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Portrait of The Holocaust

History · The 20th century

The Holocaust

1933–1945; systematic mass murder from 1941

Genocide — the state-organised murder of Europe's Jews by Nazi Germany

The systematic, state-organised persecution and murder of six million European Jews by Nazi Germany and its collaborators. It began with discrimination and exclusion after Hitler came to power in 1933, hardened with the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 and the violence of November 1938, and became mass murder after the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, when Einsatzgruppen shot hundreds of thousands of Jewish civilians. From late 1941 killing centres were built in occupied Poland, and at the Wannsee Conference in January 1942 officials coordinated the deportation of Europe's Jews to them. About three million died in the camps and killing centres, among them roughly one million at Auschwitz-Birkenau. The Nazi regime also murdered Roma and Sinti, disabled people, Poles, Soviet prisoners of war, gay men, Jehovah's Witnesses and political opponents. Auschwitz was liberated on 27 January 1945, now marked as International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

How to spot them

  • ▸The Hebrew term Shoah is used for the same events
  • ▸Laws of 1935 that stripped German Jews of citizenship and defined who counted as Jewish
  • ▸A conference at a villa by a lake in January 1942 that coordinated the deportations
  • ▸Mobile killing units that followed the German army into the Soviet Union in 1941
  • ▸International remembrance falls on 27 January, the date one camp was liberated

What happened

The 1935 laws that removed citizenship from German Jews and banned marriage with non-Jews (1935)

The Reich Citizenship Law and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour, announced at Nuremberg

The night of 9–10 November 1938, when synagogues were burned and shops destroyed across Germany and Austria (1938)

Kristallnacht; about 100 Jews were killed and some 30,000 men sent to concentration camps

The mass shooting of 33,771 Jews in a ravine outside Kyiv over two days (1941)

Babi Yar, 29–30 September 1941, carried out by Einsatzgruppe C and auxiliaries

A meeting at a villa in a Berlin suburb chaired by Reinhard Heydrich (1942)

The Wannsee Conference of 20 January 1942, which coordinated the ministries behind the deportations

The month-long armed resistance in a walled district of Warsaw in spring 1943 (1943)

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, April to May 1943, the largest Jewish revolt of the war

The diary of a girl hidden in an Amsterdam annexe, published by her father in 1947 (1947)

Anne Frank died at Bergen-Belsen in early 1945; her father Otto was the only survivor of those in hiding

The trials of surviving leaders before an international tribunal in 1945–46 (1945–46)

The Nuremberg trials, which established crimes against humanity as a charge in international law

Quick-fire facts

  • •Six million Jews were murdered, about two thirds of the Jewish population of Europe
  • •The word Holocaust is from Greek, meaning a burnt offering; Shoah, Hebrew for catastrophe, is widely preferred in Israel and elsewhere
  • •The Wannsee Conference of 20 January 1942 was chaired by Reinhard Heydrich, with Adolf Eichmann keeping the minutes
  • •The killing centres of Operation Reinhard were Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka; Chelmno used gas vans; Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek combined camps with killing facilities
  • •About 1.1 million people were murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau, roughly a million of them Jews; its commandant Rudolf Höss was hanged there in 1947
  • •Auschwitz was liberated by Soviet forces on 27 January 1945; Bergen-Belsen by British troops on 15 April 1945
  • •Raphael Lemkin coined the term genocide in 1944, and the UN Genocide Convention followed in 1948
  • •Adolf Eichmann was seized in Argentina in 1960, tried in Jerusalem and executed in 1962
  • •Yad Vashem in Jerusalem honours non-Jews who saved Jewish lives as Righteous Among the Nations, among them Oskar Schindler and Raoul Wallenberg
  • •Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel and Viktor Frankl wrote the best-known survivor accounts; Wiesel received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986

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Sources