 In what later became known as The Holocaust, the German government persecuted minorities and used a network of concentration and death camps across Europe to conduct a genocide of what they considered to be inferior races. In total, over 10 million civilians were systematically murdered, including 6 million Jews, between 220,000 and 1,500,000 Romani, 275,000 persons with disabilities, thousands of Jehovah's Witnesses, thousands of homosexuals, and hundreds of thousands of members of the political and religious opposition. Nazi policies in the German occupied countries resulted in the deaths of 2.7 million Poles, 1.3 million Ukrainians, and an estimated 2.8 million Soviet war prisoners. German military war casualties were estimated at between 3.2 million and 5.3 million soldiers, and up to 2 million German civilians. German territorial losses resulted in the expulsion of circa 12 million of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe. Germany ceded roughly one-quarter of its pre-war territory. Strategic bombing and land warfare destroyed many cities and cultural heritage sites. After World War II, former members of the Nazi regime were tried for war crimes at the Nuremberg trials.
