Most generally, the Holocaust evolved from the efforts of the Nazi state to solve the “Jewish problem,” or how to accomplish the separation of the Jews from German society, and eventually from all of Europe. It became, essentially, a vast and complex administrative problem. As the policy evolved, it was up to the various components of the public bureaucracy to figure out how to accomplish it. The difficulty of the problem stemmed from the fact that, antiSemitism aside, Jews were fully entwined with every aspect of German (and European) society—economic, political, social, and cultural. No matter how virulent Hitler's hatred of the Jews and the zeal of his followers, Jews could not suddenly be exiled or killed without severely disrupting the social fabric and political economy of German society. This was so clear that even Hitler did not pursue such an approach in the early years of his regime (Browning, 1989).