The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the World War II genocide of the European Jews. Between 1941 and 1945, 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.
About The Holocaust in brief
The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the World War II genocide of the European Jews. Between 1941 and 1945, 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. The European Jews were targeted for extermination as part of a larger event during the Holocaust era, in which Germany persecuted and murdered other groups, including ethnic Poles, Soviet civilians and prisoners of war, the Roma, the handicapped, political and religious dissidents, and gay men. The death toll of these other groups is thought to be over 11 million. Most Holocaust historians define the Holocaust as the genocide by the Nazi regime and collaborators between 1941 and1945. The term holocaust, first used in 1895 by the New York Times to describe the massacre of Armenian Christians by Ottoman Muslims, comes from the Greek: holókaustos; hólos, ‘whole’ or ‘burnt offering’ The biblical term shoah, meaning ‘destruction’, became the standard Hebrew term for the murder of theEuropean Jews. Yom HaShoah became Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day in 1951.
In 1968 the Library of Congress created a new category, “Holocaust, Jewish”. In November that year the term was popularised in the United States by the NBC mini-series Holocaust, about a fictional family of German Jews. Many non-Jewish Jews chose to use the terms Shoah or Churban or Shoah in the Hebrew groups, which many use to refer to themselves as Holocaust victims. The Nazi regime used the phrase ‘Final Solution to the Jewish Question’ to describe its policy to exterminate Jews. The Nazis used the term ‘ Shoah’ in 1938 to describe an early phase of the mass murder by the regime; which views Kristallnacht in 1938 as an early stage of the Jewish regime; and ‘the Shoah’ in 1938 was used in the early 1940s by the Jewish community in the U.S. to describe events in Germany in September 1939. The Holocaust is a term used by the Hebrew community in Israel, which uses the term Shoah as a name for events in the 1930s and 1940s. The word ‘Holocaust’ was first used by Haaretz in 1939, and by the American Hebrew in October 1941. In October 1941, the Hebrew Hebrew used the phrases “before the Holocaust’ and “Before The Holocaust” in a discussion of the Bermuda Conference, in May 1943, the NewYork Times referred to the hundreds of thousands of European Jews still surviving the Nazi Holocaust.
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This page is based on the article The Holocaust published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 17, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
