The Nazis called themselves Übermensch ("master race") and wanted to kill every Jew in Europe. In an organized, planned and deliberate way, they murdered around six million Jews and five million others who were not part of the "master race".
In 1933, around 9,500,000 Jewish people lived in Europe. (This was less than 2% of Europe's population.) By the end of the Holocaust, nearly two out of every three Jews in Europe had been murdered in the Holocaust. The Nazis murdered Jews in every community they could during the Holocaust.
The Holocaust was unprecedented genocide, total and systematic, perpetrated by Nazi Germany and its collaborators, with the aim of annihilating the Jewish people.
According to the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust,
The Holocaust was the attempt by the Nazis and their collaborators to murder all the Jews in Europe.
[The Holocaust was] the extermination of the Jews by the Nazis and their accomplices during World War II, [also] known as [...] the Shoah.
Etymology
The word holocaust originally described a religious sacrifice where animals were burned to ashes. At some point during the late 19th century, it also came to mean "large-scaledestruction of a group of men". For instance, some people described the Armenian Genocide as a holocaust when it happened. After World War II, the Nazis' genocide against the Jews became widely known as "the Holocaust." This name was chosen to reflect how the bodies of concentration camp victims were burned to ash in fires or crematoria.
Today, mainstreamscholars say it is offensive to use the word holocaust to describe something other than the World War II-era Holocaust. Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel said that the word had become too trivialized. He pointed out examples of news networks using the word to describe a small-scale murder case or the defeat of a sports team.
Camps and ghettos
The Nazis established around 44,000 concentration camps, death camps, and ghettos in Nazi-controlled parts of Europe and North Africa during World War II.
By mid-1941, the Nazis had forced almost all Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland into ghettos. The largest of these was the Warsaw Ghetto. In November 1940, the Nazis forced 380,000 Jews into the ghetto and locked them in. Over 80,000 of them died from starvation, overcrowding, disease, freezing to death, and other terrible conditions. The second largest, the Lodz Ghetto, held around 210,000 people in total. In this ghetto, more than one in every five people died from the terrible living conditions. According to Leo Schneiderman, who survived the Lodz Ghetto: "The whole ghetto was designed, actually, to starve the people out."
Prisoners at Dachau cheer the U.S. Army as they free the camp.
There were 23 main concentration camps and hundreds of sub-camps throughout the lands that Nazi Germany controlled. According to Karin Orth in the Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos: 1933-1945, as many as one thousand camps may have operated at a time. The Nazis used concentration camps for many purposes: to gather and isolate the Nazis' "enemies"; to punish and torture these "enemies"; to obtain forced labor; to steal victims' belongings on a massive scale; to perform medical experiments on prisoners; and to kill people.
Special Schutzstaffel(SS) units like the Einsatzgruppen killed hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of Jews at a time in mass shootings. Sometimes they forced Jews and other prisoners to dig giant holes in the ground where, after days of hard work, they were shot. Their bodies were buried and burned in mass graves.
At Babi Yar in Kyiv, Ukraine,Einsatzgruppen killed 33,771 Jews in two days, between 29-30 September 1941. The Nazis continued to use Babi Yar for mass executions of Jews, Sovietprisoners or war, and Roma people throughout the war. As many as 100,000 people may have died there.
To eliminate these people, the Nazis sent them to killing centers like Hartheim Killing Facility, where they murdered them in gas chambers. According to the Britannica,
When they first used poison gas to kill Jews, the Nazis used gas vans that piped carbon monoxide into the passenger compartment. Soon, though, the Nazis built permanent gas chambers where they killed up to 2000 people at a time. By 1942 the Nazi's main method of murdering people in concentration camps was to kill them in gas chambers with Zyklon-B. This was a rat poison which had cyanide. In a planned, organized, and methodical way, they deported trains full of people to the extermination camps and sent them straight to the gas chambers. The Nazis killed around 1,100,000 people in concentration camp gas chambers using Zyklon-B.
Other methods
The Nazis executed many people by shooting, stabbing, or beating them to death. Some people survived beatings, but suffered broken bones and/or died when their wounds got infected.
Forced marches
Many people also died in forced marches from one camp to another. Some were killed in medical experiments by SS doctors like Josef Mengele. Others were worked to death.
Forced labor
The Nazis also deliberately killed prisoners in some concentration camps by treating them so terribly that many died. They forced prisoners to do hard forced labor, but fed them very little (about 25% of the calories needed to survive). In the winter, prisoners did not have warm clothing or heating, and many froze to death. Others developed frostbite, which sometimes worsened into gangrene.
The Nazis killed at least 6,000,000 Jews during the Holocaust.
Map of the Jewish Holocaust death toll as a% of the total pre-war Jewish population by country/region
Jews
67% European Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, including at least 3,000,000 Polish Jews. The Holocaust killed almost all of the Jewish children in Europe. Before World War II, there were about 1,600,000 Jewish children living in the lands that the Nazis would soon control. Only 6% of them survived World War II; between 1,000,000 and 1,500,000 died. Most European Jews had been killed by 1943 before reports of the mass extermination were received. As per the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM),
2,700,000 Jews were killed at death camps
2,000,000 Jews were killed in mass shootings and other massacres
Between the 1st century the Holocaust, antisemitism had been a significant problem in Europe. Many people wrongly thought that all Jews became rich by stealing money from others, like Christians. Many believed Jews only liked other Jews. Since at least the 2nd century BC, people have levelled a range of false accusations against Jews, including the blood libel – the lie that Jews are taking blood from Christian kids.
These beliefs were not true and were based on stereotypes. However, these beliefs were popular in the German-speaking world and elsewhere in the late 1800s. Adolf Hitler was born in Austria during this time, when many people disliked Jews. He may have been jealous of Jewish success in Austria. However, in his book Mein Kampf ("My Struggle"), he said it was the Jews' fault that Germany and Austria lost World War I. He also said Germany's economic problems were the Jews' fault. Many people agreed with Hitler’s ideas and supported him as the leader of the Nazi Party.
Also, the Nazis justified the Holocaust with conspiracy theories based on self-victimization and inversion of reality. They accused Jews of controlling the world and blamed every problem on them. American historian Jeffrey Herf wrote in his bookThe Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust:
[...] the [Nazi] propaganda [...] presented Hitler and Germany as merely responding to the [...] threats of others [. ...] turned the power relations between Germany and the Jews upside down: Germany was the innocent victim; Jewry was all-powerful.
Herf said that Nazis' view of the Jews being an inferior race was not the motive for the Holocaust. Instead, it was the stereotype of Jews being an "all-powerful anti-German force" that made the Holocaust happen:
The core of the radical antisemitism that justified and accompanied the Holocaust was a conspiracy theory that ascribed not inferiority, but enormous power, to what it alleged was an international Jewish conspiracy that sought [...] extermination of the German population.
American legal scholar Kenneth L. Marcus presented the idea Accusation in a Mirror (AiM) to describe the tendency of genocide perpetrators – from Nazi Germans to Hutu nationalists – to accuse their victims of seeking a genocide against them in order to justify a genocide themselves. In psychology, such behaviour is called projection.
Righteous Among the Nations
On the other hand, Some persons saved Jews during the Holocaust because they thought it was the right thing to do. Some of them were later given Righteous Among the Nationsawards by Yad Vashem.
Some extremists say that the Holocaust did not happen or was not as bad as it was. This is called Holocaust denial, or Holocaust distortion.
Many Holocaust deniers say that the Nazis did not kill so many victims. Instead, they claim many of them died because they were ill or starving. However, a significant amount of evidenceproves that Holocaust deniers are wrong. Jews were killed because Hitler ordered it. In Germany and some other countries, it is criminal to deny the Holocaust.
They also claim that only 271.000 Jews were actually killed.
Definition
Contrary to public misconceptions, Holocaust denial does not only mean denying that the Holocaust happened. Instead, it also includes the following acts:
Intentional efforts to excuse or minimize the impact of the Holocaust or its principal elements, including collaborators and allies of Nazi Germany;
Gross minimization of the number of the victims of the Holocaust in contradiction to reliable sources;
Attempts to blame the Jews for causing their own genocide;
Statements that cast the Holocaust as a positive historical event. Those statements are not Holocaust denial but are closely connected to it as a radical form of antisemitism. They may suggest that the Holocaust did not go far enough in accomplishing its goal of “the Final Solution of the Jewish Question”;
For instance, someone acknowledging that the Holocaust happened while denying the Nazi use of poison gas is also a Holocaust denier.
Recent trend
A trend of Holocaust distortion, some state-sponsored, is also seen in other European countries, including Austria, Croatia, Czechia, Hungary, Germany, Italy, Poland, The Polish government’s resolve to control the past culminated with [...] the Amendment to the Act on the Institute of National Remembrance [...] penalizes those who ‘slander the good name of the Polish nation’ and who ‘blame the Polish society for crimes committed by the Nazi Third Reich.’ In the book Decoding Antisemitism, co-author Hagen Troschke said that the common strategies of such Holocaust distortion consisted of:
Making some Holocaust perpetrators look better than they were
Reducing the Holocaust responsibility to a small group of perpetrators
Some scholars said that Holocaust distortion was going mainstream amid the rise of nationalism across Europe, where Jews were sometimes equated with the disliked Soviet communists against whom the Holocaust was considered "a reaction".
Some described the phenomenon with the conceptmnemonic politics, where nationalist governments distorted the Holocaust by painting their ethnic majority as the victims rather than the Jews or Roma. Such distortion is sometimes rooted in the conspiracy theory that the focus on Jews is an EUplot to suppress national identity and promote "cosmopolitanism" and "multiculturalism".
123Shasha, Shaul M. (April 2004). "Morbidity in the Concentration Camps of the Third Reich". Harefuah. 143 (4): 272–276, 318. ISSN0017-7768. PMID15116584.
Antony Polonsky and Joanna Beata Michlic (eds.), The Neighbors Respond: The Controversy over the Jedwabne Massacre in Poland (Princeton, 2009) and Laurence Weinbaum, “Amnesia and Antisemitism in the ‘Second Jagiellonian Age,’” Anti-Judaism, Antisemitism, and Delegitimizing Israel, Robert Wistrich (ed.) (Lincoln, 2016).
Robert Rozett, “Competitive Victimhood and Holocaust Distortion,” The Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs, XVI (2022); “Distorting the Holocaust and Whitewashing History: Toward a Typology,” XIII: 1 (2019); Yehuda Bauer, “Creating a “Usable” Past: On Holocaust Denial and Distortion,” XIV: 2 (2022); and Jan Grabowski, “The Holocaust and Poland's 'History Policy'” X: 3 (2016).
Joanna Beata Michlic, “The Politics of the Memorialisation of the Holocaust in Poland: Reflections on the Current Misuses of the History of Rescue,” Jewish Historical Studies—Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England, LIII: 1 (2022); Piotr Forecki, Po Jedwabnem: Anatomia pamięci funkcjonalnej (Kraków, 2018); Jan Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne (Princeton, 2001).
Piotr Forecki, “Domestic ‘Assassins of Memory’: Various Faces of Holocaust Revisionism in Contemporary Poland,” presentation at a symposium in honor of Professor Antony Polonsky called “The Holocaust in Eastern Europe: sources, memory, politics,” March 16, 2021, UCL, London.
"Polish appeals court dismisses claims against Holocaust book historians". Euractiv. August 17, 2021. Retrieved January 4, 2025. An appeals court ruled that two historians accused of tarnishing the memory of a Polish villager in a book about the Holocaust need not apologise, overturning a lower court ruling that raised fears about freedom of academic research.
Grabowski, Jan (2024). "Whitewash: Poland and the Jews". Jewish Quarterly. London, United Kingdom. Retrieved May 25, 2025. In this ground-breaking essay, Jan Grabowski, a world-renowned Holocaust historian, examines how the government, museums, schools and state institutions became complicit in delivering a message of Polish national innocence during the Holocaust. He recounts his own experience as the victim of smears and a notorious lawsuit for questioning the complicity of Poles in the destruction of the country's Jews, and examines the far-reaching consequences of Poland's historical distortions, which have been repeated and replicated worldwide to challenge the truth of the Holocaust.
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