The Holocaust also known as The Shoah was the genocide of approximately six million European Jews during World War II. Here read some facts about this!
- The Holocaust began in 1933 when Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany and ended in 1945 when the Nazis were defeated by the Allied powers.
- The term “Holocaust,” originally from the Greek word “holokauston” which means “sacrifice by fire,” refers to the Nazi’s persecution and planned slaughter of the Jewish people. The Hebrew word “Shoah,” which means “devastation, ruin, or waste,” is also used for this genocide.
- In addition to Jews, the Nazis targeted Gypsies, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and the disabled for persecution. Anyone who resisted the Nazis was sent to forced labor or murdered.
- The term “Nazi” is an acronym for “Nationalsozialistishe Deutsche Arbeiterpartei” (“National Socialist German Worker’s Party”).
- The Nazis used the term “the Final Solution” to refer to their plan to murder the Jewish people.
- It is estimated that 11 million people were killed during the Holocaust. Six million of these were Jews.
- The Nazis killed approximately two-thirds of all Jews living in Europe.
- An estimated 1.1 million children were murdered in the Holocaust.
- After the beginning of World War II, Nazis began ordering all Jews to live within certain, very specific, areas of big cities, called ghettos.
- Jews were forced out of their homes and moved into smaller apartments, often shared with other families.
- Some ghettos started out as “open,” which meant that Jews could leave the area during the daytime but often had to be back within the ghetto by a curfew. Later, all ghettos became “closed,” which meant that Jews were trapped within the confines of the ghetto and not allowed to leave.
- Nazis would then order deportations from the ghettos. In some of the large ghettos, 1,000 people per day were loaded up in trains and sent to either a concentration camp or a death camp.
- To get them to cooperate, the Nazis told the Jews they were being transported to another place for labor.
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