Holocaust" and "Shoah" redirect here.

For other uses, see Holocaust

(disambiguation) and Shoah (disambiguation).
The Holocaust
Part of World War II

Hungarian Jews arriving at Auschwitz II-Birkenau in

German-occupied Poland, May 1944. Most were
"selected" to go straight to the gas chambers.[1]
(from the Auschwitz Album)
Location Nazi Germany and German-occupied
Europe
Date 1941–1945[2]
Attack Genocide, ethnic cleansing
type
Deaths Around 6 million European
Jews[a]
Other victims of Nazi
persecution: 11 million[3]
Perpetrato Nazi Germany and its collaborators
rs
Motive Antisemitism
The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah,[b] was a genocide in
German-occupied Europe between 1941 and 1945 during World War
II, in which Nazi Germany, aided by local collaborators, systematically
murdered some six million Jews, around two-thirds of Europe's
Jewish population.[a][c] The murders were carried out in pogroms and
mass shootings; by a policy of extermination through labour in
concentration camps; and in gas chambers and gas vans in German
extermination camps in occupied Poland: Auschwitz, Bełżec,
Chełmno, Majdanek, Sobibór, and Treblinka.[5]
Germany implemented the persecution in stages. Following Adolf
Hitler's appointment as Chancellor in January 1933, the regime built a
network of concentration camps in Germany for political opponents
and those deemed "undesirable", starting with Dachau on 22 March
1933.[6] After the passing of the Enabling Act on 24 March,[7] which
gave Hitler plenary powers, the government began isolating Jews
from civil society, which included a boycott of Jewish businesses in
April 1933, and enacting the Nuremberg Laws in September 1935.
On 9–10 November 1938, during Kristallnacht (the "Night of Broken
Glass"), Jewish businesses and other buildings were ransacked,
smashed or set on fire throughout Germany and Austria, which
Germany had annexed in March that year. After Germany invaded
Poland in September 1939, triggering World War II, the regime set up
ghettos to segregate Jews from the rest of the population. Eventually
thousands of camps and other detention sites were established
across German-occupied Europe.
The segregation of Jews in ghettos culminated in the policy of
extermination the Nazis called the "Final Solution to the Jewish
Question", discussed by senior Nazi officials at the Wannsee
Conference in Berlin in January 1942. As German forces captured
territories in the East, all anti-Jewish measures were radicalized.
Under the coordination of the SS, with directions from the highest
leadership of the Nazi Party, killings were committed within Germany
itself, throughout occupied Europe, and within territories controlled by
Germany's allies. Paramilitary death squads called Einsatzgruppen,
in cooperation with the Wehrmacht and local collaborators, murdered
around 1.3 million Jews in mass shootings and pogroms between
1941 and 1945. By mid-1942, victims were being deported from
ghettos across Europe in sealed freight trains to extermination camps
where, if they survived the journey, they were worked to death or
gassed. The killing continued until the end of World War II in Europe
in May 1945.
Jews were targeted for extermination as part of a larger event during
the Holocaust era, usually defined as beginning in January 1933,[8] in
which Germany and its collaborators persecuted and murdered other
groups, including Slavs (chiefly ethnic Poles, Soviet prisoners of war,
and Soviet citizens), the Roma, the "incurably sick", political and
religious dissenters such as communists and Jehovah's Witnesses,
and gay men.[d] Taking into account all the victims of Nazi
persecution, the death toll rises to 17 million.[3]
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 External links Terminology and scope
Terminology
Main article: Names of the Holocaust
Part of a series on
The Holocaust

Jews on selection ramp at Auschwitz, May 1944

Responsibility
[show]
Early policies
[show]
Victims
[show]
Ghettos
[show]
Camps
[show]
Atrocities
[show]
Resistance
[show]
Allied response
[show]
Aftermath
[show]
 Lists
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Resources
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Remembrance
[show]
• vte
The term holocaust, first used in 1895 to describe the massacre of
Armenians,[9] comes from the Greek: ὁλόκαυστος,
romanized: holókaustos; ὅλος hólos, "whole" + καυστός kaustós, "burnt
offering".[10][e] The Century Dictionary defined it in 1904 as "a sacrifice
or offering entirely consumed by fire, in use among the Jews and
some pagan nations".[f]
The biblical term shoah (Hebrew: meaning "destruction", ), ‫ׁשֹואָ ה‬
became the standard Hebrew term for the murder of the European
Jews, first used in a pamphlet in 1940, Sho'at Yehudei Polin ("Sho'ah
of Polish Jews"), published by the United Aid Committee for the Jews
in Poland.[13] On 3 October 1941 the cover of the magazine The
American Hebrew used the phrase "before the Holocaust", apparently
to refer to the situation in France,[14] and in May 1943 The New York
Times, discussing the Bermuda Conference, referred to the
hundreds of thousands of European Jews still surviving the Nazi "
Holocaust".[15] In 1968 the Library of Congress created a new
category, "Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945)".[16] The term was
popularized in the United States by the NBC mini-series Holocaust
about a fictional family of German Jews,[17] and in November ), 1978(
the President's Commission on the Holocaust was 1978
established.[18] As non-Jewish groups began to include themselves as
Holocaust victims too, many Jews chose to use the terms Shoah or
Churban instead.[14][g] The Nazis used the phrase "Final Solution to the
]20[
.Jewish Question" (German: die Endlösung der Judenfrage)
Definition
Most Holocaust historians define the Holocaust as the enactment,
between 1941 and 1945, of the German state policy to exterminate
the European Jews.[a] In Teaching the Holocaust (2015), Michael
Gray, a specialist in Holocaust education,[29] offers three definitions:
(a) "the persecution and murder of Jews by the Nazis and their
collaborators between 1933 and 1945", which views the events of
Kristallnacht in Germany in 1938 as an early phase of the Holocaust;
(b) "the systematic mass murder of the Jews by the Nazi regime and
its collaborators between 1941 and 1945", which acknowledges the
shift in German policy in 1941 toward the extermination of the Jewish
people in Europe; and (c) "the persecution and murder of various
groups by the Nazi regime and its collaborators between 1933 and
1945", which includes all the Nazis' victims. The third definition fails,
Gray writes, to acknowledge that only the Jewish people were singled
out for annihilation.[30]
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum defines the
Holocaust as the "systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored
persecution and murder of six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its
collaborators",[31] distinguishing between the Holocaust and the
targeting of other groups during "the era of the Holocaust".[32]
According to Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memorial, most
historians regard the start of the "Holocaust era" as January 1933,
when Hitler was named Chancellor of Germany.[8] Other victims of the
Holocaust era include those viewed as inferior (such as the Roma,
ethnic Poles, Russians, and the disabled); and those targeted
because of their beliefs or behavior (such as Jehovah's Witnesses,
communists, and homosexuals).[32] Hitler came to see the Jews as
"uniquely dangerous to Germany", according to Peter Hayes, "and
therefore uniquely destined to disappear completely from the Reich
and all territories subordinate to it". The persecution and murder of
other groups was much less consistent. For example, he writes, the
Nazis regarded the Slavs as "sub-human", but their treatment
consisted of "enslavement and gradual attrition", while "some Slavs—
Slovaks, Croats, Bulgarians, some Ukrainians—[were] allotted a
favored place in Hitler's New Order".[22]
Dan Stone, a specialist in the historiography of the Holocaust, lists
ethnic Poles, Ukrainians, Soviet prisoners of war, Jehovah's
Witnesses, black Germans, and homosexuals as among the groups
persecuted by the Nazis; he writes that the occupation of eastern
Europe can also be viewed as genocidal. But the German attitude
toward the Jews was different in kind, he argues. The Nazis regarded
the Jews not as racially inferior, deviant, or enemy nationals, as they
did other groups, but as a "Gegenrasse: a 'counter-race', that is to
say, not really human at all". The Holocaust, for Stone, is therefore
defined as the genocide of the Jews, although he argues that it
cannot be "properly historically situated without understanding the
'Nazi empire' with its grandiose demographic plans".[d] Donald Niewyk
and Francis Nicosia, in The Columbia Guide to the Holocaust (2000),
favour a definition that focuses on the Jews, Roma, and Aktion T4
victims: "The Holocaust—that is, Nazi genocide—was the systematic,
state-sponsored murder of entire groups determined by heredity. This
applied to Jews, Gypsies, and the handicapped."[34]
Distinctive features
Genocidal state
Further information: List of Nazi concentration camps

German-occupied Europe, 1942

Concentration camps, extermination camps, and ghettos (2007 borders;

extermination camps circled in red)
The logistics of the mass murder turned Germany into what Michael
Berenbaum called a "genocidal state".[35] Eberhard Jäckel wrote in
1986 that it was the first time a state had thrown its power behind the
idea that an entire people should be wiped out.[h] Anyone with three or
four Jewish grandparents was to be exterminated,[37] and complex
rules were devised to deal with Mischlinge ("mixed breeds": half and
quarter Jews).[38] Bureaucrats identified who was a Jew, confiscated
property, and scheduled trains to deport them. Companies fired Jews
and later used them as slave labor. Universities dismissed Jewish
faculty and students. German pharmaceutical companies tested
drugs on camp prisoners; other companies built the crematoria.[35] As
prisoners entered the death camps, they were ordered to surrender
all personal property, which was catalogued and tagged before being
sent to Germany for reuse or recycling.[39] Through a concealed
account, the German National Bank helped launder valuables stolen
from the victims.[40]
Extermination camps and gas chambers
Further information: § Extermination camps
Victims were transported in sealed freight trains from all over Europe
to extermination camps equipped with gas chambers.[41] The
stationary facilities grew out of Nazi experiments with poison gas
during the Aktion T4 mass murder ("euthanasia") programme against
the disabled and mentally ill, which began in 1939.[42] The Germans
set up six extermination camps in Poland: Auschwitz II-Birkenau
(established October 1941); Majdanek (October 1941); Chełmno
(December 1941); and the three Operation Reinhard camps: Bełżec,
Sobibór, and Treblinka (1942).[5] Discussions at the Wannsee
Conference in January 1942 made it clear that the German "final
solution of the Jewish question" was intended eventually to include
Britain and all the neutral states in Europe, including Ireland,
Switzerland, Turkey, Sweden, Portugal, and Spain.[43]