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The Holocaust

genocide of European Jews by Nazi Germany carried out during the second world war
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The Holocaust, sometimes called The Shoah (Hebrew: השואה), was the genocide of European Jews by Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1945, which killed at least 6,000,000 Jews (67% pre-war European Jews).[a]

The Holocaust
Part of World War II
Hungarian Jews arriving at Auschwitz II-Birkenau, Poland in May 1944.[1]
DescriptionGenocide of the European Jews
LocationNazi Germany and Nazi-occupied territories
DateJune 1941 – May 1945[2]
Attack type
Genocide, ethnic cleansing
DeathsAround 6 million Jews[a]
PerpetratorsNazi Germany and its helpers
MotiveAntisemitism
TrialsNuremberg trials, Adolf Eichmann trial, and others

The Nazis called themselves the "master race" and wanted to kill every Jew in Europe.[13] In an organized, planned and deliberate way, they murdered around six million Jews[14][15] and five million others who were not part of the "master race".[16] The Nazis persecuted and discriminated against Jews and other groups in many ways. They forced many Jews to live in ghettos.[17] They deported millions of people to forced labor camps and concentration camps.[18] To allow them to kill as quickly as possible, they built death camps with gas chambers that could kill up to 2,000 people at a time.[19]

In 1933, around 9.5 million Jewish people lived in Europe.[20] (This was less than 2% of Europe's total population.[20]) By 1945, nearly two out of every three Jews in Europe had been killed in the Holocaust.[21] Every Jewish community in Nazi-occupied Europe lost people during the Holocaust.[16]

Camps and ghettos

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The Nazis established around 44,000 concentration camps, death camps, and ghettos in Nazi-controlled parts of Europe and North Africa during World War II.[22][23]

 
People in the Warsaw Ghetto are arrested after trying to resist deportation to concentration camps

Ghettos

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See the main article: Ghettos in Europe during the Holocaust

By mid-1941, the Nazis had forced almost all Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland into ghettos.[24] The largest of these was the Warsaw Ghetto. In November 1940, the Nazis forced 380,000 Jews into the ghetto and locked them in. Over 80,000 of them died from starvation, overcrowding, disease, freezing to death, and other terrible conditions.[25] The second largest, the Lodz Ghetto, held around 210,000 people in total.[26] In this ghetto, more than one in every five people died from the terrible living conditions.[26] According to Leo Schneiderman, who survived the Lodz Ghetto: "The whole ghetto was designed, actually, to starve the people out."[26]

Concentration camps

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Prisoners at Dachau cheer the U.S. Army as they free the camp
See the main article: Nazi concentration camp

There were 23 main concentration camps and hundreds of sub-camps throughout the lands that Nazi Germany controlled.[27] According to Karin Orth in the Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos: 1933-1945, as many as one thousand camps may have operated at a time.[28] The Nazis used concentration camps for many purposes: to gather and isolate the Nazis' "enemies"; to punish and torture these "enemies"; to obtain forced labor; to steal victims' belongings on a massive scale; to perform medical experiments on prisoners; and to kill people.[23][29]

Major concentration camps included:[30]

Death camps

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Main articles: Death camp, Extermination camp, and List of Nazi concentration camps
 
Gas chamber at the Majdanek death camp

The Nazis established six death camps in Poland. Their sole purpose was to kill Jews as quickly and efficiently as possible.[23]

The death camps were:[31]

Methods of murder

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Mass executions

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Further information: Einsatzgruppen

Special Schutzstaffel (SS) units like the Einsatzgruppen killed hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of Jews at a time in mass shootings.[32] Sometimes they forced Jews and other prisoners to dig giant holes in the ground where, after days of hard work, they were shot. Their bodies were buried and burned in mass graves.

 
Einsatzgruppen execute a group of Soviet civilians kneeling by the side of a mass grave

At Babi Yar in Kyiv, Ukraine, Einsatzgruppen killed 33,771 Jews in two days (between 29-30 September 1941).[33] The Nazis continued to use Babi Yar for mass executions of Jews, Soviet prisoners or war, and Roma people throughout the war.[32] As many as 100,000 people may have died there.[32]

Poison gas

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The Nazis first used gas chambers to kill people as part of their T4 Project (Aktion T4).[34] The Nazis believed in eugenics and thought that people with disabilities, chronically ill people, and many elderly people were "useless eaters."[34] To eliminate these people, the Nazis sent them to killing centers like Hartheim Killing Facility, where they murdered them in gas chambers.[34]

According to the Encyclopedia Britannica,[34]

The murder of the [disabled] was a precursor to the Holocaust. The killing centres to which the [disabled] were transported were the antecedents of the extermination camps, and their organized transportation foreshadowed mass deportation. Some of the physicians who became specialists in the technology of cold-blooded murder in the late 1930s later staffed the death camps. They had long since lost all their moral, professional, and ethical inhibitions.

When they first used poison gas to kill Jews, the Nazis used gas vans that piped carbon monoxide into the passenger compartment. Soon, though, the Nazis built permanent gas chambers where they killed up to 2000 people at a time.[19] By 1942 the Nazi's main method of murdering people in concentration camps was to kill them in gas chambers with Zyklon-B.[35] This was a rat poison which contained cyanide. In a planned, organized, and methodical way, they deported trains full of people to the extermination camps and sent them straight to the gas chambers. The Nazis killed around 1.1 million people in concentration camp gas chambers using Zyklon-B.[35]

Other methods

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The Nazis executed many people by shooting, stabbing, or beating them to death. Some people survived beatings, but suffered broken bones and/or died when their wounds got infected.[36] Many people also died in forced marches from one camp to another. Some were killed in medical experiments by SS doctors like Josef Mengele. Others were worked to death.[37][38]

The Nazis also deliberately killed prisoners in some concentration camps by treating them so terribly that many died.[38] They forced prisoners to do hard forced labor, but fed them very little (about 25%[39] of the calories needed to survive).[40][41] In the winter, prisoners did not have warm clothing or heating, and many froze to death.[39] Others developed frostbite, which sometimes worsened into gangrene.[36]

Diseases spread quickly in the camps because there was no healthcare, no sanitation, and a lot of overcrowding. Lice were everywhere, and they spread typhus, which was "ever-present, both endemic and epidemic, [and] fatal".[39] Other illnesses were common, including tuberculosis, malaria, meningitis, scabies, pneumonia, and diarrheal diseases.[36] Prisoners who were too sick or injured to work were often killed.

Deaths

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See the main article: Holocaust victims

The Nazis killed around 6 million Jews[14][15] and 5 million others[42] during the Holocaust. However, not all deaths were written down, so it is impossible to know the exact number of deaths.

Jews

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See the main article: Jews
Further information: Antisemitism

Nearly two out of every three Jews in Europe were killed in the Holocaust.[21] This included around 3 million Polish Jews.[43][44] The Holocaust killed almost all of the Jewish children in Europe. Before World War II, there were about 1.6 million Jewish children living in the lands that the Nazis would soon control. Only 6% to 11% of them survived World War II; between 1 million and 1.5 million died.[45] (The adult survival rate was at least three times higher: 33%.[45]) Most European Jews had already been killed by 1943 before the Allies received reliable reports of the mass extermination.[46] As per the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM),[42]

  • 2.7 million Jews were killed at death camps
  • 2 million Jews were killed in mass shootings and other massacres
  • 800,000 to 1 million Jews were killed in ghettos, forced labor camps and concentration camps
  • 250,000 Jews were killed in other acts of violence, including tortures, pogroms, death marches etc.

The approximate proportions of Jews killed are as follows.

Other victims of Nazi genocide

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As per the USHMM, other victims of Nazi genocide included:[42]

Why were the Jews killed?

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For hundreds of years before the Holocaust, there had been hatred and persecution of Jews (antisemitism) in Europe.[52] Many people wrongly thought that all Jews became rich by stealing money from others, like Christians.[53] Many believed Jews only liked other Jews.[53] Since at least the 2nd century BC, people have made accusations of blood libel - accusing Jews of harming children to use their blood for religious rituals.[54]

 
An article advertising Hitler's Mein Kampf in January 1933

These beliefs were not true and were based on stereotypes and prejudices. However, these beliefs were popular in the German-speaking world and elsewhere in the late 1800s.[53]

Adolf Hitler was born in Austria during this time, when many people disliked Jews. He may have been jealous of Jewish success in Austria. However, in his book Mein Kampf ("My Struggle"), he said it was the Jews' fault that Germany and Austria lost World War I.[55] He also said Germany's economic problems were the Jews' fault.[55] Many people agreed with Hitler’s ideas and supported him as the leader of the Nazi Party.[56][57]

On the other hand, there were people who saved Jews during the Holocaust because they thought it was the right thing to do. Some of them were later given "Righteous Among the Nations" awards by Yad Vashem.[58]

Holocaust denial

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See the main article: Holocaust denial
Further information: Holocaust trivialization and Holocaust inversion

Some people say the Holocaust did not happen at all,[59] or was not as bad as historians say it was. This is called Holocaust denial. However, historians agree that the Holocaust did happen and has been described correctly.[60] Many Holocaust deniers say that the Nazis did not kill so many people. Instead, they claim many of these people died because they were ill or didn't have enough to eat. But historical accounts, eyewitness evidence, and documentary evidence from the Nazis themselves clearly prove that the ideas of Holocaust deniers are not true. Jews were killed because Hitler ordered it. In Germany[61] and some other countries, it is against the law to say that the Holocaust never happened.[62]

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Notes

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  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 Matt Brosnan (Imperial War Museum, 2018): "The Holocaust was the systematic murder of Europe's Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators during the Second World War."[3]
    Jack R. Fischel (Historical Dictionary of the Holocaust, 2010): "The Holocaust refers to the Nazi objective of annihilating every Jewish man, woman, and child who fell under their control."[4]
    Peter Hayes (How Was It Possible? A Holocaust Reader, 2015): "The Holocaust, the Nazi attempt to eradicate the Jews of Europe, has come to be regarded as the emblematic event of Twentieth Century ... Hitler's ideology depicted the Jews as uniquely dangerous to Germany and therefore uniquely destined to disappear completely from the Reich and all territories subordinate to it. The threat posted by supposedly corrupting but generally powerless Sinti and Roma was far less, and therefore addressed inconsistently in the Nazi realm. Gay men were defined as a problem only if they were German or having sex with Germans and considered 'curable' in most cases. ... Germany's murderous intent toward the handicapped ... was more comprehensive ... but here, too, implementation was uneven and life-saving exceptions permitted .... Not only were some Slavs—Slovaks, Croats, Bulgarians, some Ukrainians—allotted a favored place in Hitler's New Order, but the fate of most of the other Slavs the Nazis derided as sub-humans ... consisted of enslavement and gradual attrition, not the prompt massacre meted out to the Jews after 1941."[5]
    Raul Hilberg (The Destruction of the European Jews, 2003): "Little by little, some documents were gathered and books were written, and after about two decades the annihilation of the Jews was given a name: Holocaust."[6]
    Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, UK (2019): "The Holocaust (The Shoah in Hebrew) was the attempt by the Nazis and their collaborators to murder all the Jews in Europe."[7]
    Ronnie S. Landau (The Nazi Holocaust: Its History and Meaning, 1992): "The Holocaust involved the deliberate, systematic murder of approximately 6 million Jews in Nazi-dominated Europe between 1941 and 1945."[2]
    Michael Marrus (Perspectives on the Holocaust, 2015): "The Holocaust, the murder of close to six million Jews by the Nazis during the Second World War ...".[8]
    Timothy D. Snyder (Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, 2010): "In this book the term Holocaust signifies the final version of the Final Solution, the German policy to eliminate the Jews of Europe by murdering them. Although Hitler certainly wished to remove the Jews from Europe in a Final Solution earlier, the Holocaust on this definition begins in summer 1941, with the shooting of Jewish women and children in the occupied Soviet Union. The term Holocaust is sometimes used in two other ways: to mean all German killing policies during the war, or to mean all oppression of Jews by the Nazi regime. In this book, Holocaust means the murder of the Jews in Europe, as carried out by the Germans by guns and gas between 1941 and 1945."[9]
    Dan Stone (Histories of the Holocaust, 2010): "'Holocaust' ... refers to the genocide of the Jews, which by no means excludes an understanding that other groups—notably Romanies and Slavs—were victims of genocide."[10]
    United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (Holocaust Encyclopedia, 2017): "The Holocaust was the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators."[11]

    Yad Vashem (2019): "The Holocaust was the murder by Nazi Germany of six million Jews."[12]

References

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  1. ↑ "Deportation of Hungarian Jews". Timeline of Events. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Archived from the original on 25 November 2017. Retrieved 6 October 2017.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 Landau 2016, p. 3.
  3. ↑ Brosnan, Matt (12 June 2018). "What Was The Holocaust?". Imperial War Museum. Archived from the original on 2 March 2019. Retrieved 2 March 2019.
  4. ↑ Fischel 2010, p. 115.
  5. ↑ Hayes 2015, pp. xiii–xiv.
  6. ↑ Hilberg 2003, p. 1133.
  7. ↑ "The Holocaust". Holocaust Memorial Day Trust. Archived from the original on 10 February 2019.
  8. ↑ Marrus 2015, p. vii.
  9. ↑ Snyder 2010, p. 412.
  10. ↑ Stone 2010, pp. 1–3.
  11. ↑ "Introduction to the Holocaust". Holocaust Encyclopedia. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Archived from the original on 1 October 2017. Retrieved 4 October 2017.
  12. ↑ "What was the Holocaust?". Yad Vashem. Archived from the original on 2 March 2019. Retrieved 16 June 2019.
  13. ↑ "Final solution | Definition, Holocaust, & Third Reich | Britannica". Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved 2024-10-18.
  14. ↑ 14.0 14.1 Rubenstein, Richard L.; Roth, John K. (2003). Approaches to Auschwitz: The Holocaust and Its Legacy. Westminster John Knox Press. p. 381. ISBN 978-0-664-22353-3.
  15. ↑ 15.0 15.1 Willoughby, Susan (2002). The Holocaust (20th Century Perspectives). Heinemann. p. 42. ISBN 978-0-431-11990-8.
  16. ↑ 16.0 16.1 "36 Questions About the Holocaust". Museum of Tolerance Los Angeles. Retrieved 2024-10-14.
  17. ↑ "Holocaust: Nazi Persecution, Genocide, Concentration Camps". Encyclopedia Britannica. 2024-10-17. Retrieved 2024-10-18.
  18. ↑ "Deportations". United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Retrieved 2024-10-18.
  19. ↑ 19.0 19.1 "Auschwitz and Shoah: Gas Chambers". Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum.
  20. ↑ 20.0 20.1 "Pre-War: Overview". Holocaust Center for Humanity. Retrieved 2024-10-18.
  21. ↑ 21.0 21.1 "Timeline of Events". United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Retrieved 2024-10-14.
  22. ↑ "The Concentration Camps – Inside the Nazi System of Incarceration and Genocide". khc.qcc.cuny.edu. Retrieved 2024-10-14.
  23. ↑ 23.0 23.1 23.2 "Nazi Camps". United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Retrieved 2024-10-18.
  24. ↑ "Ghettos In The Holocaust". Imperial War Museums. Retrieved 2024-10-14.
  25. ↑ "Warsaw Ghetto". Yad Vashem. Retrieved 2024-10-14.
  26. ↑ 26.0 26.1 26.2 "Lodz". United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Retrieved 2024-10-14.
  27. ↑ "How Many Concentration Camps?". Jewish Virtual Library. Retrieved 2024-10-18.
  28. ↑ Orth, Karin. Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos: 1933 - 1945. Indiana University Press. pp. 195 (fn. 49).
  29. ↑ "The Nazi Camps and the Persecution and Murder of the Jews: Nazi Concentration Camps". European Holocaust Research Infrastructure. Retrieved 2024-10-18.
  30. ↑ "Major Nazi Concentration Camps". National Museum of the United States Air Force.
  31. ↑ "Killing Centers in Occupied Poland, 1942". United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Retrieved 2024-10-18.
  32. ↑ 32.0 32.1 32.2 "Babi Yar | History, Location, Shostakovich, Map, & Facts | Britannica". Encyclopedia Britannica. 2024-09-29. Retrieved 2024-10-14.
  33. ↑ Hjelmgaard, Kim. "75 years ago: 33,771 Jews slaughtered at Babi Yar". USA TODAY. Retrieved 2024-10-14.
  34. ↑ 34.0 34.1 34.2 34.3 "T4 Program | Definition and History | Britannica". Encyclopedia Britannica. 2024-10-03. Retrieved 2024-10-14.
  35. ↑ 35.0 35.1 "Zyklon-B | Description, Manufacturer, & Facts | Britannica". Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved 2024-10-14.
  36. ↑ 36.0 36.1 36.2 "Sicknesses and Epidemics". Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. 2024.
  37. ↑ Müller, Filip; Freitag, Helmut; Flatauer, Susanne (1999). Eyewitness Auschwitz: three years in the gas chambers. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee. ISBN 978-1-56663-271-3.
  38. ↑ 38.0 38.1 Caplan, Jane; Wachsmann, Nikolaus, eds. (2010). Concentration camps in Nazi Germany: the new histories. London ; New York, NY: Routledge. pp. 139–160. ISBN 978-0-415-42650-3. OCLC 166360253.
  39. ↑ 39.0 39.1 39.2 Shasha, Shaul M. (April 2004). "Morbidity in the Concentration Camps of the Third Reich". Harefuah. 143 (4): 272–276, 318. ISSN 0017-7768. PMID 15116584.
  40. ↑ "Hunger in the concentration camps. Part Two". Medical Review Auschwitz. Retrieved 2024-10-18.
  41. ↑ "Food". Muzeum Treblinka. Retrieved 2024-10-18.
  42. ↑ 42.0 42.1 42.2 "How Many People did the Nazis Murder?". United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. 2023-09-26. Retrieved 2024-10-14.
  43. ↑ Bauer, Yehuda; Rozett, Robert (1990). "Appendix". In Gutman, Israel (ed.). Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. New York: Macmillan Library Reference. pp. 1797–1802. ISBN 978-0-02-896090-6.
  44. ↑ Benz, Wolfgang (1996). Dimension des Volkermords. Die Zahl der judischen Opfer des Nationalsozialismus (in German). Dtv. pp. 145 ff. ISBN 978-3-423-04690-9.
  45. ↑ 45.0 45.1 "Plight of Jewish Children". United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Retrieved 2024-10-17.
  46. ↑ 46.0 46.1 46.2 46.3 Laqueur, Walter (July 30, 2009). "Towards the Holocaust". The Changing Face of Antisemitism: From Ancient Times to the Present Day. ISBN 9780195341218. Retrieved November 3, 2024.
  47. ↑
  48. ↑
  49. ↑ Croatian: Nezavisna Država Hrvatska (NDH)
  50. ↑
  51. ↑
  52. ↑ "Antisemitism: Learning the Lessons of History". The UNESCO Courier. 2024-05-27. Retrieved 2024-10-17.
  53. ↑ 53.0 53.1 53.2 "Antisemitism in History: The Era of Nationalism, 1800–1918". United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Retrieved 2024-10-18.
  54. ↑ "Blood Libel". United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Retrieved 2024-10-14.
  55. ↑ 55.0 55.1 "Mein Kampf | Quotes, Summary, & Analysis | Britannica". Encyclopedia Britannica. 2024-09-23. Retrieved 2024-10-18.
  56. ↑ Kershaw, Ian (2010). Hitler: A Biography. W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 978-0-393-33761-7.
  57. ↑ Stern, Fritz (2007). Five Germany's I Have Known. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 978-0-374-53086-0.
  58. ↑ "The Righteous Among the Nations | Yad Vashem". Yad Vashem. Retrieved 2024-10-18.
  59. ↑ Lipstadt, Deborah (2011-02-17). "Denying the Holocaust". BBC. Retrieved 2011-04-20.
  60. ↑ "Denying the Holocaust". The Week. Retrieved 2010-05-13.
  61. ↑ "Facebook must adhere to German Holocaust denial laws, says Berlin". Reuters. 2018-07-19. Retrieved 2019-07-17.
  62. ↑ "Push for EU Holocaust denial ban", BBC News, January 15, 2007. Retrieved May 13, 2010.

More reading

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Other websites

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