The Holocaust
The Holocaust ( HOL-ə-kawst), known in Hebrew as the Shoah ( SHOH-ə; Hebrew: הַשּׁוֹאָה, romanized: HaShoah, IPA: [haʃoˈʔa], lit. 'the Catastrophe'), was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. From 1941 to 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 committed primarily through mass shootings across Eastern Europe and poison gas chambers in extermination camps, chiefly Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor, and Chełmno in occupied Poland. Separate Nazi persecutions killed millions of other non-Jewish civilians and prisoners of war (POWs); the term Holocaust is sometimes used to include the murder and persecution of non-Jewish groups.
The Nazis developed their ideology based on racism and pursuit of "living space", and seized power in early 1933. Meant to force all German Jews to emigrate, regardless of means, the regime passed anti-Jewish laws, encouraged harassment, and orchestrated a nationwide pogrom known as Kristallnacht in November 1938. After Germany's invasion of Poland in September 1939, occupation authorities began to establish ghettos to segregate Jews. Following the June 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union, 1.5 to 2 million Jews were shot by German forces and local collaborators. By early 1942, the Nazis decided to murder all Jews in Europe. Victims were deported to extermination camps where those who had survived the trip were killed with poisonous gas, while others were sent to forced labor camps where many died from starvation, abuse, exhaustion, or being used as test subjects in experiments. Property belonging to murdered Jews was redistributed to the German occupiers and other non-Jews. Although the majority of Holocaust victims died in 1942, the killing continued until the end of the war in May 1945.
Many Jewish survivors emigrated out of Europe after the war. A few Holocaust perpetrators faced criminal trials. Billions of dollars in reparations have been paid, although falling short of the Jews' losses. The Holocaust has also been commemorated in museums, memorials, and culture. It has become central to Western historical consciousness as a symbol of the ultimate human evil.
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