What was the Holocaust?
The Holocaust (1941–1945) was the systematic, state-sponsored genocide of six million European Jews by Nazi Germany, along with millions of Roma, disabled people, political prisoners, and others. It was carried out through mass shootings, forced labor, and industrialized killing in extermination camps like Auschwitz, representing the most horrific crime of the 20th century.
The Holocaust — known in Hebrew as the Shoah — was the deliberate, industrialized murder of six million Jewish men, women, and children by the Nazi German regime and its collaborators during World War II. It stands as the defining atrocity of the modern era, a crime so vast and systematic that it challenged fundamental assumptions about human civilization and progress.
The Holocaust did not begin with gas chambers. It evolved through stages of escalating persecution. After taking power in 1933, the Nazis systematically stripped German Jews of their civil rights through laws like the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, which revoked citizenship and prohibited marriage between Jews and non-Jews. Kristallnacht in November 1938 — a coordinated pogrom that destroyed synagogues and Jewish businesses across Germany — marked the transition from legal persecution to organized violence. After the war began, Jews in occupied territories were confined to ghettos, subjected to forced labor, starvation, and disease.
The systematic killing began with the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. Mobile killing units (Einsatzgruppen) followed the advancing army, shooting entire Jewish communities. Over 1.5 million Jews were murdered by shooting. But Nazi leaders sought a more 'efficient' method. At the Wannsee Conference in January 1942, senior officials coordinated the 'Final Solution to the Jewish Question' — the organized deportation of Europe's Jews to extermination camps equipped with gas chambers. Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, Chelmno, and Majdanek became factories of death where thousands could be killed daily.
The victims included not only Jews but also Roma and Sinti (an estimated 250,000–500,000 killed), disabled people (murdered under the T4 euthanasia program), Soviet prisoners of war (over 3 million died in German captivity), Polish intellectuals, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, and political opponents. But Jews were the primary target of an ideology that defined them as a racial threat requiring total extermination.
The Holocaust raises questions that have no adequate answers: how a cultured, educated nation could commit industrialized genocide; how ordinary people became perpetrators; why the world responded so slowly; and how survivors rebuilt their lives from absolute devastation. It led directly to the creation of the State of Israel, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Genocide Convention, and a permanent transformation in how humanity thinks about evil, responsibility, and the obligations of civilization.