THE HOLOCAUST

The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews during World war II. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe, around two-thirds of Europe’s Jewish population. The murders were carried out in pogroms and mass shootings; by a policy of extermination through labor in concentration camps and in gas chambers and gas vans in German extermination camps, chiefly Auchwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor, and Treblinka in occupied Poland.
Germany implemented the persecution in stages. Following Adolf Hitler appointment as chancellor on 30 January 1933, the regime built a network of concentration camps in Germany for political opponent and those deemed “undesirable”, starting with Darchau on 22 march 1933. After passing of the enabling act on 24 march, which gave Hitler dictatorial plenary powers, the government began isolating Jews from civil society; this include boycotting Jews business in April 1933 and enacting the Nuremberg laws in September 1935. On 9-10 November 1938, eight month after Germany annexed Austria, Jewish business and other building were ransacked or set on fire through out Germany and Austria on wht become known as Kristallnatch (The “ Night of broken glass”). After Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, triggering World war II, the regimes set up Ghettos to segregate Jews. Eventually thousand of camps and other detention site were established across German-occupied Europe.
The segregation of Jews in ghettos culminated in the policy of extermination the Nazis called the Final solution to the Jewish Question, discussed by senior government officials at the Wannsee conference in Berlin in January 1942. As German forces captured Territory in the east, all anti Jewish measures were randicalised. Under the coordination of the ss, while direction from the highest leadership of the Nazi party, killings were committed with Germany itself, through out occupied Europe, and within Territories controlled by Germany’s allies. Paramilitary death squads called Einsatzgruppen, in corporation with the German Army and local collaborators, Murdered around 1.3 million Jews in mass shootings and progoms from the summer of 1942. By mid 1942, victims were being deported from ghetto across Europe in sealed freight trains to extermination camps were, if they survived the journey, they were gassed, worked or beaten to death or killed by diseases, starvation, cold, medical experiment, or during death marches. The killing continue until the end of Word war II in Europe in 1945.
The Holocaust is understood as being primarily the genocide of the Jews, but doing the Holocaust era ( 1933-1945), systematic mass killing of other population groups occured. This included Roma, Poles, Ukrainians, Soviet civilians and prisoners of war, and other targeted populations. Smaller groups were also victims of deadly Nazi persecution, such as Jehovah’s Witness, Black Germans, disabled people, communists, and homosexuals.