Holocaust

The Holocaust was the systematic persecution and murder of approximately six million European Jews by Nazi Germany, its allies and collaborators. Persecution developed from the Nazis’ seizure of power in 1933 through escalating exclusion and dispossession to wartime mass murder. Antisemitism was central to Nazi ideology.

From exclusion to mass murder

After Adolf Hitler became chancellor in 1933, Nazi authorities excluded Jews from public life, employment and education and dispossessed them of businesses and property. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 stripped German Jews of citizenship rights and prohibited marriages and sexual relations between Jews and people classified as being of German or related blood. During the November 1938 pogroms, Nazi forces and other participants attacked Jews, destroyed synagogues and businesses and imprisoned thousands of Jewish men.

German conquest made the Holocaust’s continental scale possible. Annexation and occupation brought millions of Jews outside Germany’s prewar borders under Nazi control, especially in Poland and the occupied Soviet territories. Axis allies and collaborators also participated in persecution, deportation and murder.

Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939 extended German control over large Jewish communities. Occupation authorities concentrated Jews in ghettos, confiscated their property and imposed forced labour, starvation and disease. After the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, the SS Einsatzgruppen, police units, other German forces and local auxiliaries murdered Jewish communities in mass shootings. Women and children were among their victims.

At the Wannsee Conference on 20 January 1942, Reinhard Heydrich coordinated government cooperation in the deportation and murder of Europe’s Jews. Mass killing was already under way. German authorities operated killing centres at Chełmno, Bełżec, Sobibór, Treblinka and Auschwitz-Birkenau in occupied Poland, using gas vans or gas chambers. Deportation trains connected communities across Europe to these sites. Auschwitz also held registered prisoners for forced labour, while most Jews selected for immediate murder never entered its prisoner registers.

German institutions, allied governments and local collaborators participated in persecution, deportation and murder in different countries. As Allied armies advanced, the SS evacuated camps and forced prisoners on deadly marches. Soviet forces liberated Auschwitz on 27 January 1945; other Allied armies liberated camps as German rule collapsed.

Concentration camps and killing centres

The term concentration camp was used for civilian internment before the Nazis came to power, including during the Boer War and the First World War. In 1933, Nazi police and paramilitaries improvised camps to imprison and terrorise political opponents, especially Communists and Social Democrats. Dachau, opened in March 1933, became a model for the SS system. From 1934, Heinrich Himmler and the SS increasingly centralised its administration. Prisoners could be detained indefinitely without a trial or judicial review.

The system expanded during the war into occupied Europe. The SS exploited prisoners’ forced labour, and hundreds of subcamps were established near factories, especially in 1943–1944. Concentration camps were sites of torture, starvation, disease and deliberate murder. Nazi Germany also operated separate prisoner-of-war, transit and forced-labour camp systems.

Killing centres, often called death camps or extermination camps, were established in 1941–1942 primarily to murder large numbers of people soon after arrival. Chełmno, Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka II were outside the administrative concentration-camp system. Auschwitz combined concentration camps and forced labour with the Birkenau killing centre. These were overlapping institutions, rather than a uniform progression in which every concentration camp became a killing centre.

Gas chambers also existed in some concentration camps. Majdanek, for example, combined detention and forced labour with shootings and gassings; USHMM now usually classifies it as a concentration camp rather than a sixth purpose-built killing centre. The distinction describes a site’s principal function and administration, not whether people were murdered there.

Forced labour and labour re-education camps

German authorities and employers exploited civilians and prisoners as slave labour in factories, farms, construction projects and quarries. They deported people from occupied countries and compelled them to work under threat of punishment. The SS supplied prisoners to industrial employers, including I. G. Farben at Monowitz. Some categories of prisoners were deliberately worked to death under the policy of “annihilation through work”.

The Gestapo operated labour education camps (Arbeitserziehungslager, AEL), also described as labour re-education camps, to punish alleged violations of labour discipline. Workers could be sent there for refusing work, escaping or even sleeping on the job. These camps were outside the SS concentration-camp administration. Detention was nominally limited to weeks or months, but conditions and death rates could resemble those in concentration camps.

Disobedience or attempted escape could mean execution. At Syrets near Kyiv, camp authorities shot prisoners for resisting, attempting to escape or becoming unable to work. They also murdered prisoners for minor infractions or without an apparent reason. Surviving German orders for prisoners of war and military internees likewise ordered guards to fire on escapees and people who repeatedly abandoned or sabotaged work.

Other victims of Nazi persecution and murder

Nazi Germany also murdered millions of non-Jewish people. Its policies differed between groups and included genocide, political repression, forced labour, executions and lethal imprisonment. These deaths occurred in camps and at many other sites.

Victims	Persecution and murder
Disabled people, including Aktion T4 victims	German doctors and nurses murdered institutionalised adults and children with disabilities by gassing, lethal medication and starvation. The T4 killing facilities included converted medical institutions, rather than concentration camps. The programme supplied personnel and gassing experience later used at the Operation Reinhard killing centres. Hitler halted T4’s centralised gassing operation in August 1941, but the killing of disabled people continued until 1945.
Roma and Sinti	Nazi Germany and its partners committed genocide against Romani people through mass shootings, gassing and lethal camp conditions. An estimated 250,000–500,000 were killed across Europe.
Soviet prisoners of war	About 3.3 million died in German captivity through executions, systematic starvation, exposure, disease and forced labour. POW camps were a distinct part of the detention system.
Non-Jewish Polish civilians and other occupied populations	German authorities murdered members of the Polish intelligentsia, deported civilians for forced labour and carried out mass reprisals against real or alleged resistance.
Political opponents and resistance members	Communists, Social Democrats and trade unionists were early concentration-camp prisoners. German and foreign opponents were imprisoned, tortured and killed; political prisoners wore red triangles.
Gay men and other men accused of homosexuality	The regime used Paragraph 175 to persecute men. Between 5,000 and 15,000 were sent to concentration camps, generally marked with pink triangles; hundreds or possibly thousands died.
Jehovah’s Witnesses and other persecuted people	Jehovah’s Witnesses were imprisoned for refusing Nazi demands and military service. People labelled “asocial” or “professional criminals” also suffered forced sterilisation, indefinite detention and deaths in camps.

Resistance and survival

Jews organised armed resistance in ghettos and camps, joined partisan units, escaped and hid children. The Warsaw ghetto uprising and revolts at Treblinka and Sobibór were among these acts of resistance. Rescue involved Jewish organisations, individual Jews and non-Jews, underground networks and people who supplied hiding places or false papers, often at great personal risk.

Evidence

The Holocaust left German administrative records, internal SS reports, photographs, surviving structures, graves, victims’ wartime writings and testimony from survivors, witnesses and perpetrators. Much of the documentary evidence was created by the killers themselves during the war.

Contemporary documents

Record	What it documents
Wannsee Conference Protocol, 20 January 1942	The coordination of the deportation, forced labour and destruction of European Jewry. The original German document and modern translations are available from the House of the Wannsee Conference.
Einsatzgruppen reports	SS units reported the mass shooting of Jews to their superiors. A surviving map accompanying Einsatzgruppe A’s report marked numbers of Jews executed in the Baltic region and Belarus.
Heinrich Himmler’s Posen speech, 4 October 1943	Himmler explicitly discussed the extermination of the Jews before senior SS officers. Nuremberg document 1919-PS preserves the speech.
Stroop Report, 1943	Jürgen Stroop’s report and photographs documented the German destruction of the Warsaw ghetto, including killings, capture and deportation. The report was submitted at Nuremberg.
Ringelblum Archive	Jews in the Warsaw ghetto collected diaries, reports, letters and other records during the occupation, hiding them in boxes and milk cans. Parts were recovered after the war and are preserved by the Jewish Historical Institute.

German officials often used euphemisms such as “special treatment” or “resettlement”. Auschwitz construction records also contain direct references to gas chambers. A 29 January 1943 letter describes the basement of crematorium II as a Vergasungskeller (gassing cellar); a 2 March 1943 work report refers to a Gaskammer (gas chamber) in crematorium V. The Auschwitz Museum reproduces these documents.

Physical and forensic investigations

Forensic investigations began immediately after liberation. In 1945, Soviet investigators at Auschwitz performed more than 500 autopsies and almost 3,000 medical examinations of former prisoners. A Polish commission collected thousands of documents and sent hair and metal components from the gas chambers to the Institute of Forensic Research in Kraków. Laboratory analysis detected hydrogen cyanide and its compounds. The investigations also secured victims’ belongings and took witness statements.

Later archaeology has examined sites the Germans tried to destroy. At Treblinka, Caroline Sturdy Colls and colleagues used archival research, non-invasive surveys and targeted excavations to locate mass graves, gas-chamber remains and other structures. Their findings are documented in the Finding Treblinka research project.

Testimony

Survivors, bystanders and perpetrators described deportations, shootings, gassings and life in the camps. Their accounts can be compared with wartime documents, photographs and material remains. At Nuremberg, perpetrators generally sought to deny their own responsibility rather than deny that the mass murder had occurred. Captured German records and victims’ underground archives also survive independently of postwar courtroom testimony.

The death toll

Historians estimate that approximately six million Jews were murdered. The calculation combines German reports and transport records with prewar and postwar demographic research, Jewish records and other archives. It covers killings across Europe by several methods.

Site or method	Approximate Jewish victims
Killing centres	2.7 million
Mass shootings and associated massacres	2 million
Ghettos, concentration camps and labour camps	800,000–1 million
Other violence and deprivation outside camps and ghettos	At least 250,000

The figures are rounded and retain the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s ranges.

Jewish victims by country

Most Jewish victims came from outside Germany’s prewar borders. In 1933, Germany had about 525,000 Jews, compared with approximately three million in Poland. Poland’s estimated losses alone approach half of the six-million Jewish death toll.

The table follows USHMM’s main country entries. These are losses among the countries’ Jewish communities, not a count by killing location.

Country or prewar state	Estimated Jewish victims
Poland	2,770,000–3,000,000
Soviet Union	Approximately 1,340,000
Hungary (1937 borders)	297,621
Czechoslovakia	260,000
Romania	211,214–260,000
Germany	165,200
Lithuania	130,000
Netherlands	102,000
France	72,900–74,000
Latvia	70,000
Yugoslavia	67,228
Austria	65,459
Greece	58,800–65,000
Belgium	24,387
Italy	7,858
Luxembourg	1,200
Estonia	963
Norway	At least 758
Denmark	52–116
Albania	Unknown in this source
Bulgaria	Unknown in this source

Borders changed during the war. USHMM also gives 564,507 for Hungary within its expanded 1941 borders, including annexed territories. That figure overlaps other territorial entries and is not added here. “Unknown” means the source supplies no estimate, rather than zero victims.

Registered prisoners and people killed on arrival

At Auschwitz, approximately 400,000 deportees were registered as prisoners. Approximately 900,000 Jews were murdered in gas chambers shortly after arrival and were never registered as camp prisoners. The camp complex’s total death toll is approximately 1.1 million people, about one million of them Jews. Death registers for the registered prisoner population therefore cover only part of Auschwitz’s victims.

Starvation and epidemics killed many registered inmates. Those deaths and the mass gassing of unregistered arrivals concerned different groups of people; disease among registered prisoners cannot account for the people murdered before registration.

Historical estimates

The early Soviet estimate of four million deaths at Auschwitz was excessive. Research using transport and other archival records, particularly Franciszek Piper’s work, established the present estimate of approximately 1.1 million. Western historians had already challenged the Soviet figure. The estimate for the Holocaust as a whole uses evidence from many countries and killing sites, rather than adding the old Auschwitz figure to other losses.

The Jewish badge

Nazi authorities used identifying badges and armbands, including the yellow Star of David, to isolate Jews and enforce restrictions, confinement and deportation.

For the earlier history, see compulsory Jewish dress before the Holocaust.

The Book of Names

Yad Vashem’s Book of Names, photographed in 2023. The edition inaugurated that year commemorated approximately 4.8 million Jewish Holocaust victims whose names had been documented and confirmed by Yad Vashem. It is an incomplete register of identified victims: approximately six million Jews were murdered, and many victims’ names remain unknown. The number of names in the book is therefore not the full Holocaust death toll.

The memorial concerns Jewish victims. It does not catalogue all the other people persecuted and murdered by Nazi Germany. Yad Vashem continues to research and collect victims’ names.

Sources and further reading

• Historical overview: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Introduction to the Holocaust”.
• Camps and killing centres: USHMM, “Nazi Camps” and “The Nazi Camp System: Terminology”.
• Wartime documents: House of the Wannsee Conference, original protocol and translations; Harvard Law School Library, Himmler’s speeches, document 1919-PS; Jewish Historical Institute, Ringelblum Archive.
• Identified victims: Yad Vashem, Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names.
• Further overview: Wikipedia: The Holocaust.

See also

• Antisemitism

• Holodomor
• Antisemitic discrimination in the Arab world
• Antisemitic violence in the Arab world before 1948
• Zionism
• Israel and antisemitism