Hananya Naftali
A Tragic Chapter in History
The Short Answer
The Holocaust, or Shoah in Hebrew, was the systematic murder of six million Jews by Nazi Germany and its collaborators during World War II. About one and a half million of the victims were children. The Nazis aimed to wipe out the entire Jewish people of Europe through ghettos, mass shootings and death camps such as Auschwitz, Treblinka and Sobibor.
How the Holocaust Happened
When Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, the Nazis began stripping Jews of their rights. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 took away their citizenship, and on Kristallnacht in 1938 synagogues and Jewish shops across Germany were burned.
During the war, Nazi killing squads shot more than a million Jews in Eastern Europe. In January 1942, Nazi officials at the Wannsee Conference planned the Final Solution, the deportation of Jews from across Europe to death camps with gas chambers.
Remembering the Holocaust
The Soviet army liberated Auschwitz on January 27, 1945, now International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Israel marks Yom HaShoah each spring, and Yad Vashem in Jerusalem is the world's center of Holocaust remembrance. Read more: Why Did Hitler Hate the Jews?
Key Facts
About six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust.
About one and a half million of them were children.
Auschwitz was the largest Nazi death camp.
Israel commemorates the victims every year on Yom HaShoah.