The Holocaust
Introduction
The Nazi concentration camp in Nordhausen.
The Holocaust, also known as The Shoah and the Porrajmos in Romani, is the name applied to the systematic persecution and genocide of the Jews, other minority groups, those considered enemies of the state, and also the disabled and mentally ill of Europe and European territories in North Africa during World War II by Nazi Germany and its collaborators.
Early elements of the Holocaust include the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 8 and 9, 1938, and the T-4 Euthanasia Program, leading to the later use of killing squads and extermination camps in a massive and centrally organized effort to exterminate every possible member of the population targeted by Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.
Hitler's concept of a racially pure, superior race did not have room for any whom he considered to be inferior. Jews were, in his view, not only racially sub-human but traitors involved in a timeless plot to dominate the world for their own purposes.
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The Jews of Europe were the main victims of the Holocaust in what the Nazis called the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question"
The Jews of Europe were the main victims of the Holocaust in what the Nazis called the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question" (die "Endlösung der Judenfrage"). The commonly used figure for the number of Jewish victims is six million, though estimates by historians using, among other sources, records from the Nazi regime range from five million to seven million.
Also, about 220,000 Sinti and Roma were murdered in the Holocaust (some estimates are as high as 800,000), between a quarter to a half of the European population. Other groups deemed "racially inferior" or "undesirable:" Poles (five million killed, of whom three million were Jewish), Serbs (estimates vary between 100,000 and 700,000 killed, mostly by Croat Ustaše), Bosniaks (estimates vary from 100,000 to 500,000), Soviet military prisoners of war and civilians on occupied territories including Russians and other East Slavs, the mentally or physically disabled, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, Communists and political dissidents, trade unionists, Freemasons, and some Catholic and Protestant clergy.
Some scholars limit the Holocaust to the genocide of the Jews; some to the genocide of the Jews, Roma, and disabled; and some to all groups targeted by Nazi racism.
Profound moral questions result from the Holocaust. How could such highly educated and cultured people as Austrians and Germans do such a thing? Why did ordinary people participate or allow it to happen? Where was God? Where was humanity? Why did some people and nations refuse to be involved? People inside and outside Germany knew what was happening but took very little action.
More than a million Germans were implicated in the Holocaust. Even when some Jews escaped, they risked being handed back to the authorities or simply shot by civilians. Had all involved taken the moral high ground and refused to carry out orders, could even the terror machine that was the Nazi regime have continued with its evil policy? Few doubt, except for Holocaust deniers, that pure evil stalked the killing camps. The world is still trying to make sense of the Holocaust and the lessons that can be drawn from it.
Source: New World Encyclopedia, https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Holocaust
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