The Holocaust (/ˈhɒləkɔːst/ ⓘ HOL-ə-kawst),[1] known in Hebrew as the Shoah (/ˈʃoʊə/ ⓘ SHOH-ə; Hebrew: שּׁוֹאָה, romanized: Shoah, IPA: [ʃoˈʔa], lit. ’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’ Final Solution was 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 1945.

Many Jewish survivors emigrated from 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.

Terminology and scope

The term holocaust, derived from a Greek word meaning ‘burnt offering‘,^[2] was an ordinary English word for centuries also meaning ‘destruction or sacrifice by fire’ or, figuratively, ‘massacre’. During the 1950s, it started to become a proper noun and the most common word used to describe the Nazi extermination of Jews in English and many other languages.^[a] The term Holocaust is sometimes used to refer to the persecution of other groups that the Nazis targeted,^[b] especially those targeted on a biological basis, in particular the Roma and Sinti, as well as Soviet prisoners of war and Polish and Soviet civilians.^[3][4][5] All of these groups, however, were targeted for different reasons.^[6] By the 1970s, the adjective Jewish was dropped as redundant and Holocaust, now capitalized, became the default term for the destruction of European Jews.^[7] The Hebrew word Shoah (‘catastrophic destruction’) exclusively refers to Jewish victims.^[8][9][3] The perpetrators used the phrase “Final Solution” as a euphemism for their genocide of Jews.^[10]

Background

Jews have lived in Europe for more than two thousand years.^[11] Throughout the Middle Ages in Europe, Jews were subjected to antisemitism based on Christian theology, which blamed them for killing Jesus.^[12][13] In the 19th century many European countries granted full citizenship rights to Jews in hopes that they would assimilate.^[14] By the early 20th century, most Jews in central and western Europe were well integrated into society, while in eastern Europe, where emancipation had arrived later, many Jews continued to live in small towns, spoke Yiddish, and practiced Orthodox Judaism.^[15] Political antisemitism positing the existence of a Jewish question and usually an international Jewish conspiracy emerged in the 18th and 19th centuries due to the rise of nationalism in Europe and industrialization that increased economic conflicts between Jews and non-Jews.^[16][17] Some scientists began to categorize humans into different races and argued that there was a life or death struggle between them.^[18] Many racists argued that Jews were a separate racial group alien to Europe.^[19][20]

The turn of the twentieth century saw a major effort to establish a German colonial empire overseas, leading to the Herero and Nama genocide and subsequent racial apartheid regime in South West Africa.^[21][22] World War I (1914–1918) intensified nationalist and racist sentiments in Germany and other European countries.^[23] Jews in eastern Europe were targeted by widespread pogroms.^[24] Germany had two million war dead and lost a substantial territory;^[23] opposition to the postwar settlement united Germans across the political spectrum.^[25][26] The military promoted the untrue but compelling idea that, rather than being defeated on the battlefield, Germany had been stabbed in the back by socialists and Jews.^[25][27]

The Nazi Party was founded in the wake of the war,^[28] and its ideology is often cited as the main factor explaining the Holocaust.^[29] From the beginning, the Nazis—not unlike other nation-states in Europe—dreamed of a world without Jews, whom they identified as “the embodiment of everything that was wrong with modernity“.^[6] The Nazis defined the German nation as a racial community unbounded by Germany’s physical borders^[30] and sought to purge it of racially foreign and socially deficient elements.^[25][31] The Nazi Party and its leader, Adolf Hitler, were also obsessed with reversing Germany’s territorial losses and acquiring additional Lebensraum (living space) in Eastern Europe for colonization.^[32][33] These ideas appealed to many Germans.^[34] The Nazis promised to protect European civilization from the Soviet threat.^[35] Hitler believed that Jews controlled the Soviet Union, as well as the Western powers, and were plotting to destroy Germany.^[36][37][38]