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The Holocaust was the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of approximately six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. The Nazis, who came to power in Germany in January 1933, believed that Germans were "racially superior" and that the Jews, deemed "inferior," were an alien threat to the so-called German racial community.
(From the US Holocaust Memorial Museum)
On April 21, 2008, Holocaust Remembrance Day, called Yom Ha Shoah, will be commemorated around the world.
Find out more about events being planned around the world on April 21:
US Holocaust Memorial Museum
Yad Vashem Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Day
Learn how to plan your own commemoration event
Background
The genocide in Germany and occupied Europe during the Holocaust era was the Nazi regime’s state-sponsored persecution and murder of those it deemed inferior. Predominately, the Nazis persecuted Jews based on their belief that Jews were racially inferior and were a threat to the purity of the German race. The Holocaust was this persecution and the murder by the Nazi regime and its collaborators, of approximately six million Jews, lasting from when the Nazis came to power in Germany in January 1933 until the end of World War II in 1945. Authorities also targeted other groups it believed racially inferior: Roma (Gypsies), the disabled, and some Slavic peoples (Poles, Russians and others). Others were persecuted on political, ideological, or behavioral grounds such as Communists, Socialists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and homosexuals.
The Jewish population of Europe before the Nazi party took power in 1933 was over nine million. By 1945, through the Nazi regime’s “Final Solution” to murder the Jews of Europe, nearly two-thirds of the Jews living in Europe before WWII were killed. Other victims of the Nazis and their collaborators were approximately 200,000 Roma (Gypsies), at least 200,000 mentally or physically institutionalized disabled patients, and between two and three million Soviet prisoners of war.
The persecution and segregation of Jews was implemented in stages beginning in 1933 after the Nazi Party gained power. The Nazi regime used State sponsored racism, anti-Jewish legislation, economic boycotts, and the violence of Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass) – anti-Jewish riots in Germany and Austria in November 1938 – in order to isolate Jews from the rest of Germany and drive them out of the country.
After the September 1939 German invasion of Poland (the beginning of World War II), anti-Jewish policy escalated to the imprisonment and eventual murder of European Jewry. During this time, the Nazis built ghettos (enclosed areas designed to isolate and control the Jews) in Poland, where Western European Jews were deported and then forced to live in overcrowded and unsanitary conditions with inadequate food. More than 800 fenced-in ghettos were built throughout Eastern Europe and around one million Jews were imprisoned in them during the war.
After the June 1941 German invasion of the Soviet Union, SS (the elite Nazi force) and police units began massive killing operations aimed at entire Jewish communities. The Nazis expanded their camp system rapidly, eventually establishing about 20,000 transit camps, forced-labor camps, and extermination camps. Extermination camps (many of which were established in Poland, where the largest Jewish population existed) differed from concentration camps (which served primarily as detention and labor centers) in that they were almost exclusively killing centers. At these camps, almost all of the deportees were sent immediately to death in the gas chambers. The largest killing center was Auschwitz-Birkenau, which by spring 1943 had four gas chambers in operation and at the height of the deportations killed up to 6,000 Jews each day. In total, 2.7 million Jews were murdered in extermination camps.
At the end of the war, German authorities moved camp prisoners by train or on forced marches to prevent Allied forces from liberating large numbers of them. Only after the liberation of these camps was the full scope of Nazi horrors exposed to the world. The word genocide did not exist before 1944, but was created by a Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin to describe the Nazi policies of systematic murder and destruction of the European Jews.
Learn More
Holocaust Resource Center, Yad Vashem
US Holocaust Memorial Museum
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Genocides and Mass Atrocities 
