The Holocaust
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The Holocaust
Part of World War II
From the Auschwitz Album: Hungarian Jews arriving at Auschwitz II in German-occupied Poland, May 1944. Most were "selected" to go to the gas chambers. Camp prisoners are visible in their striped uniforms.[1]
Location
Nazi Germany and German-occupied Europe
Description
Genocide of the European Jews
Date
1941–1945[2]
Attack type
Genocide, ethnic cleansing
Deaths
Around 6 million Jews[a]
Other victims of Nazi persecution during the Holocaust era: 11 million[3]
Perpetrators
Nazi Germany and its collaborators
List of major perpetrators of the Holocaust
Motive
Antisemitism, Racism
Trials
Nuremberg trials, Subsequent Nuremberg trials, Trial of Adolf Eichmann, and others
The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah,[b] was the World War II genocide of the European Jews. Between 1941 and 1945, across German-occupied Europe, Nazi Germany and its 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 work in concentration camps; and in gas chambers and gas vans in German extermination camps, chiefly Auschwitz, Bełżec, Chełmno, Majdanek, Sobibór, and Treblinka in occupied Poland.[5]
Germany implemented the persecution in stages. Following Adolf Hitler's appointment as Chancellor on 30 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; this included boycotting Jewish businesses in April 1933 and enacting the Nuremberg Laws in September 1935. On 9–10 November 1938, eight months after Germany annexed Austria, Jewish businesses and other buildings were ransacked, smashed or set on fire throughout Germany and Austria during what became known as Kristallnacht (the "Night of Broken Glass"). 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 German Army 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.
The European 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 civilians and Soviet prisoners of war), the Roma, the "incurably sick", political and religious dissidents, and gay men.[d] The death toll of these groups is thought to rise to 11 million.[3]
Contents
1Terminology and scope1.1Terminology
1.2Definition
2Distinctive features2.1Genocidal state
2.2Collaboration
2.3Medical experiments
3Jews in Europe
4Origins4.1Antisemitism and the völkisch movement
4.2Germany after World War I, Hitler's world view
5Rise of Nazi Germany5.1Dictatorship and repression (1933–1939)
5.2Sterilization Law, Aktion T4
5.3Nuremberg Laws, Jewish emigration
5.4Anschluss
5.5Kristallnacht
5.6Resettlement
6Beginning of World War II6.1Invasion of Poland6.1.1Einsatzgruppen, pogroms
6.1.2Ghettos, Jewish councils
6.2Invasion of Norway and Denmark
6.3Invasion of France and the Low Countries
6.4Invasion of Yugoslavia and Greece
6.5Invasion of the Soviet Union6.5.1Reasons
6.5.2Mass shootings
6.5.3Toward the Holocaust
6.6Germany's allies6.6.1Romania
6.6.2Bulgaria, Slovakia, Hungary
6.6.3Italy, Finland, Japan
6.7Concentration and labor camps
7Final Solution7.1Pearl Harbor, Germany declares war on America
7.2Wannsee Conference
7.3Extermination camps7.3.1Gas vans
7.3.2Gas chambers
7.4Jewish resistance
7.5Polish resistance, flow of information about the mass murder
7.6Climax, Holocaust in Hungary
7.7Death marches
7.8Liberation
7.9Death toll
8Other victims of Nazi persecution8.1Soviet civilians and POWs
8.2Non-Jewish Poles
8.3Roma
8.4Political and religious opponents
8.5Gay men
8.6Black people
9Aftermath9.1Trials
9.2Reparations
9.3Historikerstreit, uniqueness question
9.4Awareness
10See also
11Sources11.1Notes
11.2Citations
11.3Works cited
12External 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[show]
Resources[show]
Remembrance[show]
v
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The term holocaust, previously used in 1895 to describe the massacre of Armenian Christians by Ottoman Muslims,[9] comes from the Greek: ὁλόκαυστος, romanized: holókaustos; ὅλος hólos, "whole" + καυστός kaustós, "burnt offering".[e] The biblical term shoah (Hebrew: שׁוֹאָה), meaning "destruction", became the standard Hebrew term for the murder of the European Jews; Yom HaShoah is Israel's Holocaust Remembrance Day. According to Haaretz, the writer Yehuda Erez may have been the first to describe events in Germany as the shoah. Davar and then Haaretz both used the term in September 1939.[12][f]
On 3 October 1941 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 (1978), about a fictional family of German Jews,[17] and in November that year the President's Commission on the Holocaust was established.[18] As non-Jewish groups began to include themselves as Holocaust victims, many Jews chose to use the term Shoah or the Yiddish term Churban.[14][g] The Nazis used the phrase "Final Solution to the Jewish Question" (German: die Endlösung der Judenfrage).[20]
Definition
Most Holocaust historians define the Holocaust as the genocide of the European Jews by Nazi Germany and its collaborators between 1941 and 1945.[a] In Teaching the Holocaust (2015), Michael Gray, a specialist in Holocaust education,[28] offers three definitions: (a) "the persecution and murder of Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators between 1933 and 1945", which views Kristallnacht 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 has the disadvantage of excluding victims before 1941 but the advantage, in Gray's view, of recognizing that there was a shift in policy in 1941 toward extermination; 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, a definition that fails, Gray writes, to acknowledge that only the Jews were singled out for annihilation.[29]