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The Holocaust

By: History.com Editors

Updated: August 7, 2024 | Original: October 14, 2009

The Holocaust was the state-sponsored persecution and mass murder of millions of European Jews, Romani people, the intellectually disabled, political dissidents and homosexuals by the German Nazi regime between 1933 and 1945. The word “holocaust,” from the Greek words “holos” (whole) and “kaustos” (burned), was historically used to describe a sacrificial offering burned on an altar.

After years of Nazi rule in Germany, dictator Adolf Hitler’s “Final Solution”—now known as the Holocaust—came to fruition during World War II, with mass killing centers in concentration camps. About six million Jews and some five million others, targeted for racial, political, ideological and behavioral reasons, died in the Holocaust—more than one million of those who perished were children.

Historical Anti-Semitism

Anti-Semitism in Europe did not begin with Adolf Hitler . Though use of the term itself dates only to the 1870s, there is evidence of hostility toward Jews long before the Holocaust—even as far back as the ancient world, when Roman authorities destroyed the Jewish temple in Jerusalem and forced Jews to leave Palestine .

The Enlightenment , during the 17th and 18th centuries, emphasized religious tolerance, and in the 19th century Napoleon Bonaparte and other European rulers enacted legislation that ended long-standing restrictions on Jews. Anti-Semitic feeling endured, however, in many cases taking on a racial character rather than a religious one.

Did you know? Even in the early 21st century, the legacy of the Holocaust endures. Swiss government and banking institutions have in recent years acknowledged their complicity with the Nazis and established funds to aid Holocaust survivors and other victims of human rights abuses, genocide or other catastrophes.

Hitler's Rise to Power

The roots of Adolf Hitler’s particularly virulent brand of anti-Semitism are unclear. Born in Austria in 1889, he served in the German army during World War I . Like many anti-Semites in Germany, he blamed the Jews for the country’s defeat in 1918.

Soon after World War I ended, Hitler joined the National German Workers’ Party, which became the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP), known to English speakers as the Nazis. While imprisoned for treason for his role in the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, Hitler wrote the memoir and propaganda tract “ Mein Kampf ” (or “my struggle”), in which he predicted a general European war that would result in “the extermination of the Jewish race in Germany.”

Hitler was obsessed with the idea of the superiority of the “pure” German race, which he called “Aryan,” and with the need for “Lebensraum,” or living space, for that race to expand. In the decade after he was released from prison, Hitler took advantage of the weakness of his rivals to enhance his party’s status and rise from obscurity to power.

On January 30, 1933, he was named chancellor of Germany. After the death of President Paul von Hindenburg in 1934, Hitler anointed himself Fuhrer , becoming Germany’s supreme ruler.

Concentration Camps

The twin goals of racial purity and territorial expansion were the core of Hitler’s worldview, and from 1933 onward they would combine to form the driving force behind his foreign and domestic policy.

At first, the Nazis reserved their harshest persecution for political opponents such as Communists or Social Democrats. The first official concentration camp opened at Dachau (near Munich) in March 1933, and many of the first prisoners sent there were Communists.

Like the network of concentration camps that followed, becoming the killing grounds of the Holocaust, Dachau was under the control of Heinrich Himmler , head of the elite Nazi guard, the Schutzstaffel (SS) and later chief of the German police.

By July 1933, German concentration camps ( Konzentrationslager in German, or KZ) held some 27,000 people in “protective custody.” Huge Nazi rallies and symbolic acts such as the public burning of books by Jews, Communists, liberals and foreigners helped drive home the desired message of party strength and unity.

In 1933, Jews in Germany numbered around 525,000—just one percent of the total German population. During the next six years, Nazis undertook an “Aryanization” of Germany, dismissing non-Aryans from civil service, liquidating Jewish-owned businesses and stripping Jewish lawyers and doctors of their clients. 

Nuremberg Laws

Under the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, anyone with three or four Jewish grandparents was considered a Jew, while those with two Jewish grandparents were designated Mischlinge (half-breeds).

Under the Nuremberg Laws, Jews became routine targets for stigmatization and persecution. This culminated in Kristallnacht , or the “Night of Broken Glass” in November 1938, when German synagogues were burned and windows in Jewish home and shops were smashed; some 100 Jews were killed and thousands more arrested.

From 1933 to 1939, hundreds of thousands of Jews who were able to leave Germany did, while those who remained lived in a constant state of uncertainty and fear.

Euthanasia Program

In September 1939, Germany invaded the western half of Poland , starting World War II . German police soon forced tens of thousands of Polish Jews from their homes and into ghettoes, giving their confiscated properties to ethnic Germans (non-Jews outside Germany who identified as German), Germans from the Reich or Polish gentiles.

Surrounded by high walls and barbed wire, the Jewish ghettoes in Poland functioned like captive city-states, governed by Jewish Councils. In addition to widespread unemployment, poverty and hunger, overpopulation and poor sanitation made the ghettoes breeding grounds for disease such as typhus.

Meanwhile, beginning in the fall of 1939, Nazi officials selected around 70,000 Germans institutionalized for mental illness or physical disabilities to be gassed to death in the so-called Euthanasia Program.

After prominent German religious leaders protested, Hitler put an end to the program in August 1941, though killings of the disabled continued in secrecy, and by 1945 some 275,000 people deemed handicapped from all over Europe had been killed. In hindsight, it seems clear that the Euthanasia Program functioned as a pilot for the Holocaust.

'Final Solution'

Throughout the spring and summer of 1940, the German army expanded Hitler’s empire in Europe, conquering Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and France. Beginning in 1941, Jews from all over the continent, as well as hundreds of thousands of European Romani people, were transported to Polish ghettoes.

The German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 marked a new level of brutality in warfare. Mobile killing units of Himmler’s SS called Einsatzgruppen would murder more than 500,000 Soviet Jews and others (usually by shooting) over the course of the German occupation.

A memorandum dated July 31, 1941, from Hitler’s top commander Hermann Goering to Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the SD (the security service of the SS), referred to the need for an Endlösung ( Final Solution ) to “the Jewish question.”

Yellow Stars

Beginning in September 1941, every person designated as a Jew in German-held territory was marked with a yellow, six-pointed star, making them open targets. Tens of thousands were soon being deported to the Polish ghettoes and German-occupied cities in the USSR.

Since June 1941, experiments with mass killing methods had been ongoing at the concentration camp of Auschwitz , near Krakow, Poland. That August, 500 officials gassed 500 Soviet POWs to death with the pesticide Zyklon-B. The SS soon placed a huge order for the gas with a German pest-control firm, an ominous indicator of the coming Holocaust.

Holocaust Death Camps

Beginning in late 1941, the Germans began mass transports from the ghettoes in Poland to the concentration camps, starting with those people viewed as the least useful: the sick, old and weak and the very young.

The first mass gassings began at the camp of Belzec, near Lublin, on March 17, 1942. Five more mass killing centers were built at camps in occupied Poland, including Chelmno, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek and the largest of all, Auschwitz.

From 1942 to 1945, Jews were deported to the camps from all over Europe, including German-controlled territory as well as those countries allied with Germany. The heaviest deportations took place during the summer and fall of 1942, when more than 300,000 people were deported from the Warsaw ghetto alone.

Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

Amid the deportations, disease and constant hunger, incarcerated people in the Warsaw Ghetto rose up in armed revolt.

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising from April 19-May 16, 1943, ended in the death of 7,000 Jews, with 50,000 survivors sent to extermination camps. But the resistance fighters had held off the Nazis for almost a month, and their revolt inspired revolts at camps and ghettos across German-occupied Europe.

Though the Nazis tried to keep operation of the camps secret, the scale of the killing made this virtually impossible. Eyewitnesses brought reports of Nazi atrocities in Poland to the Allied governments, who were harshly criticized after the war for their failure to respond, or to publicize news of the mass slaughter.

This lack of action was likely mostly due to the Allied focus on winning the war at hand, but was also partly a result of the general incomprehension with which news of the Holocaust was met and the denial and disbelief that such atrocities could be occurring on such a scale.

'Angel of Death'

At Auschwitz alone, more than 2 million people were murdered in a process resembling a large-scale industrial operation. A large population of Jewish and non-Jewish inmates worked in the labor camp there; though only Jews were gassed, thousands of others died of starvation or disease.

In 1943, eugenics advocate Josef Mengele arrived in Auschwitz to begin his infamous experiments on Jewish prisoners. His special area of focus was conducting medical experiments on twins , injecting them with everything from petrol to chloroform under the guise of giving them medical treatment. His actions earned him the nickname “the Angel of Death.”

The Horrifying Discovery of Dachau Concentration Camp—And Its Liberation by US Troops

The wrenching images and first‑hand testimonies of Dachau recorded by U.S. soldiers brought the horrors of the Holocaust home to America.

Horrors of Auschwitz: The Numbers Behind WWII’s Deadliest Concentration Camp

How many were killed, how many children were sent to the site and the numbers of people who attempted to escape are among the facts that reveal the scale of crimes committed at Auschwitz.

After WWII, Survivors of Nazi Horrors Found Community in Displaced‑Persons Camps

In the wake of the Holocaust, the Allies set up the camps throughout Europe to offer temporary homelands to traumatized populations.

Nazi Rule Ends

By the spring of 1945, German leadership was dissolving amid internal dissent, with Goering and Himmler both seeking to distance themselves from Hitler and take power.

In his last will and political testament, dictated in a German bunker that April 29, Hitler blamed the war on “International Jewry and its helpers” and urged the German leaders and people to follow “the strict observance of the racial laws and with merciless resistance against the universal poisoners of all peoples”—the Jews.

The following day, Hitler died by suicide . Germany’s formal surrender in World War II came barely a week later, on May 8, 1945.

German forces had begun evacuating many of the death camps in the fall of 1944, sending inmates under guard to march further from the advancing enemy’s front line. These so-called “death marches” continued all the way up to the German surrender, resulting in the deaths of some 250,000 to 375,000 people.

In his classic book Survival in Auschwitz , the Italian-Jewish author Primo Levi described his own state of mind, as well as that of his fellow inmates in Auschwitz on the day before Soviet troops liberated the camp in January 1945: “We lay in a world of death and phantoms. The last trace of civilization had vanished around and inside us. The work of bestial degradation, begun by the victorious Germans, had been carried to conclusion by the Germans in defeat.”

Legacy of the Holocaust

The wounds of the Holocaust—known in Hebrew as “Shoah,” or catastrophe—were slow to heal. Survivors of the camps found it nearly impossible to return home, as in many cases they had lost their entire family and been denounced by their non-Jewish neighbors. As a result, the late 1940s saw an unprecedented number of refugees, POWs and other displaced populations moving across Europe.

In an effort to punish the villains of the Holocaust, the Allies held the Nuremberg Trials of 1945-46, which brought Nazi atrocities to horrifying light. Increasing pressure on the Allied powers to create a homeland for Jewish survivors of the Holocaust would lead to a mandate for the creation of Israel in 1948.

Over the decades that followed, ordinary Germans struggled with the Holocaust’s bitter legacy, as survivors and the families of victims sought restitution of wealth and property confiscated during the Nazi years.

Beginning in 1953, the German government made payments to individual Jews and to the Jewish people as a way of acknowledging the German people’s responsibility for the crimes committed in their name.

The Holocaust. The National WWII Museum . What Was The Holocaust? Imperial War Museums . Introduction to the Holocaust. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum . Holocaust Remembrance. Council of Europe . Outreach Programme on the Holocaust. United Nations .

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How did the Holocaust happen?

The Holocaust took place in the context of the Second World War, which was started by the invasion of Poland in September 1939.  Here, German soldiers hoist the Nazi Flag over Krakow castle in 1939.

Courtesy of The Wiener Holocaust Library Collections.

Prior to the start of the Second World War , Jews, Roma and those viewed as ‘ a-social ’ by the Nazis faced escalating persecution in Germany and its recently incorporated territories.

More than four hundred antisemitic laws were enacted by the Nazis between 1933 and 1938. In November 1938, the situation worsened, as hundreds of Jews were tortured and arrested and thousands of businesses were destroyed in a targeted pogrom known as Kristallnacht .

The persecution of Jews intensified as the Nazis invaded Poland on 1 September 1939 at the start of the Second World War .

This section will explore the main events of the Holocaust in chronological order.

Escalating persecution and ghettos, 1939

A market inside the Łódź Ghetto.

In the ghettos, people were often forced into labour. Here, inhabitants of the Łódź Ghetto are photographed in a workshop.

On 1 September 1939, Germany invaded Poland . In September 1939, Poland was home to over three million Jews. Prior to the invasion, the Nazis had not drawn up a specific or comprehensive plan for what to do with the Jewish population once Poland was occupied. The resulting policy of ghettoisation was improvised as a temporary solution.

In just a few months, millions of Jews were quickly imprisoned inside ghettos in Poland. Conditions inside ghettos were abysmal, and thousands quickly died from starvation, disease, and poor sanitation.

Forced ghettoisation was a large escalation from the pre-war anti-Jewish policy in Germany. Prior to the war, the Nazis had focused on encouraging Jews to emigrate from the Greater German Reich through their antisemitic policies and actions. By 1939 in Poland, the Nazis escalated their actions, and segregated and imprisoned Jews for future deportation. At this stage, the Nazis planned to deport Jews to Madagascar or lands further east. Later, in 1941, as both of these options were realised to be infeasible, the Nazis created extermination camps to liquidate the populations of the ghettos instead.

Creation of the Einsatzgruppen, 1939-41

An extract from a report written by commander of Einsatzgruppe A Franz Walter Stahlecker for Reinhard Heydrich. The report was a summary of the implementation of the final solution in the Baltics. Here, Stahlecker sets out what the Einsatzgruppen aimed to achieve.

This document is a translation used in the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials.

Courtesy of The Wiener Holocaust Library Collections. 

In the report, Stahlecker also describes pogroms which took place in Lithuania, encouraged by the Einsatzgruppen.

This map featured as part of the Stahlecker report. The map indicates the number of Jews murdered by the Einsatzgruppen. The map shows modern day Belarus, at the bottom, then, continuing clockwise, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Russia.

The Einsatzgruppen   were mobile killing squads that were a part of the SS . Members were chosen for their fanatical belief in Nazi ideology and absolute commitment to Hitler.

The Einsatzgruppen were created by Reinhard Heydrich in 1939 to liquidate the Polish Intelligentsia and prevent them from coordinating a response to the German invasion of Poland .   This was called Operation Tannenberg . The Einsatzgruppen were brutally efficient in their task.

When the Nazis began to plan for the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 , the Einsatzgruppen were actively factored into the plans. Members of the Einsatzgruppen were informed that their role in the operation was to put down resistance behind enemy lines. Several types of enemies were specifically named by Himmler to be targeted: middle and high ranking communists, Jews in service of party or government and other ‘extremist’ elements. The Einsatzgruppen were also instructed to secretly encourage antisemitic or anticommunist pogroms .

General Keitel’s order

The Einsatzgruppen’s power increased in advance of the invasion of the Soviet Union.

On 13 March 1941, General Wilhelm Keitel signed a directive which stated that Himmler had been entrusted with ‘special tasks’ and gave him (and, therefore, the Einsatzgruppen ) the authority to ‘act independently and on his own his own responsibility’ within the context of these tasks.

This order was an attempt to resolve previous issues of friction between the German Army and the SS in Poland and allow the Einsatzgruppen to combat what the Nazis saw as the ‘Jewish Bolshevik’ threat in the Soviet Union.

The Nazis associated Soviet communism, their ideological enemy, with Jews, their so-called racial enemy. They also regarded most Soviet citizens as racially inferior, even if they were not Jewish.

This order increased the power of the Einsatzgruppen and, in turn, their ability to carry out tasks independently. However, the Einsatzgruppen still worked closely with the German Army.

A portrait of Wilhelm Keitel, courtesy of The Wiener Holocaust Library Collections.

Einsatzgruppen preparation for the invasion of the Soviet Union, 1941

The Einsatzgruppen ’s main training for the invasion of the Soviet Union took place in the spring of 1941 at a police training academy at Pretzsch, fifty miles southwest of Berlin. The course took just three weeks and involved lectures on Nazi racial theory and basic military training.

In order to avoid soldiers being prosecuted under military law (as had happened previously in Poland), and to encourage complete ruthlessness when dealing with the enemy, military personnel were given legal immunity prior to the invasion of the Soviet Union. This action cleared the way for further escalation and more intense persecution of those deemed to be enemies.

Before the invasion began, the Einsatzgruppen were split into four groups (A, B, C and D). Each group covered a different territory, following behind the German Army’s invasion lines.

'Death by bullets' The Einsatzgruppen and the Soviet Union, 1941-1945

A map showing the sites of major Einsatzgruppen murders that took place between 1941 and 1945.

Courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Jewish women forced to undress sit before members of the Einsatzgruppen before their execution in the early 1940s.

Courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

This report details the actions and massacre carried out by Einsatzkommando 10B, following their arrival in Czernowitz (modern-day Ukraine) on Sunday 6 July 1941.

This document is a translation used in the Nuremberg War Crime Trials.

A post-war portrait of Paul Blobel taken at the Einsatzgruppen Trial in 1948. Blobel was an SS commander and a part of the Einsatzgruppen . He supervised several mass executions, including the Babi Yar massacre of 1941 . After the war, he was found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity, and sentenced to death.

Wikimedia [Public Domain].

This affidavit was given by Blobel at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials and describes some of the Einsatzgruppen massacres he was involved in. In the text, Blobel describes supervising the executions of between 10,000-15,000 people. The actual figure was approximately 60,000.

Blobel describes the typical process of an Einsatzgruppen massacre. Towards the end of the text, Blobel describes using a gas van to murder victims for the first time.

A portrait of five-year-old Mania Halef, a Jewish child from the Ukraine. She was later killed by the Einsatzgruppen during the mass execution at Babi Yar.

Initial invasion

The Nazis regarded Soviet citizens as racially and ideologically inferior, partly due to the Soviet Union’s communist system of rule (which the Nazis saw as the ideological enemy of fascism . The Nazis viewed communists and Jews as key enemies, who needed to be detained and eliminated in order to allow the Nazis to win the war and ensure the survival of the ‘ Aryan ’ race. In many Nazis’ minds, Jews and communists were inseparable.

The mass executions of those deemed to be enemies started almost instantly after the invasion. An indication of this violence can be seen in the actions of Einsatzkommando 9 , a sub unit of Einsatzgruppe B, who, following the occupation of Vilnius on 30 June 1941, shot 500 Jews a day.

Collaboration

The Einsatzgruppen did not act alone. In many cases the German Army or local collaborators participated in the murders, either actively (in the shootings), by identifying Jews or other enemies, or by assisting in security roles, such as guards for camps.  One example of this collaboration can be seen shortly after the invasion in the first week of July 1941, where 5000 Jews in the cities of Riga and Daugavpils were detained and murdered by ethnic Germans and the Lithuanian Activist Front .

Further escalation

By late July 1941, the German Army’s advance on the eastern front had slowed and there were significant food and military shortages in Germany. This resulted in a low morale on the German home front. The Nazis blamed Jews for these shortages and this lack of military success in the Soviet Union, and suggested that Jews were not only sabotaging the war efforts through partisan activity, but were also unnecessarily draining the food supply.

Amid these growing problems on the home front, Himmler paid a series of visits to the Einsatzgruppen units across the Soviet Union in mid-August 1941. During these visits, Himmler orally issued instructions which encouraged the complete annihilation of Jews, regardless of age, gender or a proven connection to communism. After each visit, murders of Jews in that area quickly escalated.

Himmler’s visits further encouraged the widespread mass murder of Jews across the Soviet Union. There were few restrictions on the actions of the Einsatzgruppen, and they accordingly acted with little restraint or uniformity. In many areas, whole Jewish communities were swiftly murdered. In others, some were placed in ghettos. In others, some were spared, although in most cases this was only a temporary measure.

Deportation of German Jews, September 1941

Dr. Hans Schmoller (10 April 1879 – 2 November 1942) was a German Jew from Berlin. In 1942, Hans and his wife, Marie-Elisabeth (2 January 1887 – 16 May 1944), were deported to Theresienstadt. On 2 October 1942, Hans sent this Red Cross Telegram to his sister in law, Johanna Behrend, who had emigrated to England in 1939. He writes ‘On the way to be sent off to Theresienstadt…it will be quite a time until you get any more news’. Exactly a month after sending this telegram, Hans died in unknown circumstances at the hands of the Nazis in the Theresienstadt Ghetto.

This transport list documents Hans and Marie-Elisabeth Schmoller’s journey to Theresienstadt on 14 October 1942.

Courtesy of The Wiener Holocaust Library, International Tracing Service Archive, Document Number 11192721.

Marie-Elisabeth Schmoller (2 January 1887 – 16 May 1944). Following Hans’ death in 1942, Marie-Elisabeth remained in the Theresienstadt Ghetto until May 1944 – when she was deported to Auschwitz and murdered on 16 May 1944. This card was assigned to Marie-Elisabeth in Theresienstadt and shows the date she was deported to Auschwitz.

Courtesy of The Wiener Holocaust Library, International Tracing Service Archive, Document Number 5090097.

In the autumn of 1941, approximately 338,000 Jews remained in Greater Germany. Until this point, Hitler had been reluctant to deport Jews in the German Reich until the war was over because of a fear of resistance and retaliation from the German population. But, in the autumn of 1941, key Nazi figures contributed to mounting pressure on Hitler to deport the German Jews. This pressure culminated in Hitler ordering the deportation of all Jews still in the Greater German Reich and Protectorate between 15-17 September 1941.

Following the order, Himmler, Heydrich and Eichmann attempted to find space for the Jews from the Greater German Reich in the already severely overcrowded ghettos in eastern Europe. Officials in the Łódź, Litzmannstadt, Minsk and Riga ghettos were all informed that they would need to absorb the population of Jews from the Greater German Reich, irrespective of overcrowding.

The Minsk Ghetto was full, so in order to make room for the Reich Jews, the local SD , German Army and local collaborators gathered approximately 25,000 of the local ghetto inhabitants, drove them to a local ravine, and murdered them. German Jews soon filled their places in the ghetto. Similar murders took place in Riga.

In Łódź Ghetto, no local Jews were removed prior to the arrival of 20,000 Jews from the Greater German Reich. Instead, following the success of the experiments in using gas vans for mass murder at Chełmno extermination camp in December 1941, deportations from the ghetto to Chełmno began on 16 January 1942, four days before the Wannsee Conference .

As with most of the Nazis’ murderous actions, the deportation of German Jews was improvised and haphazard . The increased numbers of Jews arriving in the ghettos of eastern Europe led to severe overcrowding, unsustainable food shortages and poor sanitation. This, in combination with the slow progress in the German invasion of the Soviet Union, convinced the Nazis that a ‘solution’ to the ‘Jewish problem’ needed to be organised sooner than had been originally envisaged. The deportations also partly led to the gas experiments at Chełmno, and heightened the Nazis’ sense of urgency to coordinate the policy towards Jews at the Wannsee Conference.

The Wannsee Conference, 1942

The Wannsee Conference Villa, where the Wannsee Conference took place on 20 January 1942. Courtesy of the David Allthorpe photo collection.

The Wannsee Conference formalised the Nazis’ policy of the extermination of Jews in occupied Europe.

On 20 January 1942, leading Nazi officials met at the Wannsee Conference Villa in Wannsee, a south-western suburb of Berlin. The conference had been called to discuss and coordinate a cheaper, more efficient, and permanent solution to the Nazis’ ‘Jewish problem’. The conference was attended by senior government and SS officials, and coordinated by Reinhard Heydrich .

At the meeting, Heydrich gave a review of Nazis’ Jewish policy, highlighting the recent (September-October 1941) removal of the Jews from the German Reich, and framing it as a temporary solution to the larger Jewish problem.

The final plan for the eleven million Jews in remaining in Europe, as laid out by Heydrich, was to utilise them for work in the east on road works. Those who could not work, or became unable to work after a period of time, would be subject to special treatment. The Nazis used the term ‘special treatment’ as a euphemism for murder.

At the conference, there was also some discussion on the methods of mass murder, although concrete plans were not established. Experiments in using gas as a method of mass murder had already taken place at Chełmno in December 1941, but this was not mentioned and no one method was agreed upon within the meeting.

The meeting lasted approximately two hours.

Whilst the exact methods of mass murder were not laid out in this meeting, it played a significant role in coordinating the Nazis’ genocidal actions. The policy of annihilation to be taken against Jews was made extremely clear by the Nazi leadership. By the end of 1942, six extermination camps were in operation.

Creation of extermination camps, 1941 -1942

This map shows the extermination camps created in occupied Poland.

Courtesy of The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

This leaflet, entitled Rescue the Perishing , was published by British MP Eleanor Rathbone in May 1943. The pamphlet urged the British public to show public support and sympathy for the victims of Nazi persecution, following reports of the Nazi massacres in the British press in 1942. Despite Rathbone’s efforts, there were no major rescue efforts made following the publication of the pamphlet.

Gerta and Rudolf Pollak were assimilated middle class Jews from Prague. On 7 May 1942, they were deported by the Nazis to Theresienstadt Ghetto and shortly afterwards, on 9 May 1942 to Siedliszcze, a forced labour camp in Poland. This postcard, sent to family friend in Prague on 10 August 1942, was the last communication ever received from them. In October 1942, both Gerta and Rudolf were deported to Sobibor extermination camp and murdered.

A pre-war portrait of Gerta Pollak, neé Elischak.

Gerta Pollak’s Theresienstadt transport card, listing the date of her and Rudolf’s transport to Siedliszcze on 9 May 1942.

Courtesy of The Wiener Holocaust Library Collections , International Tracing Service Digital Archive, Document Number 5073422.

The crematorium incinerator at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. The Nazis used this to cremate bodies of victims after they had been gassed.

A can of Zyklon B, the main poison used by the Nazis to gas their victims in extermination camps.

Following the Wannsee Conference, five additional extermination camps were adapted or established with the primary purpose of efficiently murdering the Jewish population of Europe.

This brought the total number of Nazi extermination camps to six. These extermination camps were:

• Chełmno (in operation December 1941-January 1945)
• Bełżec  (in operation March-December 1942)
• Sobibór (in operation May-July 1942 and October 1942-October 1943)
• Treblinka  (in operation July 1942-August 1943)
• Majdanek  (in operation September 1942-July 1944)
• Auschwitz-Birkenau  (in operation March 1942-January 1945)

In extermination camps, victims were murdered by being poisoned by gas. The process of murder was developed and adapted as each camp was built. For example, initially, at Chełmno, gas vans were used, but as the purpose-built extermination camps were established stationary gas chambers were found to be more effective.

Once they had arrived at the extermination camp, groups of Jews were typically separated into women and children, and then men. Some of the strongest were occasionally chosen for slave labour, but typically the majority were sent straight to the gas chambers where they were murdered.

In camps such as Auschwitz, most of those sent immediately to the gas chambers were told to leave their luggage and get undressed ready for disinfection in a shower. Approximately 1000 people were then shepherded into the false showers and an airtight door was closed. Carbon monoxide gas or Zyklon B was pumped into the room, and suffocated those inside. The bodies were then removed from the gas chamber and sent to the crematoria, and the lethal process began again.

The creation of the extermination camps marked the final, fatal, step in the Nazis’ journey towards genocide. In total, approximately three million people were murdered in the extermination camps. The deadliest extermination camp was Auschwitz-Birkenau, where approximately one million people were murdered.

Genocide in action, 1941-1945

Emil Leon Pilpel (right) (23 January 1889-26 May 1942) was a Jewish accountant born in Lvov. Before the war, he lived in Vienna with his wife, Serla (left), and two daughters, Fanni and Charlotte.

Following the Nazi occupation of Austria in 1938, Emil lost his job as a result of Nazi persecution. Emil retrained as a hotel keeper in the hope of escaping to England. This letter was sent along with his CV to the German-Jewish Aid Committee in England.

Emil and Serla were unable to emigrate and remained in their flat in Clusiusgasse, Vienna, which they were forced to share with several other families. On 20 May 1942 they were deported to the Minsk, and from there to a pine forest a few kilometres from Maly Trostinec camp. Here, they were executed by the Einsatzgruppen on 26 May 1942. This Red Cross Telegram, sent on 10 May 1942, was the last communication the Emil’s daughters, Fanni and Charlotte, received from their parents.

In June 2018, Emil and Serla’s surviving family unveiled a Stolpersteine (a remembrance stone) outside their former home in Vienna.

Courtesy of the Pilpel family descendants.

Auschwitz was established by the Nazis in March 1942 near the town of Oświęcim in southern Poland. In total, approximately one million people were murdered there during the Holocaust.  This photograph was taken shortly after Auschwitz was liberated in 1945. At the front of the photograph, pots and pans used by the prisoners in the camp are strewn across the ground.

Prior to murdering victims at extermination camps, the Nazis confiscated their luggage. This photograph shows some of the shaving brushes seized by the Nazis at Auschwitz.

[From left to right] Sonja, Adolf and Lotte Jaslowitz, a Jewish family from Czernowitz, a city in north Romania. On 4 June 1942, having survived the first Einsatzgruppen sweep through the city, the family were deported to Ladijin Concentration Camp. Throughout the next three years, the family endured horrific and unsanitary conditions in several ghettos and camps. Only Lotte survived the war.

From the summer of 1941 onwards, the situation for Jews and others viewed as inferior by the Nazis continued to rapidly deteriorate.

In Poland, the invasion of the Soviet Union meant that many of those incarcerated in ghettos were put to work manufacturing a variety of items for the war effort.  However, as soon as it became clear that the war would not be over quickly, the fate of the Jews trapped in the ghettos of Poland and eastern Europe was sealed. On 16 January 1942, the first set of deportations departed from the Łódź Ghetto, swiftly followed over the next two weeks by thirteen more transports, totalling 10,103 Jews. Almost all of them, except the 50-60 Jews who formed the Sonderkommado , were gassed shortly after arrival.

Four days after the first transport left Łódź, the Wannsee Conference took place, leading to the establishment of five more extermination camps. Genocide was unleashed as ghettos across Poland were emptied and Jews were sent to the extermination camps. In Warsaw,  between July and September 1942, approximately 300,000 inhabitants of the Warsaw Ghetto were deported to Treblinka and murdered.

The Soviet Union

Following the Einsatzgruppen ‘s  initial advance into the Soviet Union and the resulting widespread massacres, many of the Jews who had been initially spared were forced into ghettos and used as slave labour. Those incapable of carrying out hard labour were murdered.

As Germany’s military advances slowed, the ruthlessness of the actions against the Jews and others seen as racial enemies of the Nazis radically increased. An example of this ruthlessness can be seen in the city of Kauna, Lithuania, where, on 4 October 1941, 1985 Jews were killed by Einsatzgruppen and local Lithuanian collaborators. Karl Jäger , leader of Einsatzkommando 3A, later reported that the massacre was in retaliation for the murder of a German policeman in the ghetto. Just under four weeks later, on 29 October 1941, a further 9,200 Jews were murdered in the city. They were forced to strip naked, with their belongings and valuables taken away, pushed into large pre-prepared mass graves, and then shot with machine guns. This time, Jäger reported that those murdered were surplus to requirements.

The murders in Kauna show the escalation of the Einsatzgruppen ’s actions in the Soviet Union in late 1941, which continued to intensify and spiral out of control as war efforts struggled throughout the following years. By 1945, centuries of Jewish culture had been destroyed and thousands upon thousands of Jewish communities had been decimated .

Death marches, 1944-1945

A clandestine photograph of prisoners on a death march from Nuremberg to Dachau on 26 April 1945.

The ITS (now known as Arolsen Archives) was established to help the millions of people displaced and missing during the Second World War to trace, and be traced by, their families. Following the war, the International Tracing Service (ITS) researched and created these maps, showing the routes that death marches took. This map shows death marches from Flossenbürg camp.

Courtesy of Arolsen Archives, Document Number 10.12.694.

This burial map was also created as part of a post-war research project by the ITS. The map documents a grave, created in the midst of death march, in Michelbach an der Bilz (Baden-Württemberg). Maps such as this helped to document death tolls and routes that the death marches took.

Courtesy of The Wiener Holocaust Library, International Tracing Service Digital Archive, Document Number 101099771.

As the Second World War progressed, the Nazis were pushed into retreat on both fronts.

From spring 1944 onwards, the Nazis ordered the forced evacuation of prisoners from camps across occupied Europe. These forced evacuations became known as death marches.

The Nazis ordered these evacuations for a number of reasons: in order to continue using the prisoners as slave labour in Germany; to use the prisoners to bargain peace with the Allies; and to stop survivors of the camps giving the Allies accounts of the horrors they had experienced.

Malnourished prisoners were forced to trek hundreds of miles on foot to camps into central Germany. Thousands of people died during the marches. Those who were unable to travel were murdered. Thousands more froze to death, starved or were shot on the way.

Liberation, 1944-1945

This sign was erected at the site of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in the summer of 1945. In total, approximately 50,000 people died at Bergen-Belsen.

After the British liberated Bergen-Belsen on 15 April 1945, unsanitary conditions did not immediately improve. This photograph shows survivors of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, in the aftermath of the liberation.

Former female inmates of Bergen-Belsen after liberation.

As the German Army started to lose the war, they were pushed into retreat towards Germany by the Allies. The Allies then began to liberate the hundreds of camps which the Nazis had constructed across occupied Europe.

On 23 July 1944, Majdanek, in eastern Poland, became the first extermination camp to be liberated by the Soviet Army. Abandoned quickly by the German forces, the camp was almost completely intact.

Over the following nine months, hundreds of camps were liberated across Germany and previously occupied territories, including extermination camps Auschwitz-Birkenau (by the Soviets in January 1945) and Bergen-Belsen (by the British in April 1945).

For many prisoners, liberation was only the beginning of their journey to freedom. The Nazis had stripped survivors of their jobs, their homes, and in many cases, murdered their families. Most had nowhere to go, and many ended up being placed in Displaced Person camps until they could eventually emigrate or settle elsewhere.

The conditions in the camps also took a while to improve because of the poor conditions in post-war Europe. Disease was widespread, and the daily death rate initially remained high. In Bergen-Belsen, 10,000 people died from malnutrition and disease after liberation.

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Why did the Holocaust happen?

What happened in september.

On 13 September 1933, the Nazis made ‘racial science’ compulsory in every German school.

On 15 September 1935, the Reichstag passed the Nuremburg Laws, institutionalizing the Nazi's racist theories.

On 1 September 1939, Germany invaded Poland, starting the Second World War.

On 21 September 1939, Heydrich issued the Schnellbrief, which ordered the creation of Jewish Councils in Polish towns.

On 3 September 1941, the first experimental gassings were carried out at Auschwitz.

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Holocaust summary

Learn about the rise of anti-semitism and the state-sponsored killing of jews in nazi germany during the holocaust.

Holocaust , Hebrew Shoʾah , Systematic state-sponsored killing of Jews and others by Nazi Germany and its collaborators during World War II. Fueled by anti-Semitism , the Nazi persecution of Jews began soon after Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany in 1933 with a boycott of Jewish businesses and the dismissal of Jewish civil servants. Under the Nürnberg Laws (1935), Jews lost their citizenship. About 7,500 Jewish businesses were gutted and some 1,000 synagogues burned or damaged in the Kristallnacht pogrom in 1938, and thereafter Jews were imprisoned in concentration camp s or forced into ghettos. German victories early in World War II (1939–45) brought most European Jews under the control of the Nazis and their satellites. As German armies moved into Poland, the Balkans, and the Soviet Union, special mobile killing units, the Einsatzgruppen , rounded up and killed Jews, Roma (Gypsies), communists, political leaders, and intellectuals. Other groups targeted by the Nazis included homosexuals and the mentally retarded, physically disabled, and emotionally disturbed. At the Wannsee Conference (1942), a “final solution” was formulated for the extermination of European Jewry, and thereafter Jews from all over Nazi-occupied Europe were systematically evacuated to concentration and extermination camps, where they were either killed or forced into slave labour. Underground resistance movements arose in several countries, and Jewish risings took place against overwhelming odds in the ghettos of Poland ( see Warsaw Ghetto Uprising ). Individuals such as Raoul Wallenberg saved thousands by their efforts; whether the Allied governments and the Vatican could have done more to aid Jews has long been a matter of controversy. By the end of the war, an estimated six million Jews and millions of others had been killed by Nazi Germany and its collaborators.

Learn about the Holocaust

The Holocaust was the systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its allies and collaborators. Learn more in the Museum’s  Holocaust Encyclopedia .

Learn more about why Nazi Germany and its collaborators targeted Jews and other victims of the Holocaust era.

Get an overview of the Holocaust told through historical photographs, maps, images of artifacts, and testimony clips.

Watch a 38-minute film exploring the Nazi rise to power and the path Nazis and their collaborators took to war and the murder of millions of people.

Holocaust Encyclopedia

This resource contains more than 850 articles about the Holocaust, antisemitism, and current-day mass atrocities in 19 languages, including:

An Introduction to the Holocaust

Nazi Propaganda

Antisemitism

Documenting Numbers of Victims of the Holocaust and Nazi Persecution

Explore the online versions of current and past exhibitions, such as  Americans and the Holocaust  and  Some Were Neighbors: Collaboration and Complicity in the Holocaust.

Listen to or read Holocaust survivors’ experiences, told in their own words through oral histories, written testimony, and public programs.

Learn about key events related to the Holocaust from before 1933 through 1945 and beyond.

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Watch videos and read articles about the Holocaust and the conditions that made it possible.

• Learn About Antisemitism and Holocaust Denial
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• Online Tools for Learning and Teaching

The importance of teaching and learning about the Holocaust

On the occasion of International Holocaust Remembrance Day , commemorated each year on 27 January, UNESCO pays tribute to the memory of the victims of the Holocaust and reaffirms its commitment to counter antisemitism, racism, and other forms of intolerance. 

In 2017, UNESCO released a policy guide on Education about the Holocaust and preventing genocide , to provide effective responses and a wealth of recommendations for education stakeholders.

What is education about the Holocaust?

Education about the Holocaust is primarily the historical study of the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jews by Nazi Germany and its collaborators.

It also provides a starting point to examine warning signs that can indicate the potential for mass atrocity. This study raises questions about human behaviour and our capacity to succumb to scapegoating or simple answers to complex problems in the face of vexing societal challenges. The Holocaust illustrates the dangers of prejudice, discrimination, antisemitism and dehumanization. It also reveals the full range of human responses - raising important considerations about societal and individual motivations and pressures that lead people to act as they do - or to not act at all.

Why teach about the Holocaust?

Education stakeholders can build on a series of rationales when engaging with this subject, in ways that can relate to a variety of contexts and histories throughout the world. The guide lists some of the main reasons why it is universally relevant to engage with such education.

Teaching and learning about the Holocaust:

• Demonstrates the fragility of all societies and of the institutions that are supposed to protect the security and rights of all. It shows how these institutions can be turned against a segment of society. This emphasizes the need for all, especially those in leadership positions, to reinforce humanistic values that protect and preserve free and just societies.  
• Highlights aspects of human behaviour that affect all societies, such as the susceptibility to scapegoating and the desire for simple answers to complex problems; the potential for extreme violence and the abuse of power; and the roles that fear, peer pressure, indifference, greed and resentment can play in social and political relations.  
• Demonstrates the dangers of prejudice, discrimination and dehumanization, be it the antisemitism that fueled the Holocaust or other forms of racism and intolerance.  
• Deepens reflection about contemporary issues that affect societies around the world, such as the power of extremist ideologies, propaganda, the abuse of official power, and group-targeted hate and violence.  
• Teaches about human possibilities in extreme and desperate situations, by considering the actions of perpetrators and victims as well as other people who, due to various motivations, may tolerate, ignore or act against hatred and violence. This can develop an awareness not only of how hate and violence take hold but also of the power of resistance, resilience and solidarity in local, national, and global contexts.  
• Draws attention to the international institutions and norms developed in reaction to the Second World War and the Holocaust. This includes the United Nations and its international agreements for promoting and encouraging respect for human rights; promoting individual rights and equal treatment under the law; protecting civilians in any form of armed conflict; and protecting individuals who have fled countries because of a fear of persecution. This can help build a culture of respect for these institutions and norms, as well as national constitutional norms that are drawn from them.  
• Highlights the efforts of the international community to respond to modern genocide. The Military Tribunal at Nuremberg was the first tribunal to prosecute “crimes against humanity”, and it laid the foundations of modern international criminal justice. The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, under which countries agree to prevent and punish the crime of genocide, is another example of direct response to crimes perpetrated by Nazi Germany. Educating about the Holocaust can lead to a reflection on the recurrence of such crimes and the role of the international community.  

What are the teaching and learning goals?

Understanding how and why the Holocaust occurred can inform broader understandings of mass violence globally, as well as highlight the value of promoting human rights, ethics, and civic engagement that bolsters human solidarity. Studying this history can prompt discussion of the societal contexts that enable exclusionary policies to divide communities and promote environments that make genocide possible. It is a powerful tool to engage learners on discussions pertaining to the emergence and the promotion of human rights; on the nature and dynamics of atrocity crimes and how they can be prevented; as well as on how to deal with traumatic pasts through education.

Such education creates multiple opportunities for learners to reflect on their role as global citizens. The guide explores for example how education about the Holocaust can advance the learning objectives sought by  Global Citizenship Education  (GCED), a pillar of the Education 2030 Agenda. It proposes topics and activities that can help develop students to be informed and critically literate; socially connected, respectful of diversity; and ethically responsible and engaged.

What are the main areas of implementation?

Every country has a distinct context and different capacities. The guide covers all the areas policy-makers should take into consideration when engaging with education about the Holocaust and, possibly, education about genocide and mass atrocities.  It also provides precise guidelines for each of these areas. This comprises for example curricula and textbooks, including how the Holocaust can be integrated across different subjects, for what ages, and how to make sure textbooks and curricula are historically accurate.  The guide also covers teacher training, classroom practices and appropriate pedagogies, higher learning institutions. It also provides important recommendations on how to improve interactions with the non-formal sector of education, through adult education, partnerships with museums and memorials, study-trips, and the implementation of international remembrance days.

Learn more about UNESCO’s on Education about the Holocaust .

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What is the Holocaust?

In the course of the Second World War, the Nazis murdered nearly six million European Jews. This genocide is called the Holocaust. Here, you can read about its causes and backgrounds, the stages of the Holocaust, and the perpetrators. Koen Smilde

Holocaust or Shoah?

The word ‘holocaust’ comes from ancient Greek and means ‘burnt offering’. Even before the Second World War, the word was sometimes used to describe the death of a large group of people, but since 1945, it has become almost synonymous with the murder of the European Jews during the Second World War. That's why we use the term 'the Holocaust'. Jews also refer to it with the word ‘Shoah’, which is Hebrew for 'catastrophe'.

Causes of the Holocaust

The Holocaust has a number of causes. Its direct cause is the fact that the Nazis wanted to exterminate the Jews and that they were able to do so. But their lust for murder didn't come out of nowhere. The antisemitic Nazi ideology must be considered in the broader context of the age-old hostility towards Jews, modern racism, and nationalism.

Jews in Europe have been discriminated against and persecuted for hundreds of years, often for religious reasons. For a start, they were held responsible for the death of Christ. In the Middle Ages, they were often made to live outside the community in separate neighbourhoods or ghettos and were excluded from some professions. In times of unrest, Jews were often singled out as scapegoats. During the plague pandemic around 1350, Jews were expelled and persecuted. In Russia, after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, there were outbreaks of violence in which groups of Jews were mistreated or murdered. With the rise of racially inspired ideologies in the nineteenth century, the idea arose that Jews belonged to a different race and were therefore not part of 'the people' or the nation.

In 1918, Germany lost the First World War. Right-wing extremists blamed the Jews. They also accused the Jews of being capitalist exploiters who profited at the expense of others. At the same time, the Jews were accused of being followers of communism who were after world domination by means of a revolution.

Yet there is no straight line from the antisemitism of the Nazis to the Holocaust. In his book Mein Kampf and his speeches, Hitler never made a secret of his hatred of the Jews and his opinion that there was no place for them in Germany, but initially, he had no plans for mass murder. The Holocaust can best be seen as the outcome of a series of decisions, influenced by circumstances.

Polish Jews were expelled from Germany in 1938 and in 1940 German Jews were sent to occupied Poland and France, but the Nazis were not interested in their fate. Only some time after the outbreak of the Second World War did the Nazi top conceive of the idea and the possibility of murdering the European Jews. Sometimes the initiative came from lower placed Nazis, who were looking for extreme solutions to the problems they faced. Competition between different government departments also led to increasingly radical measures against the Jews. But in the end, nothing went against Hitler's wishes and he was the one who made the final decisions.

Expelling the Jews from Germany

Between 1933 and 1939, the Nazis made life in Germany increasingly impossible for the Jews. Jews fell victim to discrimination, exclusion, robbery, and violence. The Nazis sometimes killed Jews, but not systematically or with the intention of killing all Jews.

At that point, the main goal of the Nazis was to remove the Jews from Germany by allowing them to emigrate. To encourage them to do so, they took away their livelihoods. Jews were no longer allowed to work in certain professions. They were no longer allowed in some pubs or public parks. In 1935, the Nuremberg Racial Laws came into force. Jews were forbidden to marry non-Jews. Jews also lost their citizenship, which officially turned them into second-class citizens with fewer rights than non-Jews.

In 1938, the Nazis organised pogroms all over Germany: the Kristallnacht (Crystal Night). Jewish houses, synagogues and shops were destroyed and thousands of Jews were imprisoned in concentration camps. When the war broke out in September 1939, about 250,000 Jews fled Germany because of the violence and discrimination. 

The Second World War: Radicalisation of the persecution of the Jews

The German invasion of Poland in September 1939 heralded a new, more radical phase in the persecution of the Jews. The war had made emigration all but impossible. The occupation of Poland meant that 1.7 million Polish Jews were now under German rule.  They were housed in ghettos, Jewish housing estates, which looked more like prisons. Several families often shared a single house. They went hungry and lacked medical care. The Jews were not allowed to leave the ghetto without permission, and they sometimes had to do forced labour. Moreover, during the first months of the occupation of Poland, the Germans executed thousands of Jewish and non-Jewish citizens.

During this period, the Nazis were planning to deport the Jews from the occupied territories to reservations in Poland or to the territory of the Soviet Union after its planned conquest. An alternative plan entailed deporting Jews to the island of Madagascar. It should be noted that the Nazi plans did not include provisions regarding their accommodation or other living facilities, although they did go into the seizure of Jewish property. This suggests that the Nazis counted on high mortality rates among the Jews.

Invasion in the Soviet Union: mass executions of Jews

In June 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union. Hitler declared a war of destruction on Germany’s ideological enemy, the communist regime. The army command was notified that war crimes would not be punished and that they had permission to execute all criminal suspects without trial. By expelling, killing, or starving the population of the Soviet Union, the Germans want to create Lebensraum : a colony for Germans.

Behind the German military lines, the Einsatzgruppen sprang into action. These were special killing units charged with the task of killing communist officials, partisans, and Jewish men between the ages of 15 and 60. Their actions were officially intended to prevent resistance. From August 1941 onwards, however, the Einsatzgruppen frequently also killed old people, women, and children. Their murders could hardly be considered 'retaliations'.

The Jews in the Occupied Territories were usually ordered to report to a central point, often on the pretext of deportation, or they were rounded up during raids. Then the Nazis would then take them to a remote place where they were executed. In 1941 alone, close to 900,000 Soviet Jews were murdered in this way. 

The decision to resort to genocide

Historians disagree about the moment when Hitler decided that all European Jews should be killed. A signed order to do so does not exist. However, based on other sources and events, there is a strong likelihood that the decision was made somewhere in the second half of 1941.

Mass murder seems an extreme alternative to the previous plans for deportation. The war made it impossible to deport Jews to Madagascar, and the plan to push the Jews back further to the east could not be carried out because the victory over the Soviet Union was not forthcoming. And so, the 'final solution to the Jewish question’ took the form of genocide. During the Wannsee Conference, on 20 January 1942, Nazi officials discussed the execution of the planned murder of the eleven million Jews living in Europe.

Aktion Reinhard: The first extermination camps

In late 1941, the Nazis began preparing for the murder of more than two million Jews living in the General Government, the occupied part of Poland. The Nazis also experimented with mass murder in other occupied and annexed areas of Eastern Europe. In Chelmno, they introduced the use of gas to kill Polish Jews. This method was faster and considered less ‘aggravating' for the SS officers involved than shooting people.

Under the code name Aktion Reinhard , the Nazis built several extermination camps: Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka. Here, the victims were murdered in gas chambers with diesel engine exhaust fumes immediately upon arrival.

The only purpose of the extermination camps was to kill people. Only a small number of Jews were kept alive to help with the killing process. In November 1943, Aktion Reinhard was terminated. The camps were disassembled and the bodies of the victims were excavated and burned. The Nazis then planted trees on the grounds to wipe out their crimes. At least 1.75 million Jews were murdered during Aktion Reinhard . 

Deportations from all over Europe to Auschwitz

In the middle of 1942, the Germans began deporting Jews from the occupied territories in Western Europe. The decision-making process and dynamics differed from one country to the next, as did the numbers of victims. 104,000 Jews were deported from the Netherlands; in Belgium and France, the numbers were relatively and absolutely lower. There are several reasons for this difference.

The Jews were crammed in overcrowded cattle wagons and transported to Eastern Europe. Most of them ended up at Auschwitz-Birkenau, but there were other concentration or extermination camps. Out of the 101,800 Dutch Jews who were murdered, 34,000 were killed in Sobibor.

Auschwitz-Birkenau was both a labour camp and an extermination camp. And so, upon arrival, the Jews were selected according to their age, health, and ability to work. Those who were not fit enough were gassed immediately. The others had to do forced labour under barbaric conditions. The work was extremely hard, the little food was of poor quality, hygiene was poor, and Jews were often maltreated. This programme is therefore also referred to as ‘extermination through labour’.

Jews were brought in from other occupied parts of Europe. In 1943 and 1944, deportations started from the occupied regions in Italy, Hungary, Greece, and the Balkans. Only when the Allies were drawing near, by end of 1944, did the persecution of the Jews slowly come to a halt. In the last months of the war, thousands of Jews and other prisoners died during the 'death marches' after the Germans had evacuated the concentration camps to prevent the prisoners from falling into the hands of the Allied troops. Even after liberation, people still died of malnutrition, disease, and exhaustion.

The other victims of the Nazis

The Nazis did not just kill Jews during the war. Their political opponents, Jehovah's Witnesses, the handicapped, homosexuals, Slavs, and Roma and Sinti were also murdered on a large scale. Nevertheless, the murder of the European Jews takes a special place. Numerically speaking, they were the largest group of victims. Moreover, the Nazis set out to exterminate the entire Jewish people.

The only other group they intended to wipe out as a whole were the Roma and Sinti, although the Nazis were slightly less fanatical in their persecution. They murdered 200.000 - 500,000 Roma and Sinti from Germany and the occupied territories. The Roma and Sinti call this massacre porajmos , 'the devouring'.

Who were the perpetrators?

The main perpetrators of the Holocaust were the Nazis who planned and carried out the mass murder. Still, they could never have done this without the support and help of millions of Germans and others. Virtually all government agencies were complicit to some extent. There was little protest from the population, although it should be noted that the Third Reich was a dictatorship without free speech.

The allies of Nazi Germany were often guilty of killing Jews themselves or of deporting them to Germany. In some cases, they succumbed to German pressure, in others, they did not deport their own citizens, but only Jews with foreign passports.

Throughout the occupied territories, there were numerous collaborators, who reported Jews to the Germans or helped the Germans to find Jews in hiding. Government agencies often followed the orders of the Germans and cooperated in the arrest and deportation of Jews. Sometimes they did so in order to prevent worse from happening, but their actions often had fatal consequences for the Jews. In Eastern Europe, some people sided with the Germans to join them in the fight against the hated Soviet regime. The Germans sometimes recruited personnel for the extermination camps among Soviet prisoners of war, for whom this was their only chance to escape death.

People collaborated with the Germans for a variety of reasons. Antisemitic ideas often played a role, but not always. Some people had personal scores to settle. Others reported Jews out of greed, hoping that they would be able to seize their possessions. Fear of the Germans sometimes kept people from helping the Jews.

Who knew about the Holocaust?

It is difficult to determine how many people knew that the Jews were being murdered during the war. Few will have realised the full extent of the Nazi crimes. Yet in many cases, the population was aware of what was going on, at least to some extent.

In Germany, the plan to murder all Jews was officially a secret, but due to the enormous number of people involved, rumours started circulating before long. Soldiers stationed in the east wrote about the executions in their letters home and took photographs. Many others were involved in processing the Jewish possessions that were left behind after the deportations.

The Germans did not know as much about the extermination camps. Their existence was deliberately kept secret from the outside world. Still, the local population near places of execution, ghettos, and camps knew what was happening. In the rest of the occupied territories, this knowledge was less public, although it was clear that deportation to the so-called 'labour camps’ did not bode well for the Jews.

Reports on the murder of Jews reached the Allied countries from 1942 onwards, but the effect was limited, partly because they were often based on ‘hearsay’ and they reached the other side of the ocean with great delay. Besides, the Nazi crimes were so inconceivable that few could believe that the reports were not exaggerated. Only when the Allies liberated the concentration and extermination camps did the world fully realise the extent of the crime that had taken place.

Bibliography

• Arad, Yitzhak, ‘”Operation Reinhard”: Extermination Camps of Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka,’ Yad Vashem Studies XVI, (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem 1984) 205-239.
• Benz, Wolfgang, Der Holocaust (München: C.H. Beck 2005, 6e druk).
• Browning, Christopher,  The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939-March 1942 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press 2004).
• Cesarani, David, Final Solution: The Fate of the Jews 1933 - 1949 (Londen: Macmillan 2016).
• Evans, Richard J., The Third Reich at War (Londen: Allen Lane, 2008).
• Friedländer, Saul, Nazi Germany and the Jews. Vol. I: The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939 (New York: HarperCollins 1997).
• Friedländer, Saul, Nazi Germany and the Jews. Vol.II: The Years of Extermination, 1939-1945 (Londen: Wiedenfeld & Nicholson 2007).
• Fritzsche, Peter, Life and Death in the Third Reich (Cambridge: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press 2008).
• Gerlach, Christian, The Extermination of the European Jews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2016).
• Kuwalek, Robert, Das Vernichtungslager Belzec (Berlijn: Metropol Verlag 2013).
• Laqueur, Walter, The Terrible Secret. Suppression of the Truth About Hitler’s “Final Solution” (New York: Owl Books 1998).
• Longerich, Peter, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2010).
• Novick, Peter, The Holocaust and Collective Memory (Londen: Bloomsbury 2001).
• Pohl, Dieter, Holocaust. Die Ursachen – das Geschehen – die Folgen (Freiburg: Herder 2000).
• Snyder, Timothy, Bloodlands. Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books 2010).
• Wachsmann, Nikolaus, KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2015).

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Rise of the Nazis and Beginning of Persecution

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The players follow paths that cross Jewish businesses. A player who lands on one wins a figurine wearing a “Jewish hat”. One of the aims of the game is to evict Jews.

Facsimile, courtesy of Wiener Library for the Study of the Nazi Era and the Holocaust, Tel Aviv University

Yad Vashem Artifacts Collection

The players follow paths that cross Jewish businesses. A player who lands on one wins a figurine wearing a “Jewish hat”. One of the aims of the game is to evict Jews.Yad Vashem Artifacts Collection. 

Yad Vashem Artifacts Collection Courtesy of the Wiener Library for the Study of the Nazi Era and the Holocaust, Tel Aviv University.

Yad Vashem Artifacts Collection Courtesy of Wiener Library for the Study of the Nazi Era and the Holocaust

A photograph taken in 1932 by Rachel, wife of Rabbi Akiva Posner, of their candle-lit Chanukah menorah against the backdrop of the Nazi flags flying from the building across from their home in Kiel, GermanyLeft: the Chanukah menorah

אוסף החפצים, יד ושם

Herman Zondek was born in a small town in the area of Posen in 1887. He served as a medical doctor in the First World War and rose quickly in the hospital hierarchy. In 1926 he was appointed to head the city hospital “am Urban” in Berlin. In March of 1933 Nazi storm troopers entered Prof. Zondek’s hospital, locked him and other doctors, “Jews and Communists” in a room, and proceeded to inform the Professor that he was relieved of his duties as Director of the hospital. Prof. Zondek left Germany for Zurich that same day, never to return. In 1934, encouraged by Chaim Weizman, Professor Zondek came to Eretz Israel and took upon himself to head the Bikur Cholim Hospital in Jerusalem. Professor Zondek passed away in 1979.

Yad Vashem Artifacts Collection Gift of Gerda Zondek, Jerusalem, Israel

The Rise of the Nazis to Power in Germany

Hitler and the Nazi Party rose to power due to the social and political circumstances that characterized the interwar period in Germany. Many Germans could not concede their country’s defeat in World War I, arguing that “backstabbing” and weakness in the rear had paralyzed and, eventually, caused the front to collapse. The Jews, they claimed, had done much to spread defeatism and thus destroy the German army. Democracy in the Weimar Republic, they argued, was a form of governance that had been imposed on Germany and was unsuited to the German nature and way of life. They construed the terms of the Versailles peace treaty and the steep compensation payments that it entailed as revenge by the victors and a glaring injustice. This frustration, together with intransigent resistance and warnings about the surging menace of Communism, created fertile soil for the growth of radical right-wing groups in Germany, spawning entities such as the Nazi Party.

In 1925, a transitory economic upturn and a promising political dialogue brought relative calm into sight. However, the severe international economic crisis that erupted in 1929 carried the instability to new heights.

In 1919, Adolf Hitler , a released soldier wounded in WWI, joined a small and insignificant group called the National Socialist Party . He became the group’s leader and formulated the racial and antisemitic principles in its charter. In 1923 party activists led a revolt and tried to seize power in Munich, but failed. Hitler was imprisoned, during which time he wrote his venomous book Mein Kampf (My Struggle), in which he expressed his ideas about racial theory and Nazi global dominion. Hitler realized that he must employ legitimate democratic means in his struggle to seize power. However, he and his associates left no doubt about their belief in democratic freedoms as mere tools with which power might be attained. After his release Hitler reorganized the party.

In the 1924 Reichstag elections, the Nazi Party received three percent of the votes cast and was represented in the parliament by fourteen delegates. In the 1928 elections, its support declined; the party was able to send only twelve delegates to the legislature. The turnaround came in 1930, the first elections after the economic crisis began. Surprisingly, the Nazis received 18.3 percent of the vote and sent 107 delegates to the Reichstag, the German Parliament. In July 1932, with 230 mandates, they became the largest faction in the House — a political force that made an impact and acceded to power legitimately. President Paul von Hindenburg gave Hitler the mandate to form a government, and Hitler became Chancellor on January 30, 1933.

The Beginning of the Persecution of Jews in Germany

In the 1930s, Germany’s Jews – some 500,000 people – made up less than one percent (0.8%) of the German population. Most considered themselves loyal patriots, linked to the German way of life by language and culture. They excelled in science, literature, the arts, and economic enterprise. 24% of Germany’s Nobel Prize winners were Jewish. However, conversion, intermarriage, and declining birth rates, led some to believe that Jewish life was doomed to disappear from the German scene altogether.

The paradox was that Nazi ideology stemmed from Germany and the German people, among whom Jews eagerly wanted to acculturate. Indeed, there was a widespread belief amongst many Jews in the illusion that the role they played within industry and trade and their contributions to the German economy would prevent the Germans from completely excluding them.

Nazi anti-Jewish policy functioned on two primary levels: legal measures to expel the Jews from society and strip them of their rights and property while simultaneously engaging in campaigns of incitement, abuse, terror and violence of varying proportions. There was one goal: to make the Jews leave Germany.

On March 9, 1933, several weeks after Hitler assumed power, organized attacks on Jews broke out across Germany. Two weeks later, the Dachau concentration camp , situated near Munich, opened. Dachau became a place of internment for Communists, Socialists, German liberals and anyone considered an enemy of the Reich. It became the model for the network of concentration camps that would be established later by the Nazis. Within a few months, democracy was obliterated in Germany, and the country became a centralized, single-party police state.

On April 1, 1933, a general boycott against German Jews was declared, in which SA members stood outside Jewish-owned stores and businesses in order to prevent customers from entering.

Approximately one week later, a law concerning the rehabilitation of the professional civil service was passed. The purpose of the legislation was to purge the civil service of officials of Jewish origin and those deemed disloyal to the regime. It was the first racial law that attempted to isolate Jews and oust them from German life. The first laws banished Jews from the civil service, judicial system, public medicine, and the German army (then being reorganized). Ceremonial public book burnings took place throughout Germany. Many books were torched solely because their authors were Jews. The exclusion of Jews from German cultural life was highly visible, ousting their considerable contribution to the German press, literature, theater, and music.

In September 1935 the “ Nuremberg Laws ” were passed, stripping the Jews of their citizenship and forbidding intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews. Jews were banned from universities; Jewish actors were dismissed from theaters; Jewish authors’ works were rejected by publishers; and Jewish journalists were hard-pressed to find newspapers that would publish their writings. Famous artists and scientists played an important role in this campaign of dispossession and party labeling of literature, art, and science. Some scientists and physicians were involved in the theoretical underpinnings of the racial doctrine.

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Combating Holocaust Denial: Origins of Holocaust Denial

Nazi policy did a great deal to facilitate denial of the Holocaust even as the killing operation unfolded across German-occupied Europe during World War II .

The Holocaust was a state secret in Nazi Germany. The Germans wrote down as little as possible. Most of the killing orders were verbal, particularly at the highest levels. Hitler's order to kill Jews was issued only on a need-to-know basis. The Nazi leaders generally avoided detailed planning of killing operations, preferring to proceed in a systematic but often improvised manner. The Germans destroyed most documentation that did exist before the end of the war. The documents that survived and related directly to the killing program were virtually all classified and stamped “ Geheime Reichssache ” (Top Secret), requiring special handling and destruction to prevent capture by the enemy. Heinrich Himmler , Reich Leader of the SS and Chief of the German Police, said in a secret speech to SS generals in Posen in 1943 that the mass murder of the European Jews was a secret, never to be recorded.

In order to hide the killing operation as much as possible from the uninitiated, Hitler ordered that the killings not be spoken of directly in German documentation or in public statements. Instead, the Germans used codenames and neutral-sounding terms for the killing process. In Nazi parlance, for example, “action” ( Aktion ) referred to a violent operation against Jewish (or other) civilians by German security forces; “resettlement to the East” ( Umsiedlung nach dem Osten ) referred to the forced deportation of Jewish civilians to killing centers in German-occupied Poland; and “special treatment” ( Sonderbehandlung ) meant killing.

Both at the time and later, such euphemisms impeded a clear understanding of what the Nazis were doing. This was partly to facilitate the killing process by keeping the victims in the dark about their fate as long as possible. Widespread Jewish resistance was only possible once Jews understood that Nazi policy was to kill all of them. Furthermore, Hitler could not just assume that almost no one would protest the killing of Jews. Even within his own party there were those who agreed with the campaign of persecution against Jews but who occasionally balked at systematic murder. For example, Wilhelm Kube, the German civilian administrator of occupied Belarus, fully supported the murder of the Belarusian Jews, but protested when the SS deported German Jews to Minsk and shot them there.

Hitler had reason to fear possible unfavorable reaction should all the details of the Holocaust become public. Euphemistic language aided secrecy since only those who knew the “real” meaning of the words would understand the deeper meaning of public statements or accurately interpret the documentary record.

In addition to the use of coded language, Heinrich Himmler sought to destroy the physical remains of the victims of killing operations to hide the killing process from advancing Allied armies. He assigned SS officer Paul Blobel to command Operation (Aktion) 1005, the code name for German plans to destroy the forensic evidence at mass murder sites. The SS forced prisoners to reopen mass graves at both the killing centers in German-occupied Poland and at the open air killing sites in the former Soviet territory and to cremate the bodies, thereby removing evidence of mass murder. For example, at Babi Yar in Kiev in the summer of 1943, at Belzec in late 1942, and at Sobibor and Treblinka in the fall of 1943, the mass graves were reopened and the bodies burned to ashes. In this way, the Germans and their collaborators destroyed much—but by no means all—of the forensic evidence of mass murder before advancing Soviet armies overran the scenes of these crimes.

A scene staged by the Nazis for the International Red Cross inspection of the Theresienstadt ghetto. The people are probably watching a soccer match. Czechoslovakia, June 23, 1944.

• Comite International de la Croix Rouge

Late in the war, after word of the Holocaust had reached Britain and the United States, the Nazi leadership sought to counter Allied condemnation of Nazi policies toward Jews with a coordinated campaign of disinformation. On June 23, 1944, the Nazis permitted an International Red Cross commission visit to the Theresienstadt ghetto in occupied Bohemia in what is today the Czech Republic. They hoped to mask Nazi killing operations in the occupied eastern territories by showcasing good conditions for Jews in Theresienstadt. The Red Cross commission consisted of two Danish officials and one Swiss representative and the visit lasted only six hours. It was an elaborate hoax. The SS authorities intensified deportations of Jews from the ghetto to alleviate overcrowding and spruced up the ghetto by planting gardens, painting houses, opening cafes and theaters and the like in preparation for the visit. They even instructed the prisoners how to behave during the inspection and to give positive reports about conditions in the ghetto. Once the visit ended, however, the SS authorities resumed deportations of Jews, overwhelmingly to the Auschwitz killing center in German-occupied Poland. The visit had served its purpose: to confuse international public opinion about the true nature of Nazi policies towards Jews.

Despite Nazi efforts to keep secret the unfolding Holocaust, information did leak out. The perpetrators themselves talked about what they were doing. Occasionally, survivors of mass killing operations bore witness to the killing program. Both Jewish and Polish underground organizations made great efforts to let the outside world know what the Germans were doing in eastern Europe. The information was sometimes incomplete, contradictory, and inaccurate in some of the specific details, but the general policy and pattern of events were clear by the second half of 1942.

Yet the psychological barriers to accepting the existence of the Nazi killing program were considerable. The Holocaust was unprecedented and irrational. It was inconceivable that an advanced industrial nation would mobilize its resources to kill millions of peaceful civilians, including women and children, the elderly, and the very young. In doing so, the Nazis often acted contrary to German economic and military interests. For example, they intensified the killing operation, killing skilled Jewish laborers even while labor shortages threatened to undermine the German war effort.

All too many people responded to reports about German killings of Jewish civilians by comparing these reports to news stories about German atrocities in occupied Belgium and northern France during World War I. The British media in World War I charged that the German occupation was monstrous, that German soldiers committed many outrages against defenseless civilians in German-occupied Belgium. They charged that German soldiers bayoneted babies, disfigured women, and killed civilians with military-issued poison gas. It turned out after the war that the Allies had invented many of those stories in order to maximize popular support for the war effort. As a result of that experience, many people were skeptical of reports of mass murder operations during World War II. In this case, however, the reports turned out to be generally accurate.

While some people today are misled as a result of the Nazi policies described above into doubting the reality of the Holocaust, others deny the Holocaust for more overtly racist, political, or strategic reasons. These deniers begin with the premise that the Holocaust did not happen. This premise suits their broader purposes. They deny the Holocaust as an article of faith and no amount of rational argumentation can dissuade them. This denial is irrational, largely unrelated either to the facts of the history or to the enormity of the event. Some people deny the Holocaust because of innate antisemitism, irrational hatred of Jews.

In fact, Holocaust denial has been called by some scholars the “new antisemitism” for it recycles many of the elements of pre-1945 antisemitism in a post-World War II context. Holocaust deniers argue that reports of the Holocaust are really part of a vast shadowy plot to make the white, western world feel guilty and to advance the interest of Jews. Even at the time of the Holocaust, some people in the United States thought reports of German massacres of Jewish civilians were actually propaganda reports designed to force the government to grant Jews special treatment and consideration.

Many people who deny the Holocaust argue that the supposed “hoax” served above all the interests of the State of Israel. Holocaust denial is, for these people, also an attack on the legitimacy of the State of Israel. Finally, others deny the Holocaust because they want to see a resurgence of Nazi racism. They insist that Nazism was a good political philosophy and that only “negative” press resulting from reports of the genocide the Nazis perpetrated prevent a revival of the Nazi movement today. They deny the Holocaust so that they can attract followers to a new Nazi movement.

Holocaust denial, then, unites a broad range of radical right-wing hate groups in the United States and elsewhere, ranging from Ku Klux Klan segregationists to skinheads seeking to revive Nazism to radical Muslim activists seeking to destroy Israel.

Holocaust deniers want to debate the very existence of the Holocaust as a historical event. They want above all to be seen as legitimate scholars arguing a historical point. They crave attention, a public platform to air what they refer to as “the other side of the issue.” Because legitimate scholars do not doubt that the Holocaust happened, such assertions play no role in historical debates. Although deniers insist that the idea of the Holocaust as myth is a reasonable topic of debate, it is clear, in light of the overwhelming weight of evidence that the Holocaust happened, that the debate the deniers put forward is more about antisemitism and hate politics than it is about history.

Critical Thinking Questions

• What are the principal sources of information about the events of the Holocaust?
• What purposes does Holocaust denial serve for its supporters and believers?
• Why do perpetrators of mass murder, their collaborators, and their supporters hide or deny their actions? How can this be countered?

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