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Holocaust comes from the Greek word ‘holokauston'. It means ‘sacrifice by fire'.
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The Hebrew term for the Holocaust is ‘Shoah' which means ‘devastation, waste, or ruin'.
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Adolf Hitler came into power in Germany in 1933, which was the beginning stage of the Holocaust.
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On April 1st, 1933, the Nazi Party began their plan to remove Jews from society by announcing a boycott against all Jewish-owned businesses.
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Laws to remove Jews from civil society were enacted on September 15th, 1935, called the Nuremberg Laws. This was prior to the outbreak of World War II in Europe.
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One of these laws was to prohibit marriages between Germans and Jews.
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The German-Jews were stripped of their citizenship.
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Jews were banned from being in public parks, made to register their property and fired from government jobs.
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Jewish doctors were banned from working on any patients that were not Jewish.
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Overnight from November 9th to the 10th, 1938, the Nazis burned synagogues, destroyed Jewish-owned businesses and attacked Jews. This night was called ‘Night of Broken Glass'. On this night around 30,000 Jews were arrested and then sent to concentration or labor camps.
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Concentration camps were built to hold prisoners who performed slave labor until they died. They often died from exhaustion and disease.
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Once World War II began in 1939, Jews were required to wear the yellow Star of David on their clothing. This made it easier for them to be recognized by the Nazis.
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Jews were then ordered to live in ghettos. The largest ghetto was in Warsaw, where at one time there were 445,000 people living there.
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The murder of the Jews in the Holocaust during World War II took place in Germany and Germany-occupied territory.
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One million Jewish children, two million Jewish women and three million Jewish men were killed during the Holocaust.
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The facilities that were used to hold and to kill the Jewish and other victims were called extermination camps or death camps. They often used gas chambers to murder the victims. There were six extermination camps built by the Nazis. Auschwitz was the largest of these. Approximately 1.1 million were murdered there.
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There were also approximately ten to eleven million more prisoners of war and civilians murdered by the Nazi Party, including Romani, Soviets, Polish, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, Gypsies, and people with disabilities, to name only a few.
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The Final Solution is the name the Nazis used when referring to their plan to murder all the Jewish people.
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Whenever Germans conquered new territory during the war they had mass shootings of their opponents. These murders were carried out by specialized paramilitary units called Einsatzgruppen.
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The prisoners in concentration camps were forced to do hard labor with very little food, no mattresses or pillows and often three to a wood bunk.
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Torture was common in concentration camps. Medical experiments were often performed on prisoners in concentration camps.
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The Holocaust did not end until 1945 when the Allies defeated the Nazis.
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