high definition nature photos
 "Selection" on the Judenrampe, Auschwitz, May/June 1944. To be sent to the right meant slave labor; to the left, the gas chambers. This image shows the arrival of Hungarian Jews from Carpatho-Ruthenia, many of them from the Berehov ghetto. It was taken by Ernst Hofmann or Bernhard Walter of the SS. Courtesy of Yad Vashem.[1] |
The Holocaust (from the Greek ὁλόκαυστον (holókauston): holos, "completely" and kaustos, "burnt"), also known as haShoah (Hebrew: השואה), Churben (Yiddish: חורבן) is the term generally used to describe the genocide of approximately six million European Jews during World War II, as part of a program of deliberate extermination planned and executed by Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler.[2]
Other groups were also persecuted and killed, including the Romani, Soviet civilians, Soviet prisoners of war, ethnic Poles, the disabled, homosexual men and political and religious opponents.[3] Most scholars, however, define the Holocaust as a genocide of European Jewry alone,[4] or what the Nazis called the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question." The total number of victims of Nazi genocidal policies, including the handicapped and Romani, Poles and Soviet POW is generally agreed to be between 9 and 11 million.[5]
The persecution and genocide were accomplished in stages. Legislation to remove the Jews from civil society was enacted years before the outbreak of World War II. Concentration camps were established in which inmates were used as slave labour until they died of exhaustion or disease. Where the Third Reich conquered new territory in eastern Europe, specialized units called Einsatzgruppen murdered Jews and political opponents in mass shootings. Jews and Romani were crammed into ghettos before being transported hundreds of miles by freight train to extermination camps where, if they survived the journey, the majority of them were killed in gas chambers. Every arm of Nazi Germany's bureaucracy was involved in the logistics of the mass murder, turning the country into what one Holocaust scholar has called "a genocidal state".[6]
| The Holocaust |
|---|
| Early elements |
| Racial policy · Nazi eugenics · Nuremberg Laws · Forced euthanasia · Concentration camps (list) |
| Jews |
| Jews in Nazi Germany (1933–1939) |
Pogroms: Kristallnacht · Bucharest · Dorohoi · Iaşi · Kaunas · Jedwabne · Lviv |
Ghettos: Łachwa · Łódź · Lwów · Kraków · Budapest · Theresienstadt · Kovno · Vilna · Warsaw |
Einsatzgruppen: Babi Yar · Rumbula · Ponary · Odessa · Erntefest · Ninth Fort · |
Final Solution: Wannsee · Operation Reinhard · Holocaust trains |
Concentration camps: Resistance: Jewish partisans · Ghetto uprisings (Warsaw) |
End of World War II: Death marches · Berihah · Displaced persons |
| Other victims |
Romani people · Homosexuals · Disabled individuals · Slavs in Eastern Europe · Poles · Soviet POWs · Jehovah's Witnesses · Serbs |
| Responsible parties |
Nazi Germany: Adolf Hitler · Heinrich Himmler · Ernst Kaltenbrunner · Reinhard Heydrich · Adolf Eichmann · Schutzstaffel · Gestapo · Sturmabteilung · Nazi Party · Rudolf Höss Collaborators Aftermath: Nuremberg Trials · Denazification · Reparations Agreement |
| Lists |
| Survivors · Victims · Rescuers |
| Resources |
| The Destruction of the European Jews Functionalism versus intentionalism |
