The Holocaust

The Holocaust  also known as the Shoah , was a genocide in which Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany and its collaborators killed about six million Jews. The victims included 1.5 million children and represented about two-thirds of the nine million Jews who had resided in Europe.

From 1941 to 1945, Jews were systematically murdered in the deadliest genocide in history, which was part of a broader aggregate of acts of oppression and killings of various ethnic and political groups in Europe by the Nazi regime. Under the coordination of the SS, following directions from the highest leadership of the Nazi Party, every arm of Germany's bureaucracy was involved in the logistics and the carrying out of the genocide.

Other victims of Nazi crimes included ethnic Poles, Soviet citizens, other Slavs, Romanis, communists, homosexuals, Freemasons,Jehovah's Witnesses and the mentally and physically disabled.

The persecution and genocide were carried out in stages, culminating in what Nazis termed the "Final Solution to theJewish Question", an agenda to exterminate Jews in Europe. Initially the German government passed laws to exclude Jews from civil society, most prominently the Nuremberg Laws of 1935. Nazis established a network of concentration camps starting in 1933 and ghettos following the outbreak of World War II in 1939. In 1941, as Germany conquered new territory in eastern Europe, specialized paramilitary units  murdered around two million Jews, partisans, and others often in mass shootings. By the end of 1942, victims were being regularly transported by freight trains to extermination camps where, if they survived the journey, most were systematically killed in gas chambers. This continued until the end of World War II in Europe in April–May 1945.