The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was a genocide in which Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany and its collaborators killed about six million Jews during World War II. The victims represented about two-thirds of the nine million Jews who had resided in Europe. Killings took place throughout Nazi Germany and German-occupied territories, with Nazi-occupied Poland constituting the geographical hub of the genocide. Out of eight Nazi extermination (or death) camps, designed to systematically kill millions, primarily by gassing, but also in mass executions and through extreme work under starvation conditions, six were built on the occupied Polish territory. The Nazis used the phrase "Final Solution to the Jewish Question" and the formula "Final Solution" has been widely used as a term for the genocide of the Jews.
Holocaust scholars draw a distinction between extermination camps and concentration camps. The latter were first established as prison camps to hold Hitler's opponents in Germany immediately after the Nazi Party took over power. The lead editors of the Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945 of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Geoffrey Megargee and Martin Dean, cataloged some 42,500 Nazi ghettos and camps throughout Europe, spanning German-controlled areas from France to Russia and Germany itself, operating from 1933 to 1945. They estimate that 15 million to 20 million people died or were imprisoned in the sites.
Other victims of Nazi crimes included ethnic Poles, Soviet citizens and Soviet POWs, other Slavs, Romanis, communists, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses and the mentally and physically disabled.
IDEOLOGICAL BACKGROUND
The first medical experimentation on humans and ethnic cleansing by Germans took place in the death camps of German South-West Africa during the Herero and Namaqua Genocide (1904-07). Some historians suggested that this was an inspiration for the Holocaust. In many other genocides, pragmatic considerations such as control of territory and resources were central to the genocide policy. Historian Yehuda Bauer argues that "the basic motivation [of the Holocaust] was purely ideological, rooted in an illusionary world of Nazi imagination, where an international Jewish conspiracy to control the world was opposed to a parallel Aryan quest."
Nazi policies divided people into three types of enemies, the "racial" enemies such as the Jews and the Romani who were viewed as enemies because of their "blood;" political opponents such as Marxists, liberals, Christians and the "reactionaries" who were viewed as wayward "National Comrades;" and moral opponents such as homosexuals, the "work-shy" and habitual criminals, also seen as wayward "National Comrades." The last two groups were to be sent to concentration camps for "re-education," with the aim of eventual absorption into the Volksgemeinschaft ("people's community"), though some of the moral opponents were to be sterilized, as they were regarded as "genetically inferior." "Racial" enemies such as the Jews could, by definition, never belong to the Volksgemeinschaft; they were to be totally removed from society.
THE EXECUTION
After invading Poland, the Nazis established ghettos in the incorporated territories and General Government to confine Jews. The ghettos were formed and closed off from the outside world at different times and for different reasons. Ghettos were intended to be temporary until the Jews were deported. But deportation never occurred. Instead, the ghettos' inhabitants were sent to extermination camps.
The killings were systematically conducted in virtually all areas of German-occupied territory. It was at its most severe in East-Central Europe, which had more than seven million Jews in 1939. About five million Jews were killed there, including three million in occupied Poland and over one million in the Soviet Union. Hundreds of thousands also died in the Netherlands, France, Belgium, Yugoslavia, and Greece.
The use of extermination camps (also called "death camps") equipped with gas chambers for the systematic mass extermination of peoples was an unprecedented feature of the Holocaust. These were established at Auschwitz, Belzec, Chełmno, Majdanek, Sobibór, Treblinka (all in today's Poland), Maly Trostenets (today's Belarus), and Jasenovac (today's Serbia).
A distinctive feature of Nazi genocide was also the extensive use of human subjects in "medical" experiments carried in both extermination and concentration camps. The most notorious of the physicians participating in the experiments was Josef Mengele, who worked in Auschwitz. His experiments included placing subjects in pressure chambers, testing drugs on them, freezing them, attempting to change eye color by injecting chemicals into children's eyes, and amputations and other surgeries.
THE FINAL PHASE
By mid-1944, the Final Solution had largely run its course. Those Jewish communities within easy reach of the Nazi regime had been largely exterminated, in proportions ranging from about 25 percent in France to more than 90 percent in Poland. During 1944, in any case, the task became steadily more difficult. German armies were evicted from the Soviet Union, the Balkans and Italy, and German forces—as well as forces aligned with them—were either defeated or were switching sides to the Allies. At this time, as the Soviet armed forces approached, the camps in eastern Poland were closed down, any surviving inmates being shipped west to camps closer to Germany.
Despite the desperate military situation, great efforts were made to conceal evidence of what had happened in the camps. The gas chambers were dismantled, the crematoria dynamited, mass graves dug up and the corpses cremated, and Polish farmers were induced to plant crops on the sites to give the impression that they had never existed. Local commanders continued to kill Jews, and to shuttle them from camp to camp by forced "death marches" until the last weeks of the war. Already sick after months or years of violence and starvation, prisoners were forced to march for tens of miles in the snow to train stations; then transported for days at a time without food or shelter in freight trains with open carriages; and forced to march again at the other end to the new camp. Those who lagged behind or fell were shot. Around 250,000 Jews died during these marches.
Some extermination and concentration camps were liberated by Allied powers in their final march through Europe on the way to defeat Nazi Germany. Soviet, British, or US troops liberated Majdanek, Chełmno, Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, Ravensbrück, Mauthausen, and Theresienstadt. Treblinka, Sobibór, and Bełżec were never liberated, but were destroyed by the Nazis in 1943. In most of the camps discovered by the Soviets, almost all the prisoners had already been removed, leaving only a few thousand alive. Some 60,000 prisoners were discovered at Bergen-Belsen by the British, 13,000 corpses lay unburied, and another 10,000 died from typhus or malnutrition over the following weeks. The British forced the remaining SS guards to gather up the corpses and place them in mass graves.
Young survivors at Auschwitz, liberated by the Red Army in January 1945
Still photograph from the Soviet Film of the liberation of Auschwitz, taken by the film unit of the First Ukrainian Front, shot over a period of several months beginning on January 27, 1945 by Alexander Voronzow and others in his group. Child survivors of Auschwitz, wearing adult-size prisoner jackets, stand behind a barbed wire fence. Among those pictured are Tomasz Szwarz; Alicja Gruenbaum; Solomon Rozalin; Gita Sztrauss; Wiera Sadler; Marta Wiess; Boro Eksztein; Josef Rozenwaser; Rafael Szlezinger; Gabriel Nejman; Adek Apfelbaum; Hillik (later Harold) Apfelbaum; Mark Berkowitz (a twin); Pesa Balter; Rut Muszkies (later Webber); Miriam Friedman; and twins Miriam Mozes and Eva Mozes wearing knitted hats.