The Holocaust

Antisemitism was a foundation of Nazi ideology: Nazi leaders falsely blamed Jews for Germany’s social, economic, political, and cultural problems, including its defeat in World War I.[1] Their ideas drew on older European religious prejudice and on economic, nationalist, and racial forms of antisemitism.[1] Political and economic crises after World War I, the instability of the Weimar Republic, fear of communism, and the Great Depression helped make some Germans more receptive to Nazi ideas.[1]

Nazi racial ideology portrayed Jews as a supposedly separate and inferior race and presented them as a threat to German society.[1] It defined Jewish identity through ancestry rather than religious observance, encompassing people who identified as Christians or did not practice Judaism.[1] This racial definition made conversion or the abandonment of Jewish religious practice no protection against classification as Jewish under Nazi rules.[1]

Europe’s Jewish population numbered about nine million in 1933.[1] In Germany, Jews constituted less than one percent of the population, approximately 600,000 people.[3] More than 100,000 German Jews had served in the German army during World War I, and approximately 12,000 had died in service.[3] Nazi accusations against Jews thus targeted a population that included veterans and families whose members had fought and died for Germany.[3]

Adolf Hitler became German chancellor on January 30, 1933, at the head of a coalition government.[3] The Nazi seizure of governmental power enabled antisemitism to become state policy, enforced through official decrees, discriminatory legislation, and organized violence.[1] The regime did not immediately begin the systematic mass murder of European Jews; its early policies concentrated on excluding Jews from German society, dispossessing them, and pressuring them to emigrate.[1] The persecution radicalized over the following years, culminating in the organized genocide implemented during the war.[1]

On April 1, 1933, the Nazi regime organized a boycott of Jewish businesses; dismissals of Jews from civil-service employment followed a week later, and restrictions on Jewish participation in German schools were introduced by the end of April.[3] Other decrees excluded Jews from public office, denaturalized Jewish immigrants, barred Jews from press and radio employment, and excluded them from farming.[4] Boycotts, propaganda, public humiliation, confiscation, and violence accompanied the legal campaign, while the authorities increasingly pressured Jews to leave Germany.[1]

The Nuremberg Laws, promulgated on September 15, 1935, stripped German Jews of citizenship and prohibited marriage and sexual relations between Jews and people classified as of “German or kindred blood.”[4] Supplementary rules issued in November made ancestry the basis for classification: people with at least three Jewish grandparents were classified as Jews, while those with one or two were placed in the category the regime called “Mischlinge.”[3] These measures deprived Jews of civil and political rights and formalized racial exclusion in German law.[5]

The search for refuge became increasingly desperate during the late 1930s.[5] At the Évian Conference in July 1938, convened by United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt, participating governments were told they would not have to alter their immigration laws or spend government funds, and Britain was assured that Palestine would not be on the agenda.[5] The conference produced little practical assistance for Jews seeking escape.[5]

On November 9–10, 1938, Nazi leaders coordinated the nationwide anti-Jewish pogrom known as Kristallnacht, or the “Night of Broken Glass.”[6] More than 1,400 synagogues were burned, thousands of Jewish-owned businesses were vandalized, and Jewish people and homes were attacked; hundreds of Jews died during the violence and its aftermath.[6] Police and fire brigades were ordered not to protect Jews or their property.[6] Approximately 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and sent to concentration camps.[6] Afterward, Jews were fined one billion Reichsmarks, made responsible for cleanup costs, and subjected to further exclusions, including bans from theaters and German schools.[7]

German territorial expansion brought millions more Jews under Nazi control.[1] Germany annexed Austria and the Sudetenland and occupied the Czech lands in 1938–1939.[1] Its invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, began World War II in Europe; subsequent invasions, occupations, and alliances extended German control or influence across most of Europe and parts of North Africa by 1942.[1] The methods and timing of persecution differed by territory, rather than following one uniform sequence everywhere.[8]

After the invasion of Poland, German authorities forced Jewish communities into ghettos and deported Jews from Germany and other countries into occupied territories.[9] On September 21, 1939, Reinhard Heydrich ordered the formation of Jewish Councils, or Judenräte, which were made responsible for carrying out German orders.[7] The Nazis also considered deporting Jews to Madagascar, but abandoned the proposal as impractical.[7] Ghettoization confined Jews in restricted areas, separating them from non-Jewish populations and facilitating control, exploitation, and subsequent deportation or murder.[1]

The Nazis and their allies established more than 1,300 ghettos, most in occupied Poland, the Baltic states, and occupied Soviet territory; there were no ghettos in western Europe.[1] Some existed for years, while others operated briefly as holding places before murder or deportation.[1] In Warsaw, Jews who constituted approximately 30 percent of the city’s population were confined within 2.4 percent of its area.[7] A 1942 report citing official German statistics recorded 433,000 Jews crowded into a ghetto area that had previously contained about 200,000 Jews.[8]

Ghetto residents endured overcrowding, inadequate food, limited sanitation and medical care, exposure, disease, forced labor, and violence.[1] Hunger and malnutrition caused deaths before the beginning of mass deportations.[7] Authorities restricted movement, and ghettos became holding points for transports to killing centers.[8] Beginning in 1941–1942, Germans and their collaborators dissolved ghettos in operations they called “liquidation,” murdering residents nearby or deporting them to killing centers.[1]

Nazi Germany also persecuted and murdered millions of non-Jewish people, although the grounds and forms of persecution differed among groups.[1] Targets included political opponents, Jehovah’s Witnesses, men accused of homosexuality, people labeled “asocials,” Black people in Germany, people with disabilities, Roma, Poles, Soviet officials, and Soviet prisoners of war.[1] The T4 program, begun in 1939 under the euphemism “euthanasia,” murdered people with disabilities; its gas chambers and trained personnel later contributed to the killing system used at death camps.[7] These crimes formed part of the wider system of Nazi persecution, distinct from the specifically anti-Jewish genocide.[1]

Germany invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941.[1] German units initially targeted Jewish men of military age, but by August were massacring entire Jewish communities, including women and children.[1] Mobile killing units known as Einsatzgruppen operated behind the advancing German army, alongside Order Police battalions, Waffen-SS units, and local auxiliaries.[1] The German military provided logistical support and manpower, and some Wehrmacht units also carried out massacres.[1]

Mass shootings occurred in more than 1,500 cities, towns, and villages across eastern Europe.[1] Victims were rounded up, taken to prepared or newly dug mass graves, and shot.[1] Killing sites included Fort IX in Kovno, the Rumbula and Bikernieki forests near Riga, and Maly Trostenets near Minsk.[1] As many as two million Jews were murdered in mass shootings or gas vans in territories seized from Soviet forces.[1]

At Babyn Yar outside Kyiv, SS and German police units and their auxiliaries, acting under the guidance of Einsatzgruppe C members, murdered about 34,000 Jews on September 29–30, 1941.[10] Victims were forced to surrender their possessions and undress before being shot in the ravine.[10] At Rumbula Forest outside Riga, approximately 25,000–28,000 Jews were shot in late November and early December 1941.[11]

From 1941 to 1945, the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” was the deliberate, organized, and systematic mass murder of European Jews.[1] Mass shootings and asphyxiation with poison gas were its principal killing methods.[1] At the Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942, Heydrich convened 15 officials to coordinate the policy.[11] The minutes used euphemisms such as “evacuation of the Jews to the east” to describe a process whose participants understood involved deportation to killing centers.[11]

Nazi Germany operated five stationary killing centers in occupied Poland: Chełmno, Bełżec, Sobibór, Treblinka, and Auschwitz-Birkenau.[1] Killing at Chełmno began on December 8, 1941, and mass deportations from the Łódź ghetto to that center began on January 16, 1942.[9][10] Treblinka, Sobibór, and Bełżec were established in 1942.[11] These centers were built for mass murder, primarily by poison gas released in sealed chambers or vans.[1]

The camps differed in function: Bełżec, Treblinka, and Sobibór were devoted to killing, while Auschwitz and Majdanek also exploited prisoners for forced labor.[11] Auschwitz I, opened in 1940, served as the complex’s administrative center and held political prisoners, forced laborers, and Soviet prisoners of war.[12] Auschwitz II-Birkenau, about three kilometers away, was the largest extermination camp built by Nazi Germany.[12] The Auschwitz complex combined imprisonment, mass murder, and forced labor.[11]

The European rail network enabled deportations from across the continent.[1] The Reich Security Main Office directed deportations, the Transport Ministry arranged train schedules, and the Foreign Office negotiated with allied states to hand over Jews.[1] Authorities concealed the purpose of transports through terms such as “resettlement actions” and “evacuation transports.”[1] Deportees were crowded into railcars without adequate food, water, sanitation, heat, or medical care, and some died during the journey.[1]

Most Jews deported to killing centers were murdered soon after arrival; others were selected for forced labor.[1] At Auschwitz, selections sent many children, older people, sick people, and pregnant women directly to death because they were deemed unable to work.[11] Those assigned to labor remained vulnerable to lethal conditions and later selection for murder.[11] Some Jewish prisoners were forced to sort victims’ belongings and remove bodies from gas chambers.[1]

Nearly 2.7 million Jewish men, women, and children were murdered at the five killing centers.[1] Approximate Jewish victim totals include at least 152,000 at Chełmno, 435,000 at Bełżec, at least 167,000 at Sobibór, 925,000 at Treblinka II, and about one million at the Auschwitz camp complex.[13] More than 1.1 million prisoners in total were killed at Auschwitz.[14] These killings were accompanied by deaths in ghettos, labor camps, concentration camps, and violence outside the camp system.[13]

Responsibility extended far beyond Hitler and the senior Nazi leadership.[1] Hitler inspired, ordered, approved, and supported the genocide, while Hermann Göring, Heinrich Himmler, Reinhard Heydrich, and Adolf Eichmann were among its coordinators, planners, and implementers.[1] The SS and police, military, railways, civil service, justice and healthcare systems, businesses, and banks participated in different ways.[1] Axis governments, collaborationist regimes, local bureaucracies and police, and auxiliary units helped extend persecution and murder across Europe.[1]

Individual involvement included denouncing Jews, appropriating or buying confiscated property, and other acts that supported persecution.[1] Motives included antisemitism, ideology, careerism, greed, fear, revenge, and self-interest.[1] Millions of Germans and other Europeans participated, and their involvement enabled the genocide’s reach and implementation.[1] Local occupation regimes, administrative attitudes, SS presence, labor demands, and opportunities for hiding, escape, or resistance shaped Jewish experiences in different places.[8]

Jewish resistance developed under severe constraints, including limited access to weapons, isolation, collective reprisals, and incomplete knowledge of Nazi plans.[15] Underground movements emerged in about 100 ghettos between 1941 and 1943, seeking to organize uprisings, escape, and join partisan units.[16] Fighters understood that they could not stop the Germans and that only a small number might escape, but resisted nonetheless.[16]

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising began on April 19, 1943, when German troops and police entered to deport the remaining residents.[10] It followed the deportation of more than 300,000 Warsaw Jews to Treblinka between July and September 1942.[9] Fighters used Molotov cocktails, hand grenades, and a small number of firearms.[16] Organizations involved included the Jewish Combat Organization and the Jewish Military Union, and Mordecai Anielewicz was among the uprising’s leaders.[15][17] German forces crushed the uprising by May 16, deported surviving residents, and left the ghetto in ruins; some resisters continued hiding there for months.[10][16]

Jewish prisoners revolted at Treblinka in August 1943 and Sobibór in October 1943, attacking SS staff and auxiliary guards with stolen weapons.[16] About 70 people survived the Treblinka revolt and about 200 survived the Sobibór uprising.[17] In October 1944, Jewish Sonderkommando prisoners at Auschwitz-Birkenau mutinied and destroyed a crematorium.[15][16] Nearly 250 prisoners died in the fighting, and another 200 were shot after the mutiny was suppressed.[16]

Resistance also meant preserving Jewish communal life against attempts to destroy it.[16] Jews maintained clandestine schools, cultural activities, religious observance, welfare services, underground newspapers, and collections of evidence.[16] In Warsaw, the Oneg Shabbat archive documented Jewish life and suffering and concealed its records despite the ghetto’s destruction.[16] Such efforts preserved dignity, mutual assistance, and historical testimony alongside armed resistance.[1][16]

Rescue efforts included the escape of most Danish Jews to neutral Sweden by sea in October 1943, with help from the Danish resistance and members of the public.[11] In occupied Poland, where helping Jews was punishable by death, the underground Council for Aid to Jews, Żegota, supplied hiding places, money, and forged identity documents.[11] Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg arrived in Budapest in July 1944 and worked with other diplomats and Jewish groups to prevent deportations.[11]

The destruction of Hungarian Jewry demonstrated the speed with which deportations could proceed late in the war.[11] Germany occupied Hungary on March 19, 1944, and Jews were confined to ghettos by mid-April.[11] Deportations began on May 15; over the next 55 days, more than 437,000 Jews were sent to Auschwitz on 147 trains.[11]

As Allied forces advanced in 1944–1945, the SS forced prisoners onto death marches, partly to prevent them from falling into Allied hands.[1] Prisoners endured long distances, inadequate food and water, and brutal treatment; guards shot those who fell behind.[15] Before fleeing Auschwitz, the SS attempted to destroy the camp and forced about 60,000 prisoners westward.[14] Across the final winter of Nazi rule, more than 50 such marches took place.[15]

Soviet troops reached Majdanek in July 1944 and liberated Auschwitz on January 27, 1945, finding thousands of sick, dying, and dead prisoners.[1][14] Soviet forces also liberated Stutthof, Sachsenhausen, and Ravensbrück.[1] United States forces liberated Buchenwald, Dora-Mittelbau, Flossenbürg, Dachau, and Mauthausen, while British forces liberated camps in northern Germany, including Neuengamme and Bergen-Belsen.[1] Germany signed unconditional surrender documents in Reims on May 7 and Berlin on May 8, 1945; both took effect on May 8 at 11:01 p.m. Central European Time.[10] The defeat of Nazi Germany in May 1945 ended the Holocaust.[1]

Liberation did not immediately restore survivors’ health, homes, families, or security.[1] Many had lost relatives and entire communities, faced continuing antisemitism, and struggled to find missing family members or determine whether returning home was safe.[1] Camp conditions remained lethal even after liberation: approximately 28,000 inmates died after Bergen-Belsen was freed.[15] Some Jewish displaced persons initially lived alongside former persecutors because Allied authorities classified displaced people by nationality rather than religion.[15]

Postwar violence intensified survivors’ insecurity.[18] In Kielce, Poland, a pogrom in July 1946 killed at least 42 Jews.[18] Tens of thousands of homeless survivors moved westward to refugee centers and displaced-persons camps.[18] Jewish organizations provided aid, vocational training, and assistance with emigration and the rebuilding of lives.[18]

Several hundred thousand Jewish survivors remained in displaced-persons camps after the war.[1] At the end of 1946, approximately 250,000 Jewish displaced persons were living in Germany, Austria, and Italy: 185,000 in Germany, 45,000 in Austria, and 20,000 in Italy.[18] Between 1945 and 1952, more than 250,000 Jewish displaced persons lived in camps and urban centers administered by Allied authorities and the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration.[19] Many could not or would not return to eastern Europe because of antisemitism and the destruction of their communities.[19]

Survivors rebuilt communal institutions even in bleak surroundings, which sometimes included former concentration camps or German army facilities.[19] They searched for relatives, established schools and religious institutions, and formed cultural and social organizations.[19] More than 170 publications appeared among displaced persons, while theater, music, and athletic groups became active.[19] These activities accompanied the search for permanent homes rather than replacing it.[19]

Palestine became the preferred destination for increasing numbers of Jewish survivors between 1945 and 1948, while others sought admission to the United States and other countries.[19] Restricted immigration and closed borders prolonged stays in the camps.[18] The Brihah movement helped more than 100,000 Jews pass British patrols and enter Palestine without British authorization between 1945 and 1948.[19] Israel’s establishment in 1948 and changes to United States immigration laws in 1948–1949 helped resolve the prolonged search for new homes.[15]

By 1952, more than 80,000 Jewish displaced persons had immigrated to the United States under the Displaced Persons Act and with assistance from Jewish agencies.[19] Approximately 136,000 had settled in Israel and 20,000 in other countries.[19] Migration and renewed communal life took place against the continuing losses of families, homes, and communities destroyed during the genocide.[1]

The material destruction extended beyond individual possessions.[2] Nazi confiscation and looting encompassed Jewish businesses, land, residences, synagogues, sacred objects, cemeteries, schools, and community centers as part of an effort to eliminate Jewish cultural life.[2] An estimated 600,000 paintings were looted, with about 100,000 still missing at the time of the cited report.[2] These losses accompanied the murder and displacement of the people and communities to whom the property had belonged.[2]

By 1945, Germans and their allies and collaborators had murdered nearly two out of every three European Jews.[20] The six million Jewish victims included approximately 1.5 million children.[2] The Holocaust and World War II interrupted the lives of about 5,000 Jewish communities across Europe and North Africa.[17] The destruction encompassed human lives, religious and educational institutions, cultural property, and the communal settings in which Jewish life had developed.[2][17]

The accounting of Jewish victims draws on Nazi German documents, prewar and postwar demographic data, captured archives, censuses, and postwar investigations rather than one comprehensive wartime record.[13][21] Approximate categories include 2.7 million Jews murdered at killing centers, about two million in mass shootings and related massacres, 800,000–1,000,000 in ghettos, labor camps, and concentration camps, and at least 250,000 in other violence outside camps and ghettos.[13] These categories document the multiple methods and settings of the genocide.[13]

The Nazi regime attempted to destroy evidence as it lost the war, including by exhuming mass graves, burning corpses, and destroying records.[13] Documents and witness accounts nevertheless survived and became evidence in postwar trials, including the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg.[13] Survivors recorded their experiences through diaries, memoirs, and written and oral testimony and helped establish archives, memorials, and museums.[13]

Preserved materials include records, photographs, letters, survivor memoirs, music, and oral documentation from ghettos, camps, and hiding places.[17] They document Jewish life during the period as well as its destruction.[17] The clandestine Oneg Shabbat archive exemplifies the effort to preserve evidence while persecution was still taking place, linking wartime resistance with the subsequent historical record.[16]

The wider history of Nazi mass murder includes approximately 3.3 million Soviet prisoners of war, 1.8 million non-Jewish ethnic Poles, 250,000–500,000 Roma, and 250,000–300,000 people with disabilities living in institutions and care facilities.[13] More than 310,000 Serb civilians were murdered by Ustaša authorities in the Independent State of Croatia.[13] Other victims included tens of thousands of German political opponents and dissenters, about 1,700 Jehovah’s Witnesses, hundreds or possibly thousands of men accused of homosexuality, and an unknown number of Black people in Germany.[13] These groups are not included in the six-million Jewish Holocaust victim total.[13]

Terminology reflects different aspects of remembrance.[5] Shoah means “catastrophe,” while the Hebrew and Yiddish term Ḥurban, or khurbn, means “destruction” and was used by survivors in the years immediately after liberation.[5][22] The word Holocaust derives from the Greek holokauston, a translation of the Hebrew ʿolah, meaning a burnt sacrifice offered whole to God.[5] Shoah emphasizes the annihilation of the Jews rather than the totality of Nazi victims.[5]

Scholarly debate concerns the timing and development of the decision to murder all European Jews: historians differ over whether it resulted from a single central decision or an accumulation of leadership and local decisions during the war.[7] No written order from Hitler directing the murder of all Jews has been found; the decision to extend murder to all Jews was most likely made in autumn 1941, before the Wannsee Conference coordinated implementation.[23] The exact death toll is also reconstructed rather than precisely countable: six million is the commonly used figure, while demographic research has produced estimates including 5.59–5.86 million.[23] Usage of the term Holocaust varies by context, with some American usage encompassing other persecuted civilian groups, whereas its specifically Jewish meaning remains more common internationally.[22]