Holocaust


 * //__ Holocaust __//**

The Holocaust (from the Greek ὁλόκαυστος holókaustos: hólos, "whole" and kaustós, "burnt"), also known as The Shoah, from the Hebrew for "destruction"), was the genocide of approximately six million European Jews during World War II, a programme of systematic state-sponsored extermination by Nazi Germany. Two-thirds of the population of nine million Jews who had resided in Europe before the Holocaust were killed.

Some scholars maintain that the definition of the Holocaust should also include the Nazis' systematic murder 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 other political and religious opponents, which occurred whether they were of German or non-German ethnic origin. By this definition, the total number of Holocaust victims would be between 11 million and 17 million people.

The persecution and genocide were carried out in stages. Various legislation to remove the Jews from civil society, predominantly theNuremberg Laws, was enacted in Nazi Germany years before the outbreak of World War II. Concentration camps were established in which inmates were used as slave labor until they died of exhaustion or disease. Where the Third Reich conquered new territory in eastern Europe, specialized units called Einsatzgruppen murdered Jews and political opponents in mass shootings. The Germans required Jews and Romani to be confined in overcrowded ghettos 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 bureaucracy was involved in the logistics that led to the genocides, turning the country into what one Holocaust scholar has called "a genocidal state". Opinions differ on how much the civilian population of Germany knew about the government conspiracy against the Jewish population. Most historians claim that the civilian population was not aware of the atrocities that were carried out, especially in the extermination camps located in German-occupied Europe. The historianRobert Gellately, however, claims that the government openly announced the conspiracy through the media, and that civilians were aware of every aspect of the conspiracy except for the use of gas chambers.