The Holocaust is the term for the genocide of around six million Jews by the Nazi regime and their collaborators during the Second World War. The Holocaust is also sometimes referred to as the Shoah, the Hebrew word for catastrophe.
Between 1933 and 1945, the Nazis sought to eliminate the entire Jewish community of Europe. Jews were murdered by death squads called Einsatzgruppen or transported to extermination camps . Six million of the eleven million European Jews in Europe perished. The Holocaust mainly occurred in Eastern Europe, in places such as occupied Poland and Ukraine.
The term ‘Holocaust’ is sometimes also used to refer to the orchestrated murder of Roma in Europe. As many as 500,000 Roma and Sinti individuals were murdered by the Nazis.
Other groups were also targeted by the Nazi regime. People with disabilities, Soviet Prisoners of War and Soviet and Polish civilians were persecuted and targeted for mass murder because of their perceived racial inferiority. Gay people, socialists, communists and trades unionists, Freemasons and Jehovah’s Witnesses were oppressed and imprisoned in concentration camps , where many died from starvation and disease.
The Nazis did not act alone. Countries which were occupied by Nazi Germany during the Second World War, such as Lithuania, Ukraine and Hungary collaborated with the perpetrators .
