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.
The anti-Jewish measures implemented in Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1945 at first focused on the forced emigration of Jews. However, with the invasion of Poland and the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939, Nazi policy shifted to the concentration of Jews in ghettos and camps, and then to the total annihilation of the Jewish population of Europe, between 1941 and 1945. Jews were murdered by death squads called Einsatzgruppen or transported to extermination camps . 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 .
