Among the events of the Second World War, none demands more careful and sober remembrance than the Holocaust: the systematic, state-organized murder of six million European Jews by Nazi Germany and its collaborators, alongside the persecution and killing of millions of others the regime deemed unworthy of life. This is not a story of battles won or lost, but of a modern government turning the machinery of the state toward genocide — and it remains essential to understanding what the Allied victory in 1945 actually stopped.
From Persecution to Genocide
Antisemitic persecution in Germany began almost as soon as the Nazi Party took power in 1933, through discriminatory laws, boycotts, and escalating violence, including the November 1938 pogrom known as Kristallnacht — the “Night of Broken Glass” — in which synagogues were burned and Jewish-owned businesses destroyed across Germany and Austria. But the war years brought a shift from persecution and forced emigration to mass murder.
Following the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, mobile killing units called Einsatzgruppen began shooting Jewish civilians, along with Roma people, Soviet political commissars, and others, in mass executions across Eastern Europe. At the Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942, senior Nazi officials formally coordinated what they called the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” — the deportation and murder of Europe’s Jewish population on an industrial scale.
The Camps
The Nazi regime built an extensive system of concentration, labor, and extermination camps across occupied Europe. Auschwitz-Birkenau, in occupied Poland, became the largest and deadliest of these: historians estimate that more than 1.1 million people were murdered there, the overwhelming majority of them Jews transported from across the continent, killed on arrival in gas chambers or worked and starved to death in the camp’s labor system. Other extermination camps — Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, Chelmno, and Majdanek — were built for the specific purpose of mass killing and claimed hundreds of thousands to well over a million lives among them.
The regime’s victims extended beyond Europe’s Jewish population, though Jews were the deliberate target of total annihilation. An estimated 200,000 to 500,000 Roma and Sinti people were murdered in what is sometimes called the Porajmos. Soviet prisoners of war died by the millions in German captivity. People with disabilities were murdered under the regime’s earlier “T4” euthanasia program, which some historians view as a direct precursor to the death camps. Political dissidents, Jehovah’s Witnesses, gay men, and others were also imprisoned, and many were killed.
Liberation and Reckoning
As Allied forces advanced into Germany and Soviet-occupied Poland in 1944 and 1945, they began encountering the camps directly. The Red Army liberated Auschwitz on January 27, 1945 — a date now marked internationally as Holocaust Remembrance Day. British forces liberated Bergen-Belsen in April 1945; American forces liberated Buchenwald and Dachau the same month. Soldiers who entered the camps, many of them hardened by years of combat, were reportedly unprepared for what they found, and their photographs and testimony became some of the first, most searing evidence of what had happened.
In the war’s aftermath, the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg prosecuted senior Nazi officials for crimes against humanity, establishing legal precedents still cited today. The word “genocide” itself was coined during this period, by the legal scholar Raphael Lemkin, specifically to describe what had occurred.
Why It Still Matters
The Holocaust is not a peripheral detail of the Second World War — it is central to understanding what the war was fought over and against. Remembering it accurately, with attention to both the scale of the atrocity and the individual human lives behind the statistics, is part of what this site tries to do whenever the subject arises in other articles on the war in Europe.
If this topic raises difficult feelings, you are not alone in that reaction; organizations such as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum maintain extensive, carefully documented resources for further reading.