Have you ever heard of the word Holocaust?
Read the full story according to history.
The word “Holocaust,” from the Greek words
“holos” (whole) and “kaustos” (burned), was
historically used to describe a sacrificial offering
burned on an altar. Since 1945, the word has
taken on a new and horrible meaning: the mass
murder of some 6 million European Jews (as well
as members of some other persecuted groups,
such as Gypsies and homosexuals) by the
German Nazi regime during the Second World
War. 
To the anti-Semitic Nazi leader Adolf Hitler,
Jews were an inferior race, an alien threat to
German racial purity and community. After years
of Nazi rule in Germany, during which Jews were
consistently persecuted, Hitler’s “final solution”–
now known as the Holocaust–came to fruition
under the cover of world war, with mass killing
centers constructed in the concentration camps
of occupied Poland.
Before the Holocaust:
Historical Anti-Semitism &
Hitler’s Rise to Power
Anti- Semitism in Europe did not begin with Adolf
Hitler. Though use of the term itself dates only
to the 1870s, there is evidence of hostility
toward Jews long before the Holocaust–even as
far back as the ancient world, when Roman
authorities destroyed the Jewish temple in
Jerusalem and forced Jews to leave Palestine .
The Enlightenment , during the 17th and 18th
centuries, emphasized religious toleration, and in
the 19th century Napoleon and other European
rulers enacted legislation that ended long-
standing restrictions on Jews. Anti-Semitic
feeling endured, however, in many cases taking
on a racial character rather than a religious one.
The roots of Hitler’s particularly virulent brand of
anti-Semitism are unclear. Born in Austria in
1889, he served in the German army during World
War I . Like many anti-Semites in Germany, he
blamed the Jews for the country’s defeat in
1918.
Soon after the war ended, Hitler joined the
National German Workers’ Party, which became
the National Socialist German Workers’ Party
(NSDAP), known to English speakers as the
Nazis. While imprisoned for treason for his role in
the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, Hitler wrote the
memoir and propaganda tract “Mein Kampf”(My
Struggle), in which he predicted a general
European war that would result in “the
extermination of the Jewish race in Germany.”
Hitler was obsessed with the idea of the
superiority of the “pure” German race, which he
called “Aryan,” and with the need for
“Lebensraum,” or living space, for that race to
expand. In the decade after he was released
from prison, Hitler took advantage of the
weakness of his rivals to enhance his party’s
status and rise from obscurity to power. On
January 20, 1933, he was named chancellor of
Germany. After President Paul von Hindenburg’s
death in 1934, Hitler anointed himself as
“Fuhrer,” becoming Germany’s supreme ruler.
Nazi Revolution in
Germany, 1933-1939
The twin goals of racial purity and spatial
expansion were the core of Hitler’s worldview,
and from 1933 onward they would combine to
form the driving force behind his foreign and
domestic policy. At first, the Nazis reserved their
harshest persecution for political opponents such
as Communists or Social Democrats. The first
official concentration camp opened at Dachau
(near Munich) in March 1933, and many of the
first prisoners sent there were Communists.
Like the network of concentration camps that
followed, becoming the killing grounds of the
Holocaust, Dachau was under the control of
Heinrich Himmler, head of the elite Nazi guard,
the Schutzstaffel (SS), and later chief of the
German police.
By July 1933, German
concentration camps (Konzentrationslager in
German, or KZ) held some 27,000 people in
“protective custody.” Huge Nazi rallies and
symbolic acts such as the public burning of
books by Jews, Communists, liberals and
foreigners helped drive home the desired
message of party strength.
In 1933, Jews in Germany numbered around
525,000, or only 1 percent of the total German
population.
During the next six years, Nazis
undertook an “Aryanization” of Germany,
dismissing non-Aryans from civil service,
liquidating Jewish-owned businesses and
stripping Jewish lawyers and doctors of their
clients. Under the Nuremberg Laws of 1935,
anyone with three or four Jewish grandparents
was considered a Jew, while those with two
Jewish grandparents were designated Mischlinge
(half-breeds).
Under the Nuremberg Laws, Jews became
routine targets for stigmatization and
persecution. This culminated in Kristallnacht , or
the “night of broken glass” in November 1938,
when German synagogues were burned and
windows in Jewish shops were smashed; some
100 Jews were killed and thousands more
arrested. From 1933 to 1939, hundreds of
thousands of Jews who were able to leave
Germany did, while those who remained lived in
a constant state of uncertainty and fear.
Beginning of War ,
1939-1940
In September 1939, the German army occupied
the western half of Poland. German police soon
forced tens of thousands of Polish Jews from
their homes and into ghettoes, giving their
confiscated properties to ethnic Germans (non- Jews outside Germany who identified as
German), Germans from the Reich or Polish
gentiles.
Surrounded by high walls and barbed
wire, the Jewish ghettoes in Poland functioned
like captive city-states, governed by Jewish
Councils. In addition to widespread
unemployment, poverty and hunger,
overpopulation made the ghettoes breeding
grounds for disease such as typhus.
Meanwhile, beginning in the fall of 1939, Nazi officials selected around 70,000 Germans
institutionalized for mental illness or disabilities
to be gassed to death in the so-called
Euthanasia Program.
After prominent German
religious leaders protested, Hitler put an end to
the program in August 1941, though killings of
the disabled continued in secrecy, and by 1945
some 275,000 people deemed handicapped from
all over Europe had been killed. In hindsight, it seems clear that the Euthanasia Program
functioned as a pilot for the Holocaust.
Towards the “Final
Solution” , 1940-1941
Throughout the spring and summer of 1940, the
German army expanded Hitler’s empire in
Europe, conquering Denmark, Norway, the
Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and France.
Beginning in 1941, Jews from all over the
continent, as well as hundreds of thousands of
European Gypsies, were transported to the Polish
ghettoes. The German invasion of the Soviet
Union in June 1941 marked a new level of
brutality in warfare. Mobile killing units called
Einsatzgruppenwould murder more than 500,000
Soviet Jews and others (usually by shooting)
over the course of the German occupation.
A memorandum dated July 31, 1941, from
Hitler’s top commander Hermann Goering to
Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the SD (the security
service of the SS), referred to the need for an
Endlösung (final solution) to “the Jewish
question.” Beginning in September 1941, every
person designated as a Jew in German-held
territory was marked with a yellow star, making
them open targets. Tens of thousands were soon
being deported to the Polish ghettoes and
German-occupied cities in the USSR.
Since June 1941, experiments with mass killing
methods had been ongoing at the concentration
camp of Auschwitz , near Krakow. That August,
500 officials gassed 500 Soviet POWs to death
with the pesticide Zyklon-B. The SS soon placed
a huge order for the gas with a German pest-
control firm, an ominous indicator of the
comingHolocaust.
Holocaust Death Camps,
1941-1945
Beginning in late 1941, the Germans began mass
transports from the ghettoes in Poland to the
concentration camps, starting with those people
viewed as the least useful: the sick, old and
weak and the very young. The first mass
gassings began at the camp of Belzec, near
Lublin, on March 17, 1942. Five more mass killing
centers were built at camps in occupied Poland,
including Chelmno, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek
and the largest of all, Auschwitz-Birkenau. From
1942 to 1945, Jews were deported to the camps
from all over Europe, including German-
controlled territory as well as those countries
allied with Germany. The heaviest deportations
took place during the summer and fall of 1942,
when more than 300,000 people were deported
from the Warsaw ghetto alone.
Though the Nazis tried to keep operation of
camps secret, the scale of the killing made this
virtually impossible. Eyewitnesses brought
reports of Nazi atrocities in Poland to the Allied
governments, who were harshly criticized after
the war for their failure to respond, or to
publicize news of the mass slaughter. This lack
of action was likely mostly due to the Allied
focus on winning the war at hand, but was also
a result of the general incomprehension with
which news of the Holocaust was met and the
denial and disbelief that such atrocities could be
occurring on such a scale.
At Auschwitz alone, more than 2 million people
were murdered in a process resembling a large-
scale industrial operation. A large population of
Jewish and non-Jewish inmates worked in the
labor camp there; though only Jews were
gassed, thousands of others died of starvation or
disease. During the summer of 1944, even as the
events of D -Day (June 6, 1944) and a Soviet
offensive the same month spelled the beginning
of the end for Germany in the war, a large
proportion of Hungary’s Jewish population was
deported to Auschwitz, and as many as 12,000
Jews were killed every day.
Nazi Rule Comes to an
End, as Holocaust
Continues to Claim Lives,
1945
By the spring of 1945, German leadership was
dissolving amid internal dissent, with Goering and
Himmler both seeking to distance themselves
from Hitler and take power. In his last will and
political testament, dictated in a German bunker
that April 29, Hitler blamed the war on
“International Jewry and its helpers” and urged
the German leaders and people to follow “the
strict observance of the racial laws and with
merciless resistance against the universal
poisoners of all peoples”–the Jews. The
following day, he committed suicide. Germany’s
formal surrender in World War II came barely a
week later, on May 8, 1945.
German forces had begun evacuating many of
the death camps in the fall of 1944, sending
inmates under guard to march further from the
advancing enemy’s front line. These so-called
“death marches” continued all the way up to the
German surrender, resulting in the deaths of
some 250,000 to 375,000 people. In his classic
book “Survival in Auschwitz,” the Italian Jewish
author Primo Levi described his own state of
mind, as well as that of his fellow inmates in
Auschwitz on the day before Soviet troops
arrived at the camp in January 1945: “We lay in
a world of death and phantoms. The last trace of
civilization had vanished around and inside us.
The work of bestial degradation, begun by the
victorious Germans, had been carried to
conclusion by the Germans in defeat.”
Aftermath & Lasting
Impact of the Holocaust
The wounds of the Holocaust–known in Hebrew
as Shoah, or catastrophe–were slow to heal.
Survivors of the camps found it nearly impossible
to return home, as in many cases they had lost
their families and been denounced by their non-
Jewish neighbors. As a result, the late 1940s
saw an unprecedented number of refugees,
POWs and other displaced populations moving
across Europe.
In an effort to punish the villains of the
Holocaust, the Allies held the Nuremberg Trials
of 1945-46, which brought Nazi atrocities to
horrifying light. Increasing pressure on the Allied
powers to create a homeland for Jewish
survivors of the Holocaust would lead to a
mandate for the creation of Israel in 1948.
Over the decades that followed, ordinary
Germans struggled with the Holocaust’s bitter
legacy, as survivors and the families of victims
sought restitution of wealth and property
confiscated during the Nazi years. Beginning in
1953, the German government made payments to
individual Jews and to the Jewish people as a
way of acknowledging the German people’s
responsibility for the crimes committed in their
name.
Source:history