Was extermination of Jews since the beginning the Nazi plan, or did they really want to expell them to Africa as they claimed in public in the early phase of WW2?
The Nazis never really had a well-thought out long-term plan for anything. The idea of the final solution evolved over time.
Originally, attitudes to Jews, and their treatment, tended to be the province of whichever military or Party officials happend to be on the scene. In 1940, Himmler and the SS began to take a keener interest in the issue, but originally this was also very disjointed and subject to local issues. Adolf Eichmann wanted to expropriate the wealth of the Jews as quickly and efficiently as possible, and was supported in this by Goering. This would take the process of organised emigration, the so-called Viennese Model invented by Eichmann in 1938, after the
Anschluss.
Himmler, on the other hand, was only interested in getting rid of the Jews, and tended to want to deport them to the USSR, often by having them woken in the middle of the night and simply carted to the border. He also carted them to the borders of the General Government, but Frank opposed this and tended to ship them back when he could. Eventually, Himmler decided it would be best to simply kill them, especially when he became aware of Hitler's plans to invade the USSR. Any Jews who were taken from Poland to the USSR would only be postponing the problem at that point.
Heydrich was interested in using Jews for slave labour, both for economic and ideological reasons. This often amounted to working the Jews to death, even if this made no economic sense. The military was mostly concerned with the possibility of Jews forming partisan units in the conquered territories, which led them to treat the Jews very differently depending on who was in command in the area. Some officers executed Jews, some rounded them up but didn't actively try to harm them, while others simply left them alone.
In the Balkans the Italians would often intervene to protect Jews from both the Germans and the locals, which vastly complicated matters for Hitler there. Likewise, the Bulgarians did as little as they felt they could get away with in handing over Jews. Hungary treated Hungarian Jews quite well, but both Hungary and Romania were positively brutal to the Jews in the USSR. Nazi policy towards the Jews was not really finalized until the infamous Wannsee Conference, and even then there were changes afterwards.
Hang on, isn't this putting the Roman Catholics on the tines of Morton's fork? When they condemned the Nazis for theological reasons, then they missed the wood for the trees. When they condemned the Nazis for euthanasia, that's a moral protest, nothing to do with their religious beliefs.
I'm not suggesting an evil plot to trap LightSpectra (neo-Platonists and Canaanite pagans make unlikely bedfellows
), but I'd also give the RCs a bit of a pass if they didn't manage to line up all their theological-ethical points into one document. There was a colossal amount of ugly anti-semitism in German Catholicism, as in wider German society. The chances of it being rooted out in the midst of persecution were minimal.
We Canaanites are an untrustworthy breed. Our alliances shift like sand, and are always to the benefit of almighty Ba'al.
I do see your point. And you're not completely wrong; I'm sure religious sentiments played their part in the anti-euthanasia protests. Many of those protesting were priests, both Catholic and Protestant, and they no doubt helped inspire the majority of the protesters. But the real reason for the protests was not religious sentiments, but fear. Many people had family in sanitariums, both for the mentally ill and the physically deformed. While originally the Nazis only targeted the mentally ill, it wasn't much of a stretch to assume those who suffered from physical deformities or had suffered accidents such as paralysis would be next on the Nazi hit-list - as indeed they were - and this inspired countless families to actively protest the action. Indeed they protested it to the point that Hitler had to call a temporary halt.
