186 The Holocaust
31.4.4: The Holocaust
The German government led by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party was responsible for the Holocaust: the deliberate and systematic extermination of approximately six million Jews, 2.7 million ethnic Poles, and four million others who were deemed “unworthy of life.”
Learning Objective
Connect the events of the Holocaust to previous Anti-Semitic actions taken under the Nazi Regime
Key Points
- The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah (Hebrew for “the catastrophe”), was a genocide in which Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany and its collaborators killed approximately six million Jews.
- Other victims of Nazi crimes included ethnic Poles, Soviet citizens and Soviet POWs, other Slavs, Romanis, communists, homosexuals, Freemasons, Jehovah’s Witnesses and the mentally and physically disabled, bringing the total number of Holocaust victims to 11 million.
- The persecution and genocide were carried out in stages, culminating in what Nazis termed the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question,” an agenda to exterminate Jews in Europe. Initially, though, the Nazis used legal repression and forced deportation and relocation to eliminate Jews from German culture.
- In 1941, as Germany conquered new territory in eastern Europe, specialized paramilitary units called Einsatzgruppen (“death squads”) murdered around two million Jews, partisans, and others, often in mass shootings.
- By the end of 1942, victims were regularly transported by freight trains to extermination camps where most who survived the journey were systematically killed in gas chambers.
Key Terms
- Nuremberg Laws
- Antisemitic laws in Nazi Germany, which declared that only those of German or related blood were eligible to be Reich citizens; the remainder, mainly Jews, were classed as state subjects without citizenship rights.
- Final Solution
- The Nazi plan for the total extermination of the Jews during World War II, carried out in the period known as the Holocaust.
- extermination camps
- Camps designed and built by Nazi Germany during World War II to systematically kill millions of Jews, Slavs, and others considered “sub-human,” primarily by gassing but also in mass executions and through extreme work under starvation conditions.
- genocide
- The intentional action to destroy a people (usually defined as an ethnic, national, racial, or religious group) in whole or in part.
The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah (Hebrew for “the catastrophe”), was a genocide in which Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany and its collaborators killed approximately six million Jews. The victims included 1.5 million children and represented about two-thirds of the nine million Jews who resided in Europe. Some definitions of the Holocaust include the additional five million non-Jewish victims of Nazi mass murders, bringing the total to about 11 million.
The Plan for Genocide
From 1941 to 1945, Jews were systematically murdered in one of the deadliest genocides in history, part of a broader aggregate of