The Holocaust was the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. “Holocaust” is a word of Greek origin meaning “sacrifice by fire.” 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.
During the era of the Holocaust, German authorities also targeted other groups because of their perceived “racial inferiority”: Roma (Gypsies), the disabled, and some of the Slavic peoples (Poles, Russians, and others). Other groups were persecuted on political, ideological, and behavioral grounds, among them Communists, Socialists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and homosexuals.
In 1933, the Jewish population of Europe stood at over nine million. Most European Jews lived in countries that Nazi Germany would occupy or influence during World War II. By 1945, the Germans and their collaborators killed nearly two out of every three European Jews as part of the “Final Solution,” the Nazi policy to murder the Jews of Europe. Although Jews, whom the Nazis deemed a priority danger to Germany, were the primary victims of Nazi racism, other victims included some 200,000 Roma (Gypsies). At least 200,000 mentally or physically disabled patients, mainly Germans, living in institutional settings, were murdered in the so-called Euthanasia Program.
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Author: US Holocaust Memorial Museum
Keywords: Holocaust, Shoah, Nazi concentration camps, Nuremberg Laws, Extermination camp, Final Solution, Jewish question, Auschwitz concentration camp, Auschwitz, Nazi Germany, Jews destroyed, Genocide, Concentration camps, Jewish genocide, Jews genocide, Holocaust of the Jewish people, How many Jews died in the Holocaust, Two thirds, Six million, Six million Jews, Six million Jews died, 6 million, 6 million Jews, 6 million Jews died, 9 million, Nine million, 9 million Jews, Nine Million Jews, Jews Holocaust, World War II, World War 2, ethnic cleansing, racial extermination, extermination, Oscar Schindler, Oskar Schindler, Schindler, Wallenberg, Raoul Wallenberg, Raul Wallenberg, Hitler, Adolf Hitler, Adolph Hitler, German Nazis, Schindler's List
Bible reference(s): Isaiah 43:2, Jeremiah 30:7, Zechariah 13:7-8
Source: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Introduction to the Holocaust.”
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