The Holocaust was the systematic persecution and murder of six million European Jews by Nazi Germany and its allies and collaborators. It developed through stages rather than from one published master plan, but it rested from the beginning on radical antisemitism and a dictatorship prepared to remove rights, seize property and use organised violence.
Exclusion in Nazi Germany
After 1933, laws and administrative measures pushed Jewish people out of public employment, education and professions. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 deprived German Jews of citizenship and prohibited marriages defined by Nazi racial categories. Propaganda portrayed persecution as national defence.
The violence of 9–10 November 1938, often called Kristallnacht, destroyed synagogues and businesses and sent about 30,000 Jewish men to concentration camps. Many Jews sought to emigrate, but visas, money, restrictive immigration policies and the expanding reach of Nazi power closed possible routes of escape.
War, ghettos and mass shootings
The invasion of Poland placed millions more Jews under German rule. Occupiers concentrated communities in ghettos, imposed forced labour and used hunger and disease as instruments of domination. Ghettos were not stable holding areas: they were sites of exploitation, deprivation and later deportation.
After the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, German killing units and police formations, supported by military authorities and local collaborators, murdered entire communities in mass shootings. Babi Yar near Kyiv was one of many sites. These killings linked conquest directly to racial annihilation.
Killing centres and deportation
During 1941 and 1942, Nazi policy developed into continent-wide systematic murder. At the Wannsee Conference in January 1942, senior officials coordinated the deportation of Jews across Europe under a policy already producing mass death.
Killing centres were established in occupied Poland, including Chełmno, Bełżec, Sobibór, Treblinka, Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek. Deportees arrived by rail, often after days without adequate water or food. Many were murdered immediately in gas chambers; others were selected for forced labour and subjected to starvation, disease and violence.
Collaboration, rescue and resistance
The Holocaust required institutions and people beyond a small circle of Nazi leaders: civil servants, railway systems, police forces, businesses, occupation authorities and collaborating governments all played roles. The degree of participation differed across countries and individuals.
Jewish resistance took many forms, from preserving culture and obtaining food to documenting crimes, joining partisans and armed revolt. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943 challenged German deportation despite overwhelming military disadvantage. Some non-Jews hid or assisted victims, usually at great risk; others denounced neighbours or benefited from stolen property.
Liberation, survival and evidence
Allied armies liberated camps and encountered survivors, abandoned prisoners and evidence of mass murder. Liberation did not restore families, homes or citizenship. Many survivors remained in displaced-persons camps and faced renewed antisemitism while deciding whether and where to rebuild their lives.
The six million murdered Jews were individuals from diverse communities. Nazi Germany also persecuted and killed Roma and Sinti, disabled people, Polish and Soviet civilians, prisoners of war, political opponents, gay men and others. Their histories must be studied accurately without collapsing distinct policies and experiences into one undifferentiated category.
Holocaust history draws on German records, trial evidence, material sites and survivor testimony. Each source has limits, but together they make denial untenable and allow historians to reconstruct both policy and lived experience.
Why It Matters
The Holocaust shows how racism, bureaucracy, war and collaboration can combine in mass murder. Studying the stages and the people affected resists both denial and explanations that make the crime seem inexplicable.