Holocaust

The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of approximately six million Jews by Nazi Germany and its collaborators during World War II, from 1933 to 1945. It is the central event of the genocide against Jews in the 20th century. The Nazi regime also targeted millions of people considered racially, politically, or socially inferior, including Romani people, disabled individuals, Slavic peoples, political dissidents, Jehovah's Witnesses, and LGBTQ people.

The persecution began with antisemitic legislation such as the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, which stripped Jews of citizenship and rights. It escalated through violence like the Kristallnacht of 1938, followed by forced emigration, segregation in ghettos, and mass deportations to camps. From 1941 onward, mobile killing units and later extermination camps carried out large-scale murder as part of what the regime called the Final Solution.

Murder methods included mass shootings, gas chambers, starvation, and forced labor within concentration and extermination camps such as Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, Majdanek, and Chelmno. The largest toll among Jews occurred in occupied Poland; total non-Jewish victims are estimated in the millions.

The Holocaust ended with the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945. In the postwar period, perpetrators were prosecuted in institutions such as the Nuremberg Trials. The memory of the Holocaust has shaped international law, education, and commemoration, and denial or trivialization of these events is widely rejected by scholars.