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The Nazis, who came to power in Germany, believed that Germans were "racially superior" and that the Jews, deemed "inferior," were an alien threat to the so-called German racial community.
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The Jewish population of Europe stood at over nine million. Most European Jews lived in countries that Nazi Germany would occupy or influence during World War II.
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Units with support from the Wehrmacht, moved behind German lines to murder Jews, Gypsies, and Soviet state and Communist Party officials in mass shootings as well as in specially equipped gas vans.
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In Berlin in January 1942, the SS (the elite guard of the Nazi state) and representatives of German government ministries estimated that the "Final Solution," the Nazi plan to kill the Jews of Europe.
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Nazi Germany and its Allies deported nearly three million Jews from areas under their control to Nazi-occupied Poland. The vast majority were sent to killing centers, often called extermination camps at Belzec, Chelmno, Sobibor, Treblinka, and Auschwitz-Birkenau, where they were murdered primarily by means of poison gas.
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Nazi Germany and its Allies deported nearly three million Jews from areas under their control to Nazi-occupied Poland.
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The Germans and their allies and collaborators killed nearly two out of every three European Jews as part of the "Final Solution."
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The day the German armed forces surrendered unconditionally to the Allies
