, not Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss. None of that work informed Hitler's ideas, which were more influenced by Darwin and antisemitism. He does talk of racial hygiene, the superiority of the Aryan race, segregation but actually never mentions extermination. It is evident he was not a thorough reader of Guenther, Keiter or Clauss. But at least he didn't plagiarise their work the way Arday did with his students.
