In this case, I think these factors explain it:
1) Anti-Semitism is a long-simmering sentiment in Christian Europe
The article makes reference to the two most readily handy pre-Nazi examples - the Pogroms and the Inquisition. Yet as terrible as both of these were, neither aimed at complete genocide. Spanish and Portuguese Jews, for example, find their way to the New World.
2) Hitler's personal anti-Semitism
The Daily Mail ran this interesting article about the research of Ralf-George Reuth:
Reuth argues that what was probably lower middle-class bigotry shared by many at the time, morphed into murderous hatred for Hitler after 1919.
At the time almost half of all German private banks were Jewish owned, the stock exchange dominated by Jewish stockbrokers, almost half of the nation’s newspapers were Jewish run as were 80 per cent of chain stores.
It became fashionable to decry the loss of the war on Jewish financiers.
But Hitler, according to Reuth, also blamed Jews for the Russian revolution, citing Leon Trotsky’s faith, as well as that of Marx whose theories he followed and even Lenin, who was one-quarter Jewish.
However, many world leaders harbor all sorts of personal bigotry. That alone does not explain much.
3)
The rise of Nazism depended on getting a sizable portion of the German people to concentrate their rage and fear.
An easy way to unite a people is to give them a common enemy. An easy way for that happen is for a gifted speaker to deliver a message he deeply personally believes blaming a group of whom his audience is already suspicious.
But why not just take the Jews property and deport them?
4)
War industry creates both a need for cheap labor and a means for mass slaughter.
This is where one sees a striking commonality between Stalin's Soviet Union and Hitler's Germany. In Stalin's Russia, political enemies (and later, German prisoners) are sent to Siberia in rail cars to mine, clear forests, and perform otherwise physically brutal labor until death. In Hitler's Germany, useless eaters were ruthlessly murdered with industrial methods unavailable to the Inquisition and the Pogroms. Those deemed better-than-useless were worked to death in war industries. Even high level Nazi's like Albert Speer realized the waste and stupidity inherent in this, but failed to speak out because.....
5)
Hitler grants unchecked authority to the SS/SD
The SS/SD are Hitler's private army and personal police force. They perform conventional military work (the Waffen SS), perform political-level policing and intelligence (The Gestapo and the SD), and enact the Final Solution (the Totenkopfverbände -- the "Death's Head" squadrons). I'm keeping it a summary level, but you get the idea. There is no check and balance. No one tells anyone in these organizations what they can't do. They are very well organized armed thugs with absolute power. It comes as no surprise that such an organization becomes corrupt. In this sense, I mean "corrupt" in the sense of "self-serving". By 1943, when it becomes clear to those in the upper echelons that Germany will not win the war, some Jews are ransomed from the concentration camps to raise funds for post-war escapes of high level officials. At the same time, a combination of Hitlerian rage and self-interest drives the concentration camps to -- as quickly as possible -- destroy the evidence and kill the witnesses. So for those who could not effectively work in a war industry, or those who didn't have relatives who could pay a steep ransom, death came -- either by Zyklon-B or bullets or starvation or exposure or disease.
6)
Rationalization by the ordinary German citizen.
In the 30s "Hitler saved Germany from chaos and communism. His arguments against the Jews made sense"
In the early 40s "We Germans were at war, and we couldn't trust the Jews to stand with Hitler"
By the mid-40s "We had no idea what was going on in those camps except they were run by the SS, and we were to terrified of the SS to find out"
Obviously, not every German felt this way. Many Germans did - in small ways and large - work to hide Jews and get them to safety Many worked actively to oppose Hitler and resist the Nazis, and many very good men died horrible deaths resulting from their attempt to remove the Bavarian Corporal from the planet in 1944.
So it's clearly a multiple-causation event that fed on itself.
One of the ironies of history is that the flight German refugees combined with the stupid, wasteful, and criminal slaughter of human resources combined with the industrial resources to kill those humans (not just Jews, but Roma, Homosexuals, political enemies, Jehovah's Witnesses, Russians, the disabled, Catholics who wouldn't go along with the program, and many others) literally cost Germany any chance they had of winning the war.
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