History of the Holocaust
The Holocaust was the systematic persecution of approximately six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. The Nazis, who came to power in Germany in January 1933, believed that Germans were "racially superior" and that the Jews, deemed "inferior," were a threat to the so-called German racial community.
During the era of the Holocaust, German authorities also targeted other groups because they thought that these groups were “racially inferior”. These groups included Roma (Gypsies), the disabled, and some of the Slavic peoples (Poles, Russians, and others). Other groups were persecuted on political, ideological, and behavioral grounds, among them Communists, Socialists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and homosexuals.
In 1933, there were over nine million Jews in Europe. By 1945, the Germans and their collaborators killed nearly two out of every three European Jews as part of the "Final Solution," the Nazi policy to murder all of the Jews in Europe.
In the early years of the Holocaust, the National Socialist government established concentration camps to detain real and imagined political and ideological “opponents“. Increasingly in the years before the outbreak of war, SS and police officials incarcerated Jews, Roma, and people of other ethnicities that they thought were inferior to the Germans. To concentrate and monitor the Jewish population and also to facilitate later deportation of the Jews, the Germans created ghettos and concentration camps for Jews during the war years. The German authorities also established numerous forced-labor camps for non-Jews whose labor the Germans wanted to use to their advantage. The living conditions of the ghettos and concentration camps were extremely bad. Hundreds of people were forced to cram into small rooms and live there for long periods of time.
Following the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 and later, militarized battalions of Order Police officials moved behind German lines to carry out mass-murder operations against Jews, Roma, and Soviet state and Communist Party officials. The Nazis and German SS and police units murdered more than a million Jewish men, women, and children, and hundreds of thousands of others. Between 1941 and 1944, Nazi German authorities deported millions of Jews from Germany, from occupied territories, and from the countries of many of its Axis allies to ghettos and to killing centers, often called extermination camps, where they were murdered in specially developed gassing chambers. Many were also shot and even burned to death. Others died of starvation or just from being forced to work so much.
In the final months of the war, SS guards moved camp inmates by train or on forced marches, often called “death marches,” in an attempt to prevent the Allied liberation of large numbers of prisoners. As Allied forces moved across Europe in a series of offensives against Germany, they began to encounter and liberate concentration camp prisoners and also the prisoners on the “death marches“ from one camp to another. The marches continued until May 7, 1945, when finally the German armed forces surrendered unconditionally to the Allies. For the western Allies, World War II officially ended in Europe on the next day, May 8 (V-E Day). Soviet forces announced their “Victory Day” on May 9, 1945.
After the end of the Holocaust, many of the survivors found shelter in displaced persons (DP) camps administered by the Allied powers. Between 1948 and 1951, almost 700,000 Jews emigrated to Israel, including 136,000 Jewish displaced persons from Europe. Other Jewish DPs emigrated to the United States and other nations. The last DP camp closed in 1957. The crimes committed during the Holocaust devastated most European Jewish communities and even completely eliminated hundreds of them in eastern Europe
