The systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jews by Nazi Germany and its collaborators, and the murder of millions of others deemed enemies of the Nazi regime.
Last updated: October 2026
The Holocaust was the systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jews by the Nazi regime in Germany and its collaborators across Europe between 1933 and 1945. It was the central crime of the Second World War and one of the defining catastrophes of the twentieth century. The Nazi regime also persecuted and murdered millions of other people, including Roma, people with disabilities, Soviet prisoners of war, Polish civilians, political opponents, Jehovah's Witnesses, and gay men. This entry centers on the murder of the Jews, which the Nazis pursued as a distinct goal of total annihilation, while also describing the wider system of persecution in which it took place.
The word Holocaust comes from a Greek term for a burnt offering, and it is used in English to describe the Nazi genocide of the Jews. Jewish communities often use the Hebrew word Shoah, meaning catastrophe. Scholars use both terms. The Holocaust was not a single event, a single order, or a single camp. It was a process that developed over more than a decade, from legal discrimination and social exclusion in the 1930s, through ghettoization and mass shootings, to industrialized murder in extermination camps in the 1940s. At each stage, it depended on laws, bureaucracies, railways, police forces, businesses, and ordinary people who cooperated, complied, or looked away, as well as on the courage of those who resisted and rescued.
Understanding the Holocaust requires care with evidence. The figure of six million Jewish victims is the consensus of historians, based on demographic studies, German records, and postwar documentation assembled by institutions such as Yad Vashem and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Individual estimates vary by place and period, and research continues to refine them. What is not in doubt is the scale, the systematic character, and the intent of the murder. The Holocaust is one of the most thoroughly documented crimes in history, attested by perpetrator records, survivor testimony, photographs, and the physical remains of camps and ghettos.
This entry presents the facts in chronological order, from Nazi ideology and the rise of Hitler, through persecution in Germany, the war years, and the machinery of murder, to resistance, liberation, trials, and remembrance. It avoids sensational detail. The aim is accuracy, clarity, and dignity for the victims, and a record that readers can trust.
Nazi antisemitism drew on older European prejudices but gave them a new, racial and conspiratorial form. Antisemitism, hostility toward Jews as a religious and cultural minority, had deep roots in Europe, including religious prejudice, economic resentment, and nationalist suspicion of Jews as outsiders. In the nineteenth century, racial theories recast these prejudices in biological terms, claiming that human groups were divided into superior and inferior races. Nazi ideology absorbed these ideas and fused them with a conspiracy theory: that Jews, though a small minority, secretly controlled finance, communism, the press, and liberal democracy, and were working to undermine Germany.
Adolf Hitler, who became leader of the National Socialist German Workers' Party, made antisemitism the core of his worldview. In his book Mein Kampf, written in the 1920s, he presented history as a racial struggle in which the German people, whom he called Aryans, faced a Jewish enemy that threatened their survival. He blamed Jews for Germany's defeat in the First World War, for the revolution of 1918, for communism, and for the economic crises of the Weimar Republic. These claims were false, but they gave a simple explanation for complex suffering, and they found an audience in a country humiliated by defeat, burdened by reparations, and destabilized by inflation and unemployment.
Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany on 30 January 1933. Within months, the Nazi regime dismantled democracy. The Reichstag fire in February 1933 was followed by emergency decrees that suspended civil liberties. The Enabling Act of March 1933 gave Hitler dictatorial powers. Opposition parties were banned, trade unions were dissolved, and the press was brought under control. Jews were among the first targets. In April 1933, the regime organized a boycott of Jewish businesses and passed laws removing Jews from the civil service and the professions. These measures were presented as legal and orderly, and they were carried out by ministries, courts, and professional associations, not only by paramilitaries.
The Nuremberg Laws of September 1935 marked a decisive escalation. The Reich Citizenship Law and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor stripped Jews of German citizenship and forbade marriages and sexual relations between Jews and Germans. Jews were defined by ancestry, not by religious practice, so people who had converted to Christianity or who no longer observed Judaism were still classified as Jews if they had Jewish grandparents. The laws were accompanied by a mass of regulations that excluded Jews from public life, from schools, from swimming pools, from parks, and from professions. Jewish businesses were forced to close or to sell at low prices in a process called Aryanization. The aim was to make life in Germany impossible for Jews and to force emigration, while the regime stole Jewish property and enriched German buyers.
The violence of the regime became visible to the world on the night of 9-10 November 1938, known as Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass. After the assassination of a German diplomat in Paris by a young Jewish man whose family had been expelled from Germany, Nazi paramilitaries and supporters burned synagogues, smashed Jewish shop windows, and attacked Jewish homes across Germany and Austria. Dozens of Jews were murdered that night, and tens of thousands of Jewish men were arrested and sent to concentration camps. The regime then fined the Jewish community for the damage and completed the exclusion of Jews from economic life. Kristallnacht showed that the Nazi regime would use open violence against Jews and that the world would do little to stop it.
The international response was weak. Many countries restricted Jewish immigration, and the Evian Conference of July 1938, convened to address the refugee crisis, produced expressions of sympathy but few offers of refuge. Some Jews were able to emigrate, especially in the mid-1930s, but the doors closed as the crisis deepened. The Kindertransport brought thousands of Jewish children from Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia to Britain, but their parents were generally not admitted. The voyage of the passenger ship St. Louis in 1939, carrying Jewish refugees who were turned away from Cuba, the United States, and Canada, became a symbol of the failure of the international community to offer shelter. By the time war began in September 1939, the majority of German and Austrian Jews who would escape had already left, but most Jews in Poland and the Soviet Union, where the largest Jewish populations lived, had no way out.
Two broader conditions made the Holocaust possible. The first was the Nazi regime's control of a modern state. Germany had an efficient bureaucracy, a national railway system, advanced technology, and a police apparatus capable of identifying, registering, and deporting entire populations. The second was war. The invasion of Poland in 1939 and the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 brought millions of Jews under Nazi control and created the conditions for mass murder. War provided the cover, the manpower, and the justification that the regime used to move from persecution to genocide.
The invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939 began the Second World War and the next phase of persecution. Poland was home to the largest Jewish population in Europe, more than three million people. The German occupation divided Poland into territories annexed to Germany and a General Government administered by Nazi officials. Jews were forced to wear identifying armbands, their property was confiscated, and they were subjected to forced labor. Polish Jews were concentrated in ghettos, sealed districts in cities such as Warsaw, Lodz, Krakow, and Lublin. The Warsaw Ghetto, established in November 1940, held hundreds of thousands of people in a small area, with severe overcrowding, hunger, and disease. Many died from starvation and illness before the deportations to extermination camps began.
Ghettos served several purposes for the Nazis. They isolated Jews from the surrounding population, made them easier to control and exploit, and allowed the regime to extract labor and property. Ghetto inhabitants established councils, schools, soup kitchens, cultural activities, and underground organizations, even under extreme conditions. Historians debate how much choice the Jewish councils had and whether cooperation delayed or hastened destruction. What is clear is that the councils operated under impossible pressure, with no good options, and that the responsibility for the ghettos lay with the Nazi regime that created them.
The invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, known as Operation Barbarossa, opened the phase of systematic mass murder. Behind the advancing German army came the Einsatzgruppen, mobile killing squads composed of SS and police personnel. Their task was to murder Jews, Communist officials, and others deemed enemies. In towns and villages across the Baltic states, Belarus, Ukraine, and western Russia, the Einsatzgruppen rounded up Jews, forced them to dig pits or took them to ravines and forests, and shot them. The massacre at Babi Yar, near Kyiv, in September 1941, where tens of thousands of Jews were murdered over two days, became one of the most notorious of these killings. Mass shootings continued throughout the war and accounted for a large share of the victims of the Holocaust, especially in the east.
The shooting operations were psychologically burdensome even for the perpetrators, and Nazi leaders sought methods they considered more efficient and impersonal. Gas vans, in which exhaust fumes were used to kill people inside sealed vehicles, were used at the Chelmno extermination camp, which began operating in December 1941. At the same time, the regime built a system of camps dedicated to murder. Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, Chelmno, and Majdanek were the six camps whose principal purpose was the killing of Jews, though Auschwitz and Majdanek also functioned as concentration camps with large prisoner populations. In these camps, most deportees were murdered on arrival in gas chambers, and their bodies were disposed of in crematoria or in mass graves. A minority were selected for forced labor and died from exhaustion, disease, or later selections.
The Wannsee Conference of 20 January 1942 is often misunderstood as the moment the Holocaust was decided. In fact, mass murder was already underway. Wannsee was a meeting of senior officials of the SS and German ministries, chaired by Reinhard Heydrich, to coordinate the deportation of Jews from across Europe to the east, using the bureaucratic language of a Final Solution to the Jewish Question. The minutes of the meeting, which survived the war, show officials discussing the registration, transport, and murder of millions of people in the cold language of administration. The conference is important because it shows how genocide was organized as a matter of interdepartmental planning, with timetables, transport schedules, and legal definitions.
From 1942 onward, deportations from across occupied Europe intensified. Jews were rounded up in France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, Greece, Hungary, Slovakia, Croatia, and other countries, often with the cooperation of local police and collaborators, and transported in freight cars to camps in occupied Poland. The Warsaw Ghetto was largely emptied by deportations to Treblinka in the summer of 1942. The deportation of Hungarian Jews in the spring and summer of 1944, after Germany occupied Hungary, was one of the largest and fastest operations of the Holocaust, with hundreds of thousands of people sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau within weeks. By late 1944, as Soviet forces advanced from the east and Allied forces from the west, the Nazis dismantled some camps and forced prisoners on death marches westward, during which many died from cold, hunger, and shootings.
The Holocaust also targeted other groups. Roma were subjected to persecution, deportation, and murder in camps and by shooting squads. People with disabilities were murdered in the T4 euthanasia program, in which hospitals and killing centers used gas chambers and lethal injections. Soviet prisoners of war died in vast numbers from starvation, exposure, and execution. Polish civilians, especially intellectuals and clergy, were targeted for murder and deportation. Political opponents, Jehovah's Witnesses, and gay men were imprisoned in concentration camps. These crimes were part of the same system of Nazi terror, even though the murder of the Jews had a distinct character as a program of total extermination pursued across an entire continent.
Resistance took many forms. Armed uprisings occurred in ghettos and camps, including the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of April 1943, in which Jewish fighters held out against German forces for weeks, and revolts at Treblinka in August 1943 and Sobibor in October 1943. Partisan groups operated in forests in Eastern Europe, and Jews joined resistance movements in France, Italy, Yugoslavia, and elsewhere. Rescue was also a form of resistance. Individuals and networks hid Jews, provided false papers, smuggled children to safety, and helped families escape. Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem, honors non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews with the title Righteous Among the Nations. Those honored include diplomats such as Raoul Wallenberg in Budapest and Chiune Sugihara in Lithuania, as well as farmers, nuns, teachers, and neighbors whose names are less widely known. Rescue was dangerous and rare, and it depended on local conditions, but it saved many lives and remains a central part of the history.
Liberation came as Allied forces advanced into Germany and occupied Europe. Soviet troops reached Majdanek in July 1944 and Auschwitz in January 1945, finding evidence of the camps and a small number of survivors. British and American forces liberated Buchenwald, Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, and other camps in the spring of 1945. The liberators found starving and dying prisoners, mass graves, and camp records. The images and reports from the camps, widely published in newspapers and newsreels, brought the reality of the Holocaust to the world. The war in Europe ended with the surrender of Germany on 8 May 1945. For survivors, liberation was not the end of suffering. Many had lost their entire families. Many had no homes to return to, and some faced continued antisemitism and violence when they tried to return. Displaced persons camps in Germany, Austria, and Italy housed survivors for years while they sought emigration, often to Palestine, the United States, or other countries.
After the war, the Allied powers established the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg to try senior Nazi leaders for war crimes, crimes against peace, and crimes against humanity. The Nuremberg trials, which began in November 1945, were the first international trials of their kind. They established the principle that individuals, including heads of state, could be held responsible for aggression and atrocities, and that following orders was not a sufficient defense. Twelve defendants were sentenced to death, and others received prison sentences. Subsequent trials in Nuremberg and in national courts, including the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961 and the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials in the 1960s, continued the process of accountability. Many perpetrators were never tried, and some escaped justice for decades, but the trials created a record of evidence and a precedent for international law that shaped the later creation of the International Criminal Court.
Leader of the Nazi Party and Chancellor, later Fuhrer, of Germany. Hitler made antisemitism the core of Nazi ideology, presided over the dictatorship that carried out the Holocaust, and ordered the war that made genocide possible. He died by suicide in Berlin in April 1945 as Soviet forces closed in on the city.
Head of the SS, the organization that administered the concentration camp system and organized the murder of the Jews. Himmler oversaw the Einsatzgruppen, the camps, and the deportation system. He was captured by British forces in 1945 and died by suicide while in custody.
Senior SS official and head of the Reich Security Main Office. Heydrich chaired the Wannsee Conference and coordinated the deportation and murder of Jews across Europe. He was assassinated by Czechoslovak resistance fighters in Prague in 1942, after which the Nazis carried out brutal reprisals.
SS officer responsible for organizing the transport of Jews to camps. Eichmann managed timetables, deportations, and logistics. After the war he fled to Argentina, was captured by Israeli agents in 1960, tried in Jerusalem in 1961, and executed in 1962.
Nazi Minister of Propaganda. Goebbels directed the regime's propaganda apparatus, which spread antisemitic films, newspapers, and exhibitions that dehumanized Jews and prepared the German public to accept persecution. He died by suicide in Berlin in 1945.
Jewish girl who hid with her family in Amsterdam after the German occupation of the Netherlands. Her diary, written during more than two years in hiding, became one of the most widely read documents of the Holocaust. She died in the Bergen-Belsen camp in early 1945. Her father Otto Frank survived and published the diary after the war.
Romanian-born Jewish writer and survivor of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. His memoir Night became a central work of Holocaust literature. Wiesel devoted his life to remembrance and human rights education and received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986.
Swedish diplomat in Budapest who saved many Hungarian Jews in 1944 by issuing protective passes and sheltering people in houses under Swedish protection. After Soviet forces entered Budapest, Wallenberg was arrested by Soviet authorities and disappeared. He is honored as one of the Righteous Among the Nations.
Japanese consul in Kaunas, Lithuania, who issued transit visas to Jewish refugees in 1940, allowing them to escape through Japan. Sugihara acted against the instructions of his government and was dismissed from the diplomatic service after the war. He is honored as one of the Righteous Among the Nations.
German businessman who employed Jewish workers in his factories in occupied Poland and Czechoslovakia and protected them from deportation. His efforts saved more than a thousand people. He is honored as one of the Righteous Among the Nations.
Commander of the Jewish Combat Organization in the Warsaw Ghetto. Anielewicz led the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of April 1943, in which Jewish fighters resisted German forces for weeks. He died during the uprising.
Polish-Jewish lawyer who coined the term genocide and campaigned for its recognition in international law. Lemkin's work led to the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, adopted in 1948.
The Holocaust transformed international law, politics, and memory. The Nuremberg trials established the principle of individual criminal responsibility for war crimes and crimes against humanity. The United Nations adopted the Genocide Convention in 1948 and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the same year, both shaped by the experience of the Holocaust. The creation of the state of Israel in 1948 was influenced by the Holocaust, by the refugee crisis it created, and by the determination of many survivors to build a state in which Jews could govern themselves. The relationship between the Holocaust and the founding of Israel remains a subject of historical debate, but the impact of the catastrophe on Jewish politics and identity is beyond question.
Memory of the Holocaust developed slowly. In the immediate postwar years, many survivors found that the world preferred to move on. In Germany, the process of coming to terms with the past, known as Vergangenheitsbewaltigung, unfolded over decades, through trials, education, memorials, and public debate. In Israel, the Eichmann trial of 1961 brought survivor testimony into public life. In the United States and Europe, Holocaust education, museums, and memorials expanded from the 1970s onward. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, and the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Poland became central institutions of remembrance and research.
Holocaust denial, the claim that the Holocaust did not happen or was greatly exaggerated, has been promoted by extremists and conspiracy theorists since the postwar period. It contradicts an overwhelming body of evidence, including German documents, survivor testimony, physical remains, and the findings of courts. Many countries have made Holocaust denial a criminal offense. Historians and educators continue to confront denial and distortion, including the minimization of the Holocaust, the blaming of victims, and the misuse of Holocaust comparisons in political debate. Accurate education remains the strongest answer to denial.
The Holocaust also shaped the way the world understands genocide, racism, and the responsibility to protect. The term genocide, coined by Raphael Lemkin, gave international law a vocabulary for the crime of destroying a group. Later genocides, including those in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, and Darfur, have been studied in comparison with the Holocaust, and the failures to prevent them have renewed debates about intervention, early warning, and the obligations of states and international institutions. The Holocaust did not end genocide, but it established a moral and legal standard by which later atrocities are judged.
For readers today, the central lesson of the Holocaust is the danger of dehumanization. The Holocaust began with words, with laws, with the classification of people as less than human, and with the indifference of bystanders. It proceeded through bureaucratic steps that allowed ordinary officials to participate without confronting the consequences of their actions. Remembering the Holocaust means studying how those steps worked, honoring the victims and the rescuers, and recognizing the warning signs of persecution in the present. The survivors who testified, wrote, and built memorials did so in the hope that knowledge would make repetition less likely. That hope remains the purpose of Holocaust remembrance.
