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The Holocaust
Between 1933 and 1945, the German
government led by Adolf Hitler and the
Nazi Party carried out the systematic
persecution and murder of Europe’s Jews.
This genocide is now known
as the Holocaust. -
Nazi Regime
The Nazi regime also persecuted and killed millions of other people it considered
politically, racially, or socially unfit. -
The Terror Begins
Communists, Socialists, and other political opponents of the Nazis were among the first to be rounded up and imprisoned by the regime. -
From Citizens to Outcasts
Many Germans continued to enter the Jewish stores despite the boy-cott, and it was called off after 24 hours. In the subsequent weeks and months more discriminatory measures against Jews followed and remained in effect. -
"Science" of Race
Members of the Hitler Youth receive instruction in racial hygiene at a Hitler Youth training facility. The Nazis divided the world’s population into superior and inferior “races.” -
Life in the Ghetto
Ghettos were city districts, often enclosed, in which the Germans concentrated the municipal and some-times regional Jewish population to control and segregate it from the non-Jewish population. -
Night of Broken Glass
Residents of Rostock, Germany, view a burning synagogue the morning after Kristallnacht (“Night of Broken Glass”). On the night of November 9–10, 1938, the Nazi regime unleashed orchestrated anti-Jewish violence across greater Germany. -
Concentration Camps
Jews from Hungarian-occupied Czechoslovakia (present-day Ukraine) are taken off the trains and assembled at the largest of the killing centers, Auschwitz-Birkenau. The overwhelming majority of Jews who entered the Nazi killing centers were murdered in gas chambers—usually within hours of arrival—and their bodies cremated. -
Mobile Killing Squads
About a quarter of all Jews who perished in the Holocaust were shot by SS mobile killing squads and police battalions following the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. -
Courage to Rescue
As a result of this national effort, more than 90 per-cent of the Jews in Denmark escaped deportation to Nazi concentration camps. -
Deportations
Between 1942 and 1944, trains carrying Jews from German-controlled Europe rolled into one of the six killing centers located along rail lines in occupied Poland.
