use this context: The following text was adapted from material from the U.S. Holocaust Museum and Memorial in Washington, D.C.
The Holocaust was the organized, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jews by the Nazis in Europe during World War II. Holocaust is a word of Greek origin meaning “sacrifice by fire.” The Nazis, who came to power in Germany in January 1933, believed that Germans were “racially superior” and that the Jews, deemed “inferior,” were a threat to the so-called German racial community.
During the era of the Holocaust, German authorities also targeted other groups because of their perceived “racial inferiority”: Roma (Gypsies), the disabled, some of the Slavic peoples (Poles, Russians, and others), and African Germans. Some groups were persecuted because of their political beliefs, ideologies, and behaviors, such as Communists, Socialists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and homosexuals.In 1933, the Jewish population of Europe was over nine million. Most European Jews lived in countries that Nazi Germany would later occupy during World War II. By 1945, the Germans and their collaborators killed nearly two of every three European Jews as part of the “Final Solution,” the Nazi policy to murder the Jews of Europe.
As Nazi tyranny spread across Europe, the Germans and their collaborators persecuted and murdered millions of other people. Between two and three million Soviet prisoners of war were murdered or died of starvation, disease, neglect, or maltreatment. The Germans deported millions of Polish and Soviet civilians for forced labor in Germany or in occupied Poland, where these individuals worked and often died under awful conditions.In the early years of the Nazi regime, the government established concentration camps to detain political and ideological opponents. Increasingly in the years before the outbreak of war, SS [armed wing of the Nazi party] and police officials also imprisoned Jews, Roma, and other victims of ethnic and racial hatred in these camps.
To concentrate and monitor the Jewish population as well as to facilitate later deportation of the Jews, the Nazis created ghettos and forced-labor camps for Jews during the war years. The German authorities also established many forced-labor camps for non-Jewish enemies and prisoners.
Following the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, mobile killing units and, later, militarized Order Police officials, began to carry out mass-murder operations against Jews, Roma, and Soviet state and Communist Party officials. German SS and police units murdered more than a million Jewish men, women, and children, and hundreds of thousands of others.
Between 1941 and 1944, Nazi German authorities deported millions of Jews from Germany, from occupied territories, and from the countries of many of its allies to ghettos and to killing centers, often called extermination camps, where they were murdered in specially developed gassing facilities.In the final months of the war, SS guards moved camp inmates by train or on forced marches, often called “death marches,” in an attempt to prevent the Allied liberation of large numbers of prisoners. As Allied forces moved across Europe in a series of offensives against Germany, they began to encounter and liberate concentration camp prisoners, as well as prisoners en route by forced march from one camp to another. The marches continued until May 7, 1945, the day the German armed forces surrendered unconditionally to the Allies.
For the western Allies, World War II officially ended in Europe on the next day, May 8, while Soviet forces announced their “Victory Day” on May 9, 1945.
In the aftermath of the Holocaust, many of the survivors found shelter in displaced persons camps run by the Allied powers. Between 1948 and 1951, almost 700,000 Jews emigrated to Israel, including 136,000 Jewish displaced persons from Europe. Other Jewish survivors emigrated to the United States and other nations. The crimes committed during the Holocaust devastated European Jews and eliminated hundreds of eastern European Jewish communities entirely.
Identify and explain one specific turning point* represented by this timeline.
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