The Holocaust was a time when Nazi Germany murdered six million Jewish people after sending most of the Jewish population to concentration camps. It was a tough time for people who were Jewish and World War II changed a lot of Jewish peoples’ lives forever.

When did it happen and why did it happen?

The Holocaust started when Germans occupied much of Europe between 1941 and 1945. There were individual factors that contributed to the Holocaust, like antisemitism, which is prejudice or hatred against Jewish people. Other factors that led to the Holocaust are the rise of eugenics and nationalism.

In 1918 Germany lost the World War I. Many people within German, including Adolf Hitler, found this loss very difficult and humiliating. The “stab in the back” myth was belief that the German army didn’t lose on the battle field but was believed that they were betrayed by communists, socialists, and Jews. This myth grew antisemitism.

Who started it and what happened to the Jews around that time?

Adolf Hitler started the Holocaust because he had an overriding ambition for territorial expansion. Jewish prisoners suffered through forced labor, starvation, and horrific daily “lineups.” For example, at Mauthausen concentration camp, Jewish prisoners were forced to run up 186 steps out of a stone quarry while carrying heavy boulders.

The horrific daily lineups is when guards would make prisoners stand completely still, exposed to elements in the cold, rain, and snow, after returning from labor.

The Final Solution

The Final Solution was a massive killing operation aimed at entire Jewish communities.

By autumn 1941, the German police had created mobile gas vans. These trucks had pipes reconfigured to pump poison into them, killing those locked in the vans. The German SS and the police later used poison gas in concentration camps, where nearly 2,700,000 Jews were killed by poison gas or shooting.

Books about the Holocaust: