Holocoust

The Holocaust, was the mass murder or genocide of approximately six million European Jews during World War II, a programme of systematic state-sponsored murder by Nazi Germany, led by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, throughout German-occupied territory. Of the nine million Jews who had resided in Europe before the Holocaust, approximately two-thirds were killed.Over one million Jewish children were killed in the Holocaust, as were approximately two million Jewish women and three million Jewish men.

From the beginning of the Third Reich concentration camps were founded, initially as places of incarceration. Though the death rate in the concentration camps was high, with a mortality rate of 50%, they were not designed to be killing centres. After 1939, the camps increasingly became places where Jews and POWs were either killed or made to work as slave laborers, undernourished and tortured.It is estimated that the Germans established 15,000 camps and subcamps in the occupied countries, mostly in eastern Europe. New camps were founded in areas with large Jewish, Polish intelligentsia, communist, or Roma and Sinti populations, including inside Germany. The transportation of prisoners was often carried out under horrifying conditions using rail freight cars, in which many died before reaching their destination.

A number of deadly pogroms by local populations occurred during the Second World War, some with Nazi encouragement, and some spontaneously. This included the Iaşi pogrom in Romania on 30 June 1941, in which as many as 14,000 Jews were killed by Romanian residents and police, and the Jedwabne pogrom, in which between 380 and 1,600 Jews were killed by local Poles in July 1941. During 1942, in addition to Auschwitz, five other camps were designated as extermination camps for the carrying out of the Reinhard plan Two of these, Chełmno and Majdanek were already functioning as labor camps: these now had extermination facilities added to them. Three new camps were built for the sole purpose of killing large numbers of Jews as quickly as possible, at Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka. A seventh camp, at Maly Trostinets in Belarus, was also used for this purpose. Jasenovac was an extermination camp where mostly ethnic Serbs were killed.

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