The Holocaust refers to the systematic persecution and murder of approximately six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its allies between 1933 and 1945. Beginning with the rise of the Nazis to power in Germany in 1933, the new government utilized state power to persecute Jews and others deemed "racially inferior" through ghettos and concentration camps. Over the following years, the Nazi killing operations expanded, ultimately murdering around two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population in factories of death like Auschwitz through mass shootings, gas chambers, starvation, and forced labor. Millions of other groups were also targeted in the Holocaust on racial, political, ideological, and other grounds.

1. 1933-1945

2. What was the Holocaust?
 The Holocaust refers to a specific
genocidal event in twentieth-century
history: the state sponsored, systematic
persecution and annihilation of
European Jewry by Nazi German and its
collaborators between 1933 and 1945.

3. What does Holocaust
Mean?
 “Holocaust" is a word of Greek origin
meaning "sacrifice by fire."
 The Nazis, who came to power in
Germany in January 1933, believed that
Germans were "racially superior" and
that the Jews, deemed "inferior," were
an alien threat to the so-called German
racial community.

4. What does "State Sponsored"
and "Systemic" Mean?

5. State Sponsored and Systemic
Mean…
 The government made decisions that
would support the “cleansing” of
Germany at every level such at:
school, police, politicians, and
government officials.

6. The Introduction of Hitler to
Government
 Following the appointment of Adolf Hitler
as chancellor on January 30, 1933, the
Nazi state (also referred to as the Third
Reich) quickly became a regime in
which Germans enjoyed no guaranteed
basic rights. This applied TO ALL
GERMANS!

7. The People of Germany Were
No Longer Safe!

8. Killing of the Sick and Weak
 At least 200,000 mentally or physically
disabled patients, mainly
Germans, living in institutional
settings, were murdered in the so-called
Euthanasia Program.

9. Killing Children
 The Reich Ministry of the Interior circulated
a decree compelling all
physicians, nurses, and midwives to report
newborn infants and children under the age
of three who showed signs of severe
mental or physical disability.

10. Two young brothers, seated for a family photograph in the
Kovno ghetto. One month later, they were deported to the
Majdanek camp. Kovno, Lithuania, February 1944.

11. Murder
 Public health authorities began to
encourage parents of children with
disabilities to admit their young children to
one of a number of specially designated
pediatric clinics throughout Germany and
Austria. The clinics were in reality
children's killing wards where specially
recruited medical staff murdered their
young charges by lethal overdoses of
medication or by starvation.

12. The Germans and their collaborators killed
as many as 1.5 million children
 The fate of Jewish and non-Jewish children
can be categorized in the following way: 1)
children killed when they arrived in killing
centers; 2) children killed immediately after
birth or in institutions; 3) children born in
ghettos and camps who survived because
prisoners hid them; 4) children, usually
over age 12, who were used as laborers
and as subjects of medical experiments;
and 5) those children killed during reprisal
operations or so-called anti-partisan
operations.

13. The Killing Spreads
 During the era of the Holocaust, German
authorities also targeted other groups
because of their perceived "racial
inferiority": Roma (Gypsies), the
disabled, and some of the Slavic peoples
(Poles, Russians, and others). Other
groups were persecuted on
political, ideological, and behavioral
grounds, among them
Communists, Socialists, Jehovah's
Witnesses, and homosexuals.

14. Arresting Woman and Children

15. The Ghettos
 During World War II, ghettos were city
districts (often enclosed) in which the
Germans concentrated the municipal
and sometimes regional Jewish
population and forced them to live under
miserable conditions.

16. Ghettos and Escaping
 Poland
 St. Louis

17. Warsaw Ghetto, 1940

18. Jewish man and children in Kutno, 1940
(Photo: Getty Images) More Photos…

19. Emptying the Ghettos

20. Railroad System

21. More Maps
 Introduction to Maps
 Auschwitz
 Dachau

22. The Camps-Dachau
 In the early years of the Nazi regime, the
National Socialist government established
concentration camps to detain real and
imagined political and ideological
opponents.

23. Barracks in the quarry camp of the Natzweiler-
Struthof concentration camp.

24. Aerial view of Neuengamme
concentration camp.

25. Prisoners Loading up On Cattle
Cars to Auschwitz-Birkenau

26. Auschwitz-Birkenau

27. One Building of Barracks

28. Barracks

29. Toilets

30. View of the walled entrance to the gas chamber in the main camp of
Auschwitz (Auschwitz I). This gas chamber was in use for only a short
time before being converted into a bomb shelter. In the background is a
building used by the Gestapo as a regional headquarters. (April 1945)

31. Canisters of Zyclon B

32. Inside a Gas Chamber

33. SS Soldiers

34. Two ovens inside the crematorium at the Dachau
concentration camp. (July 1, 1945)

35. Railroad Entry to Auschwitz

36. To Understand the Scale of
Loss of Life….

37. Life in the Camps

38. Burning Bodies

39. Mass Graves

40. Mass Graves

41. Corpses of Women Piled Up on
the Floor of Block 11 (Fen. 1945)

42. STILL FROM A POSTWAR SOVIET FILM: Jewish
children, kept alive in the Auschwitz II (Birkenau)
concentration camp, pose in concentration camp
uniforms between two rows of barbed wire fencing
after liberation. (After January 27, 1945)

43. A prisoner being suspended and subjected
to low pressure experimentation. (March -
August 1942)

44. Burning the Bodies