The Holocaust
The Holocaust was the systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators between 1941 and 1945, alongside the killing of millions of others including Roma, disabled people, Soviet prisoners of war, and political opponents. Originating in the anti-Semitic ideology of the Nazi Party, it escalated from legal discrimination (Nuremberg Laws, 1935) and organised violence (Kristallnacht, 1938) to mass shootings by Einsatzgruppen following the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, and then to industrialised extermination in dedicated killing centres — Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, Chelmno, and Majdanek — under the coordination codified at the Wannsee Conference in January 1942. The machinery of the Holocaust was bureaucratic as much as violent: deportation trains ran on published timetables; companies bid competitively for the construction of crematoria; civil servants processed census data to identify victims. By 1945 approximately six million Jews — two-thirds of European Jewry — had been murdered, alongside an estimated 250,000–500,000 Roma, 200,000–300,000 disabled people, and millions of Soviet civilians and POWs. The Holocaust was not a secret within Germany and occupied Europe; it was carried out with the knowledge and complicity of railway workers, local police, and civilian populations across the continent.
- Year: 1941 CE
- Category: Political
