The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah in Hebrew, was a genocide in which 6,000,000 Jews (including 1,500,000 children) were mass-murdered by Nazi Germany and its allies from 1941 to 1945, during World War II. In addition to the staggering amount of Jewish victims, the Nazis also killed 10,547,000 Slavs (including 3,300,000 Red Army prisoners), up to 1,500,000 Romani, 150,000 handicapped people, and 2,500 Jehovah's Witnesses in related persecution campaigns. The Holocaust was one of the worst crimes against humanity committed in human history, wiping out two-thirds of Europe's Jews and a third of their world population.
Many of the leading participants were either executed or imprisoned after the war's end, and many of the surviving victims became refugees, with many fleeing to either the United States or Mandatory Palestine (later Israel). The long-lasting effects of the Holocaust have impacted the modern world arguably more than any other event apart from the Second World War itself.
History[]
Nazi persecution of Jews[]
A "Jude" sign on a store window, a result of the Nuremberg Laws
The Holocaust was commited principally by the German Nazi Party, which had included Antisemitism in its party platform since its 1920 foundation. The Nazi Party claimed that Jewish Zionists had infiltrated politics across the world and were seeking to achieve world domination, and it blamed Jews for the defeat in World War I, the rise of communism, the libelous accusation that Jews used the blood of Christian babies to cook bread, and for the Great Depression, among other scurrilous and wide-ranging accusations. The Jews had been stripped of their rights by the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, excluding Jews from civil society; in 1938, the SA carried out the Kristallnacht pogroms across Nazi Germany, destroying Jewish businesses in a moment of nationalist fury. The party began herding Jews into ghettos in 1939 with the outbreak of World War II, forcing them out of the countryside and into cramped and comfortable sections of cities where they were forced to wear yellow Stars of David to identify themselves. During Operation Barbarossa in 1941, the Nazis formed the Einsatzgruppen death squads to systematically kill Jews as German armies advanced into the Soviet Union, and the Wehrmacht regular military cooperated with the death squads in locating Jewish areas and carrying out massacres. 2,000,000 Jews were killed in mass shootings in less than a year, with the Nazis claiming that they were all Bolsheviks and supporters of the Soviet Union, while many of them had actually faced persecution under Joseph Stalin.
Final solution[]
The shoes of those murdered at Auschwitz
In 1942, following the Wannsee Conference, the Nazi leadership decided to implement a "Final Solution to the Jewish Question", which called for the extermination of the Jews. Previous plans had called for their deportation to Siberia or Madagascar, but the Nazi leadership - chief among them Heinrich Himmler and Adolf Eichmann - decided to carry out horrific mass killings across Nazi-occupied Europe. Axis collaboration governments handed over their Jews to the Germans, who either sent them to perform forced labor in concentration camps (such as Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, Gross-Rosen, Flossenburg, Ravensbruck, and Sachsenhausen) or to die in extermination camps (such as Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Majdanek, Sobibor, Treblinka, and Kulmhof). The Jews shared concentration camps with other "undesirables" such as Poles, Soviet citizens, Red Army prisoners-of-war, German Resistance members, homosexuals, the handicapped, Jehovah's Witnesses, black people, and members of smaller groups, and they were forced to work until they died. The elderly, children, and the sickly were almost immediately sent to death camps. The camp guards included German SS soldiers and Trawniki auxiliaries, who included local volunteers, Jewish prisoners promised life in exchange for betraying their own people, and Red Army POWs who wanted a chance to leave their own prison camps and become guards. The Germans used various methods to kill off the prisoners, ranging from gas chambers to mass shootings. The bodies were then incinerated en masse instead of being given proper burials. From 1941 to 1945, 6,000,000 (some sources say up to 11,000,000) Jews were murdered, and the Soviets and Western Allies were shocked upon discovering the remains of the German camps while advancing into the Third Reich in 1945.
After the war, it was estimated that 200,000 people had been involved in perpetrating the horrendous crimes, and many high-ranking Nazis were tried and imprisoned or executed for their heinous crimes during the Nuremberg Trials or before other tribunals. In the communist countries of Eastern Europe, many fascist collaborators were executed by the vengeful former opposition members, who had now been brought to power by the Soviets. Memorials were established across Europe to commemorate the victims, while the Jewish holiday of Yom HaShoah ("Holocaust Remembrance Day") is held on the 27th day of Nisan (April/May) every year.