The Holocaust

The Holocaust, called the Shoah in Hebrew, refers to the systematic murder of European Jews carried out during World War II. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its allies killed roughly six million Jews across German-occupied Europe—about two-thirds of the continent’s Jewish population. The killing happened mainly through mass shootings in Eastern Europe and through poison gas in extermination camps, most notably Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor, Chełmno, and Majdanek, all located in occupied Poland. The Nazis also persecuted and killed millions of other non-Jewish civilians and prisoners of war; the word Holocaust is sometimes used more broadly to include groups like the Romani and Soviet POWs. This event is widely regarded as the deadliest genocide in human history and has become a central symbol of ultimate evil in Western historical memory.

The Nazis built their ideology on racism and the idea of acquiring “living space.” After seizing power in early 1933, they aimed to force all German Jews to emigrate, regardless of their financial situation. They passed anti-Jewish laws, encouraged violence, and in November 1938 orchestrated a nationwide pogrom known as Kristallnacht. Following Germany’s invasion of Poland in September 1939, occupation authorities set up ghettos to isolate Jews. After the June 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union, German forces and local collaborators murdered between 1.5 and 2 million Jews. Initially targeting Jewish Red Army POWs and male civilians, the Nazis soon expanded to killing Jewish women and children.

By early 1942, after the Wannsee Conference led by Reinhard Heydrich, the Nazis put the “Final Solution” into action—a plan to murder every Jew in Europe. Some historians note that Adolf Hitler often communicated major policy decisions to Heinrich Himmler verbally rather than in writing. Victims were transported to extermination camps; those who survived the journey were gassed, while others were sent to forced labor camps, where many died from starvation, abuse, exhaustion, or medical experiments. Property belonging to murdered Jews was taken and given to German occupiers and other non-Jews. The killing peaked during Operation Reinhard, from March 1942 to November 1943. Although most Holocaust victims died in 1942, the murders continued until the war ended in 1945.

After the war, many Jewish survivors left Europe. A small number of perpetrators faced criminal trials. Billions of dollars in reparations have been paid, though they fall short of the losses suffered by European Jews. The Holocaust is remembered through museums, memorials, and cultural works.

The word “holocaust” originally came from a Greek term meaning “burnt offering” and for centuries was an ordinary English word for destruction or sacrifice by fire, or figuratively for massacre. In the 1950s, it began to be used as a proper noun and became the most common term for the Nazi extermination of Jews in English and many other languages. Sometimes the term is applied to other groups the Nazis targeted on biological grounds, especially the Roma and Sinti, as well as Soviet POWs and Polish and Soviet civilians. However, each of these groups was targeted for different reasons. By the 1970s, the adjective “Jewish” was dropped as redundant, and “Holocaust,” now capitalized, became the default term for the destruction of European Jews. The Hebrew word “Shoah,” meaning “catastrophic destruction,” refers exclusively to Jewish victims. The Nazis themselves used the phrase “Final Solution” as a euphemism for their genocide.

Jews have lived in Europe for over two thousand years. During the Middle Ages, Christian theology blamed Jews for killing Jesus, fueling antisemitism. In the 19th century, many European countries granted Jews full citizenship in hopes they would assimilate. By the early 20th century, most Jews in central and western Europe were well integrated, while in eastern Europe—where emancipation came later—many still lived in small towns, spoke Yiddish, and practiced Orthodox Judaism. Political antisemitism, which claimed there was a “Jewish question” and often an international Jewish conspiracy, emerged in the 18th and 19th centuries due to rising nationalism and industrialization, which increased economic conflicts between Jews and non-Jews. Some scientists began classifying humans into races and argued that races were locked in a life-or-death struggle. Many racists claimed Jews were a separate race alien to Europe.

At the turn of the 20th century, Germany made a major push to build an overseas colonial empire, leading to the Herero and Nama genocide and a subsequent racial apartheid regime in South West Africa. World War I (1914–1918) intensified nationalist and racist feelings in Germany and elsewhere. Jews in eastern Europe faced widespread pogroms. Germany lost two million soldiers and substantial territory, and opposition to the postwar settlement united Germans across the political spectrum. The military promoted the false but compelling idea that Germany had not been defeated on the battlefield but had been stabbed in the back by socialists and Jews.

The Nazi Party was founded after the war, and its ideology is often seen as the main cause of the Holocaust. From the start, the Nazis—like some other European nations—dreamed of a world without Jews, whom they saw as “the embodiment of everything that was wrong with modernity.” They defined the German nation as a racial community that was not limited by Germany’s borders.