Part of World War II
From the Auschwitz Album: Hungarian Jews arriving at Auschwitz II in German-occupied Poland, May 1944. Most were "selected" to go to the gas chambers. Camp prisoners are visible in their striped uniforms.
Location	Nazi Germany and German-occupied Europe
Description	Genocide of the European Jews
Date	1941–1945
Attack type	Genocide, ethnic cleansing
Deaths	Around 6 million Jews Other victims of Nazi persecution during the Holocaust era: 11 million
Perpetrators	Nazi Germany and its collaborators List of major perpetrators of the Holocaust
Motive	Antisemitism, Racism
Trials	Nuremberg trials, Subsequent Nuremberg trials, Trial of Adolf Eichmann, and others

The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was a genocide of the European Jews during World War II. Between 1941 and 1945, across German-occupied Europe, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews, around two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population. The murders were carried out in pogroms and mass shootings; by a policy of extermination through work in concentration camps; and in gas chambers and gas vans in German extermination camps, chiefly Auschwitz, Bełżec, Chełmno, Majdanek, Sobibór, and Treblinka in occupied Poland.

Germany implemented the persecution in stages. Following Adolf Hitler's appointment as Chancellor on 30 January 1933, the regime built a network of concentration camps in Germany for political opponents and those deemed "undesirable", starting with Dachau on 22 March 1933. After the passing of the Enabling Act on 24 March, which gave Hitler plenary powers, the government began isolating Jews from civil society; this included boycotting Jewish businesses in April 1933 and enacting the Nuremberg Laws in September 1935. On 9–10 November 1938, eight months after Germany annexed Austria, Jewish businesses and other buildings were ransacked, smashed or set on fire throughout Germany and Austria during what became known as Kristallnacht (the "Night of Broken Glass"). After Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, triggering World War II, the regime set up ghettos to segregate Jews from the rest of the population. Eventually thousands of camps and other detention sites were established across German-occupied Europe.

The segregation of Jews in ghettos culminated in the policy of extermination the Nazis called the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question", discussed by senior Nazi officials at the Wannsee Conference in Berlin in January 1942. As German forces captured territories in the East, all anti-Jewish measures were radicalized. Under the coordination of the SS, with directions from the highest leadership of the Nazi Party, killings were committed within Germany itself, throughout occupied Europe, and within territories controlled by Germany's allies. Paramilitary death squads called Einsatzgruppen, in cooperation with the German Army and local collaborators, murdered around 1.3 million Jews in mass shootings and pogroms between 1941 and 1945. By mid-1942, victims were being deported from ghettos across Europe in sealed freight trains to extermination camps where, if they survived the journey, they were worked to death or gassed. The killing continued until the end of World War II in Europe in May 1945.

The European Jews were targeted for extermination as part of a larger event during the Holocaust era, usually defined as beginning in January 1933, in which Germany and its collaborators persecuted and murdered other groups, including Slavs (chiefly ethnic Poles, Soviet civilians and Soviet prisoners of war), the Roma, the "incurably sick", political and religious dissidents, and gay men. The death toll of these groups is thought to rise to 11 million.

Books

• The Holocaust and Its Religious Impact: A Critical Assessment and Annotated Bibliography
• Dissecting the Holocaust: The Growing Critique of 'Truth' and 'Memory'
• The First Holocaust: The Surprising Origin Of The Six Million Figure
• Modernite ve Holocaust
• The Experience of Being a Hidden Child Survivor of the Holocaust
• Shelter from the Holocaust: Rethinking Jewish Survival in the Soviet Union
• Resistance during the Holocaust
• After the Holocaust: The Book of Job, Primo Levi, and the Path to Affliction
• All Or Nothing: The Axis and the Holocaust, 1941-1943
• An Eye for an Eye: The Story of Jews Who Sought Revenge for the Holocaust
• Anne Frank and After: Dutch Holocaust Literature in Historical Perspective
• Auschwitz & The Holocaust: The Shocking Stories of Commandant & Leaders of the Holocaust & Auschwitz
• The Holocaust: Origins, Implementation, Aftermath
• Beyond Theodicy: Jewish and Christian Continental Thinkers Respond to the Holocaust
• Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning
• Bungled: "Denying the Holocaust": How Deborah Lipstadt. Botched Her Attempt to Demonstrate the Growing Assault on Truth and Memory
• Bystanders to the Holocaust
• Chelmno and the Holocaust
• Children during the Holocaust
• Collected Memories: Holocaust History and Postwar Testimony
• Complicity in the Holocaust
• Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It?
• Digging through History: Archaeology and Religion from Atlantis to the Holocaust
• Eichmann's Jews. The Jewish Administration of Holocaust Vienna 1938–1945
• The holocaust violence : how did the Nazis massacre millions of Jews, Gypsies and the disabled? What was the secred agreement between Nazism and radical Zionism?
• Execution by Hunger: The Hidden Holocaust
• Fathoming the Holocaust
• Fifty Key Thinkers on the Holocaust and Genocide
• Film and the Holocaust
• From Catastrophe to Power : Holocaust Survivors and the Emergence of Israel
• Germany's War and the Holocaust
• Golden Harvest: Events at the Periphery of the Holocaust
• The First Holocaust: Jewish Fund Raising Campaigns With Holocaust Claims During And After World War One
• Hegemony and the Holocaust: State Power and Jewish Survival in Occupied Europe
• Historical Dictionary of the Holocaust
• Histories of the Holocaust
• Hitler and the Nazi Darwinian Worldview: How the Nazi Eugenic Crusade for a Superior Race Caused the Greatest Holocaust in World History
• Hitler's Willing Executioners
• Holocaust and Memory: The Experience of the Holocaust and Its Consequences: An Investigation Based on Personal Narratives
• Holocaust Angst
• Holocaust as Fiction: Bernhard Schlink's "Nazi" Novels and Their Films
• Holocaust Representations in History
• Holocaust Testimonies : The Ruins of Memory
• Holocaust, Genocide, and the Law
• Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews
• The Holocaust and Genocide: The Betrayal of Humanity
• Facing History and Ourselves: Holocaust and Human Behavior
• Holocaust and Human Behavior
• The Holocaust Dogma of Judaism: Keystone of the New World Order
• IBM and the Holocaust
• I'm No Hero: Journeys of a Holocaust Survivor
• Inside a Class Action: The Holocaust and the Swiss Banks
• Irena Sendler: Bringing Life to Children of the Holocaust
• Jewish American and Holocaust Literature
• Judging "privileged" Jews: Holocaust Ethics, Representation, and the "Grey Zone"
• Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust
• Lectures on the Holocaust
• Nazi Empire-Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine
• Lying About Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial
• Marching into Darkness: The Wehrmacht and the Holocaust in Belarus
• Masquerade: Treason, the Holocaust, and an Irish Impostor
• Masters of Death: The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust
• Missing Pieces: My Life as a Child Survivor of the Holocaust
• Murder in Our Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing, and Representation
• Music in the Holocaust: Confronting Life in the Nazi Ghettos and Camps
• The Nanking Massacre and Other Japanese Military Atrocities, The Asia-Pacific War
• Narrating the Holocaust
• Ordinary Jews: Choice and Survival During the Holocaust
• Post-Holocaust France and the Jews, 1945-1955
• The Yiddish Historians and the Struggle for a Jewish History of the Holocaust
• Reporting the Holocaust in the British, Swedish and Finnish Press, 1945–50
• Rescuing the Children: A Holocaust Memoir
• Roots of Hate: Anti-Semitism in Europe Before the Holocaust
• Sasha Pechersky: Holocaust Hero, Sobibor Resistance Leader, and Hostage of History
• Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the Holocaust
• Shelter from the Holocaust: Rethinking Jewish Survival in the Soviet Union
• Memoirs of Holocaust survivors
• Thanks for My Journey: A Holocaust Survivor's Story of Living Fearlessly
• The 23rd Psalm: A Holocaust Memoir
• The Archive Thief: The Man Who Salvaged French Jewish History in the Wake of the Holocaust
• The Emergence of Jewish Ghettos During the Holocaust
• The End of the Holocaust
• The Hands of War: A Tale of Endurance and Hope, from a Survivor of the Holocaust
• The Holocaust and Antisemitism: A Short History
• The Holocaust and Compensated Compliance in Italy, Fossoli di Carpi, 1942–1952
• The Holocaust and the Book: Destruction and Preservation
• The Holocaust and the Nakba
• The Holocaust Averted
• The Holocaust Encyclopedia
• The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering
• The Holocaust Memorial Museum: Sacred Secular Space
• The Holocaust: History and Memory
• The Jews of Bohemia and Moravia: Facing the Holocaust
• The Last Eyewitnesses
• The Liberation of the Camps: The End of the Holocaust and Its Aftermath
• The Master Plan: Himmler's Scholars and the Holocaust
• The Narrow Bridge: Beyond the Holocaust
• The Nazi Officer's Wife: How One Jewish Woman Survived the Holocaust
• The Nuremberg Medical Trial: The Holocaust and the Origin of the Nuremberg Medical Code
• The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939-March 1942
• The Politics of Genocide: The Holocaust in Hungary
• The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II
• The Routledge History of the Holocaust
• Life between Memory and Hope: The Survivors of the Holocaust in Occupied Germany
• The Victims of Slavery, Colonization and the Holocaust
• The Historiography of the Holocaust
• The Hitler Legacy: A Dilemma of Hate Speech and Hate Crime in a Post-Holocaust World
• They Were Just People: Stories of Rescue in Poland During the Holocaust
• Victims and Survivors of Nazi Human Experiments
• Why Should Jews Survive?: Looking Past the Holocaust toward a Jewish Future
• Witnesses to the Holocaust
• Witnessing the Disaster: Essays on Representation and the Holocaust
• Wrestling with God: Jewish Theological Responses during and after the Holocaust
• Rena's Promise: A Story of Sisters in Auschwitz