The Holocaust

**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. 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. The Nazis murdered Jews inevery community they could during the Holocaust.

According to the Yad Vashem,

According to the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust,

According to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA),

### 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. 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. 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 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
The Nazis established six death camps in Poland. Their sole purpose was to kill Jews as quickly and  as possible.

* **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. 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. The Nazis believed in eugenics and thought that people with disabilities, chronically ill people, and many elderly people were "useless eaters." 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. 

#### Forced marches
Many people also died in  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. of the calories needed to survive). In the winter, prisoners did not have warm clothing or heating, and many froze to death. during the Holocaust.

### Jews
67% European Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, 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),
* 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
* 66% of Jews in Belgium
* 33% of Jews in France Many people wrongly thought that all Jews became rich by stealing money from others, like Christians. Many believed Jews only liked other Jews.

'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. He also said Germany's economic problems were the Jews' fault.

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. In psychology, such behaviour is called projection.

## 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. 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. Croatia, Czechia, Hungary, Germany, 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:

# Making some Holocaust perpetrators look better than they were
# Reducing the Holocaust responsibility to a small group of perpetrators
# Blaming Jews for the Holocaust
Some scholars said that Holocaust distortion was going mainstream amid the rise of nationalism across Europe, 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
## References