The Holocaust

The Holocaust (from the Greek ὁλόκαυστος holókaustos: hólos, "whole" and kaustós, "burnt"),[2] also known as the Shoah (Hebrew: השואה, HaShoah, "catastrophe"; Yiddish: חורבן, Churben or Hurban,[3]from the Hebrew for "destruction"), was the genocide of approximately six million European Jews during World War II, a programme of systematic state-sponsored murder by Nazi Germany, led by AdolfHitler, throughout Nazi-occupied territory.[4] Of the nine million Jews who had resided in Europe before the Holocaust, approximately two-thirds perished.[5] In particular, over one million Jewish childrenwere killed in the Holocaust, as were approximately two million Jewish women and three million Jewish men.[6][7]
Some scholars maintain that the definition of the Holocaust should also include theNazis' genocide of millions of people in other groups, including Romani, Soviet prisoners of war, Polish and Soviet civilians, homosexuals, people with disabilities, Jehovah's Witnesses and otherpolitical and religious opponents, which occurred regardless of whether they were of German or non-German ethnic origin.[8] Using this definition, the total number of Holocaust victims is between 11 millionand 17 million people.[9]
The persecution and genocide were carried out in stages. Various laws to remove the Jews from civil society, most prominently the Nuremberg Laws, were enacted in NaziGermany years before the outbreak of World War II. Concentration camps were established in which inmates were subjected to slave labor until they died of exhaustion or disease. Where Germany conquered newterritory in eastern Europe, specialized units called Einsatzgruppen murdered Jews and political opponents in mass shootings. The occupiers required Jews and Romani to be confined in overcrowdedghettos before being transported by freight train to extermination camps where, if they survived the journey, the majority of them were systematically killed in gas chambers.
Every arm of Nazi Germany's...