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The Holocaust (1933–1945) was the systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million European Jews by the Nazi German regime and its allies and collaborators.1 The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum defines the years of the Holocaust as 1933–1945. The Holocaust era began in January 1933 when Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party came to power in Germany. It ended in May 1945, when the Allied Powers defeated Nazi Germany in World War II.
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The Holocaust was Nazi Germany’s deliberate, organized, state-sponsored persecution and machinelike murder of approximately six million European Jews and at least five million prisoners of war, Romany, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, and other victims. Holocaust is a word of Greek origin. It means “burnt offering.” Antisemitism was a centuries-long phenomenon in Europe, but it reached its height in Germany during the Nazi era (1933–1945).
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The outbreak of war on September 1, 1939, the government imposed new restrictions on Jews remaining in Germany. One of the first wartime ordinances imposed a strict curfew on Jewish individuals and prohibited Jews from entering designated areas in many German cities. Once a general food rationing began, Jews received reduced rations; further decrees limited the time periods in which Jews could purchase food and other supplies and restricted access to certain stores.
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Among the thousands of books that have examined various aspects of the Jewish Holocaust, surprisingly few have treated the final days of the death camps in any detail. From July 1944 to May 1945, the Russian army liberated ten camps east of the Oder River; the Allied Forces liberated the five western camps in April and May of 1945. The names—Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, Buchenwald—form the 20th century’s most horrifying litany.
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On 1 September 1939, Germany invaded Poland. In September 1939, Poland was home to over three million Jews. Prior to the invasion, the Nazis had not drawn up a specific or comprehensive plan for what to do with the Jewish population once Poland was occupied. The resulting policy of ghettoization was improvised as a temporary solution. In just a few months, millions of Jews were quickly imprisoned inside ghettos in Poland.