# The Holocaust

| The Holocaust |
| --- |
| Part of World War II |
| Jews arriving at Auschwitz II in German-occupied Poland, May 1944. Most were selected to go to the gas chambers. |
| Location | Europe |
| Date | 1933–1945 |
| Attack type | Genocide, mass shooting, death marches, mass deportation, mass murder by poison gas |
| Deaths | At least 6,000,000 Jews |
| Perpetrators | Nazi Germany, other Axis powers and local collaborators in occupied territories |
| Motive | Antisemitism |

**The Holocaust** was the genocide of Jews in Europe by Nazi Germany, other Axis powers and their local collaborators in occupied territories between 1933 and 1945. At least 6,000,000 (six million) Jews (67% pre-war European Jews) were killed.

## Overview

The Nazis called themselves *Übermensch* ("master race") and wanted to kill every Jew in Europe. In an organized, planned and deliberate way, they murdered around six million Jews and five million others who were not part of the "master race".

The Nazis persecuted Jews and other groups in many ways. They forced many Jews to live in bad neighborhoods. They transported millions of people to forced labor camps and death camps. They built death camps with gas chambers that could kill up to 2,000 people at a time.

### European Antisemitism

In 1933, around 9,500,000 Jewish people lived in Europe. (This was less than 2% of Europe's population.) By the end of the Holocaust, nearly two out of every three Jews in Europe had been murdered in the Holocaust. The Nazis murdered Jews in every community they could during the Holocaust.

## Background

### Definition

According to the *Holocaust Encyclopedia*,

> The Holocaust was the systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million European Jews by the Nazi German regime and its allies and collaborators.
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According to the Yad Vashem,

> The Holocaust was unprecedented genocide, total and systematic, perpetrated by Nazi Germany and its collaborators, with the aim of annihilating the Jewish people.
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According to the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust,

> The Holocaust was the attempt by the Nazis and their collaborators to murder all the Jews in Europe.
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According to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA),

> [The Holocaust was] the extermination of the Jews by the Nazis and their accomplices during World War II, [also] known as [...] the Shoah.
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### Etymology

The word *holocaust* originally described a religious sacrifice where animals were burned to ashes. At some point during the late 19th century, it also came to mean "large-scale destruction of a group of men". For instance, some people described the Armenian Genocide as a *holocaust* when it happened. After World War II, the Nazis' genocide against the Jews became widely known as "the Holocaust." This name was chosen to reflect how the bodies of concentration camp victims were burned to ash in fires or crematoria.

Today, mainstream scholars say it is offensive to use the word *holocaust* to describe something other than the World War II-era Holocaust. Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel said that the word had become too trivialized. He pointed out examples of news networks using the word to describe a small-scale murder case or the defeat of a sports team.

## Camps and ghettos

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

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

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

### Concentration camps

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

Major concentration camps included:

* **Auschwitz Bergen-Belsen, where Anne Frank was killed
* Buchenwald
* Dachau, the first Nazi concentration camp
* Mauthausen
* Ravensbruck, a camp for female prisoners
* Sachsenhausen

### Death camps

Gas chamber at the Majdanek death camp
The Nazis established six death camps in Poland. Their sole purpose was to kill Jews as quickly and efficiently as possible.The death camps were:

* **Auschwitz Belzec
* Chelmno
* Majdanek
* Sobibor
* Treblinka

## Methods

### Mass murder

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

*Einsatzgruppen* execute a group of Soviet civilians kneeling by the side of a mass grave.
At Babi Yar in Kyiv, Ukraine, *Einsatzgruppen* killed 33,771 Jews in two days, between 29-30 September 1941. The Nazis continued to use Babi Yar for mass executions of Jews, Soviet prisoners or war, and Roma people throughout the war. As many as 100,000 people may have died there.

### Poison gas

The Nazis first used gas chambers to kill people as part of their T4 Project (*Aktion T4*). The Nazis believed in eugenics and thought that people with disabilities, chronically ill people, and many elderly people were "useless eaters."

To eliminate these people, the Nazis sent them to killing centers like Hartheim Killing Facility, where they murdered them in gas chambers. According to the *Britannica*,

> The murder of the disabled was a precursor to the Holocaust. The killing centres to which the [disabled] were transported were the antecedents of the extermination camps, and their organized transportation foreshadowed mass deportation. Some of the physicians [...] later staffed the death camps.
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When they first used poison gas to kill Jews, the Nazis used gas vans that piped carbon monoxide into the passenger compartment. Soon, though, the Nazis built permanent gas chambers where they killed up to 2000 people at a time. By 1942 the Nazi's main method of murdering people in concentration camps was to kill them in gas chambers with Zyklon-B. This was a rat poison which had cyanide. In a planned, organized, and methodical way, they deported trains full of people to the extermination camps and sent them straight to the gas chambers. The Nazis killed around 1,100,000 people in concentration camp gas chambers using Zyklon-B.

### Other methods

The Nazis executed many people by shooting, stabbing, or beating them to death. Some people survived beatings, but suffered broken bones and/or died when their wounds got infected.

#### Forced marches

Many people also died in forced marches from one camp to another. Some were killed in medical experiments by SS doctors like Josef Mengele. Others were worked to death.

#### Forced labor

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

#### Man-made pandemics

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

## Deaths

The Nazis killed at least 6,000,000 Jews during the Holocaust.

Map of the Jewish Holocaust death toll as a % of the total pre-war Jewish population by country/region
### Jews

67% European Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, including at least 3,000,000 Polish Jews. The Holocaust killed almost all of the Jewish children in Europe. Before World War II, there were about 1,600,000 Jewish children living in the lands that the Nazis would soon control. Only 6% of them survived World War II; between 1,000,000 and 1,500,000 died. Most European Jews had been killed by 1943 before reports of the mass extermination were received. As per the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM),

* 2,700,000 Jews were killed at death camps
* 2,000,000 Jews were killed in mass shootings and other massacres
* 800,000 to 1,000,000 Jews were killed in ghettos, forced labor camps and concentration camps
* 250,000 Jews were killed in other acts of violence, including tortures, pogroms, death marches etc.

The approximate proportions of Jews killed are as follows.

* 90% of Jews in Poland
* 83–87% of Jews in Greece
* 81% of Jews in Yugoslavian territories occupied by the Independent State of Croatia
* 75% of Jews in the Netherlands
* 68% of Jews in Hungary
* 66% of Jews in Belgium
* 53% of Jews in Romania
* 33% of Jews in France

Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin, July 2024Monument to the Ghetto Heroes, POLIN Museum, Warsaw, May 202470th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Monument to the Warsaw Ghetto Heroes in Warsaw
### Other victims of Nazism

Beyond the Holocaust, other victims of Nazism included:

|  | Summary |
| --- | --- |
| Groups | * 3,300,000 Soviet prisoners of war
* 1,800,000 ethnic Poles
* 250,000 to 500,000 Roma people
* 310,000 Serb civilians murdered by the Ustaša regime of the Independent State of Croatia
* 250,000 to 300,000 disabled people, including over 10,000 children
* 35,000 Germans imprisoned as "professional criminals" and "asocials"
* Tens of thousands of Germans who opposed the Nazi tyranny
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## Motives

Between the 1st century the Holocaust, antisemitism had been a significant problem in Europe. Many people wrongly thought that all Jews became rich by stealing money from others, like Christians. Many believed Jews only liked other Jews. Since at least the 2nd century BC, people have levelled a range of false accusations against Jews, including the blood libel – the lie that Jews are taking blood from Christian kids.

An article advertising Hitler's *Mein Kampf* in January 1933
These beliefs were not true and were based on stereotypes. However, these beliefs were popular in the German-speaking world and elsewhere in the late 1800s. Adolf Hitler was born in Austria during this time, when many people disliked Jews. He may have been jealous of Jewish success in Austria. However, in his book *Mein Kampf* ("My Struggle"), he said it was the Jews' fault that Germany and Austria lost World War I. He also said Germany's economic problems were the Jews' fault. Many people agreed with Hitler’s ideas and supported him as the leader of the Nazi Party.

Also, the Nazis justified the Holocaust with conspiracy theories based on self-victimization and inversion of reality. They accused Jews of controlling the world and blamed every problem on them. American historian Jeffrey Herf wrote in his book *The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust*:

> [...] the [Nazi] propaganda [...] presented Hitler and Germany as merely responding to the [...] threats of others [. ...] turned the power relations between Germany and the Jews upside down: Germany was the innocent victim; Jewry was all-powerful.
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Herf said that Nazis' view of the Jews being an inferior race was not the motive for the Holocaust. Instead, it was the stereotype of Jews being an "all-powerful anti-German force" that made the Holocaust happen:

> The core of the radical antisemitism that justified and accompanied the Holocaust was a conspiracy theory that ascribed not inferiority, but enormous power, to what it alleged was an international Jewish conspiracy that sought [...] extermination of the German population.
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American legal scholar Kenneth L. Marcus presented the idea **Accusation in a Mirror** (**AiM**) to describe the tendency of genocide perpetrators – from Nazi Germans to Hutu nationalists – to accuse their victims of seeking a genocide against them in order to justify a genocide themselves. In psychology, such behaviour is called projection.

## Righteous Among the Nations

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

## Holocaust denial

Some extremists say that the Holocaust did not happen or was not as bad as it was. This is called Holocaust denial, or Holocaust distortion.

Many Holocaust deniers say that the Nazis did not kill so many victims. Instead, they claim many of them died because they were ill or starving. However, a significant amount of evidence proves that Holocaust deniers are wrong. Jews were killed because Hitler ordered it. In Germany and some other countries, it is criminal to deny the Holocaust.
They also claim that only 271.000 Jews were actually killed.

### Definition

Contrary to public misconceptions, Holocaust denial does not only mean denying that the Holocaust happened. Instead, it also includes the following acts:

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> 1. Intentional efforts to excuse or minimize the impact of the Holocaust or its principal elements, including collaborators and allies of Nazi Germany;
> 2. Gross minimization of the number of the victims of the Holocaust in contradiction to reliable sources;
> 3. Attempts to blame the Jews for causing their own genocide;
> 4. Statements that cast the Holocaust as a positive historical event. Those statements are not Holocaust denial but are closely connected to it as a radical form of antisemitism. They may suggest that the Holocaust did not go far enough in accomplishing its goal of “the Final Solution of the Jewish Question”;
> 5. Attempts to blur the responsibility for the establishment of concentration and death camps devised and operated by Nazi Germany by putting blame on other nations or ethnic groups.
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For instance, someone acknowledging that the Holocaust happened while denying the Nazi use of poison gas is also a Holocaust denier.

### Recent trend

A trend of Holocaust distortion, some state-sponsored, is also seen in other European countries, including Austria, Croatia, Czechia, Hungary, Germany, Italy, Poland, The Polish government’s resolve to control the past culminated with [...] the Amendment to the Act on the Institute of National Remembrance [...] penalizes those who ‘slander the good name of the Polish nation’ and who ‘blame the Polish society for crimes committed by the Nazi Third Reich.’ In the book *Decoding Antisemitism*, co-author Hagen Troschke said that the common strategies of such Holocaust distortion consisted of:

1. Making some Holocaust perpetrators look better than they were
2. Reducing the Holocaust responsibility to a small group of perpetrators
3. Doubting the scientifically proven death toll
4. Blaming Jews for the Holocaust
5. Equating the Holocaust with other crimes against humanity

Some scholars said that Holocaust distortion was going mainstream amid the rise of nationalism across Europe, where Jews were sometimes equated with the disliked Soviet communists against whom the Holocaust was considered "a reaction".

Some described the phenomenon with the concept *mnemonic politics*, where nationalist governments distorted the Holocaust by painting their ethnic majority as the victims rather than the Jews or Roma. Such distortion is sometimes rooted in the conspiracy theory that the focus on Jews is an EU plot to suppress national identity and promote "cosmopolitanism" and "multiculturalism".

## Related pages

* Holodomor
* Rwandan genocide
* Cambodian genocide
* Secondary antisemitism
* Double genocide theory

## Footnotes