The Holocaust

The Holocaust (from the Greek ὁλόκαυστος holókaustos: hólos, "whole" and kaustós, "burnt") also known as Shoah (Hebrew: השואה, HaShoah, "the catastrophe"; Yiddish: חורבן , Churben or Hurban, from the Hebrew for "destruction"), was a genocide in which approximately eleven million people, including six million Jews, were killed by the German military, under the command of Adolf Hitler, and its collaborators. Killings took place throughout the German Reich and German-occupied territories.

Between 1941 and 1945 Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, communists, homosexuals, the mentally and physically disabled and members of other groups were targeted and methodically murdered in the largest genocide of the 20th century. In total, of the approximately 11 million people were killed during the Holocaust, over 1 million were children. Of the nine million Jews who had resided in Europe before the Holocaust, approximately two-thirds were killed.

A network of about 42,500 facilities in Germany and German-occupied territories were used to concentrate, confine, and kill Jews and other victims and between 100,000 to 500,000 people were direct participants in the planning and murder of Holocaust victims.

The persecution and genocide were carried out in stages. Initially the German government passed laws to exclude Jews from civil society, most prominently the Nuremberg Laws of 1935. A network of concentration camps was established starting in 1933 and ghettos were established following the outbreak of World War II in 1939. In 1941, as Germany conquered new territory in eastern Europe, specialized paramilitary units called Einsatzgruppen were used to murder around two million Jews and political opponents in mass shootings. By the end of 1942, victims were being regularly transported by freight train to specially built extermination camps where, if they survived the journey, most were systematically killed in gas chambers. The campaign of murder continued until the end of World War II in Europe in April–May 1945.