BACKGROUND

Perpetrator(s): Nazi Regime
Affected Group(s): Jews. In addition: Gypsies, Slavic peoples, political dissenters, communists, socialists, Jehovah’s Witnesses and homosexuals.

1933-1945

Germany and other European countries

The Holocaust was a systematic state-sponsored persecution of six million Jews and millions of groups who were considered racially inferior. The Nazis who gained power in Germany during the early 1930s, believed that Jews were racially inferior to the Germans and posed a threat to the German racial community and began to impose their “Final Solution” to murder the Jews of Europe. Between 1941 and 1944 millions of Jews from Germany were deported by Nazi German authorities from occupied territories to ghettos and extermination camps where they were murdered.

During the final months of the war, Allied forces began to liberate the concentration camp prisoners.

The crimes committed during these years destroyed European and occupied Jewish communities.

The Holocaust, including the breakdown of democracy in Germany and the steps leading to the Nazis’ organized murder of six million Jews and millions of other innocent victims, forms the core case study of Facing History and Ourselves. Read more.