What is holocaust?

I’ve never known/.

Answer #1

Part One

The Holocaust was the systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of approximately six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. The Nazis, who came to power in Germany in January 1933, believed that Germans were “racially superior” and that the Jews, deemed “inferior,” were an alien threat to the so-called German racial community.

During the era of the Holocaust, German authorities also targeted other groups because of their perceived “racial inferiority”: Roma (Gypsies), the disabled, and some of the Slavic peoples (Poles, Russians, and others). Other groups were persecuted on political, ideological, and behavioral grounds, among them Communists, Socialists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and homosexuals.

In 1933, the Jewish population of Europe stood at over nine million. Most European Jews lived in countries that Nazi Germany would occupy or influence during World War II. By 1945, the Germans and their collaborators killed nearly two out of every three European Jews as part of the “Final Solution,” the Nazi policy to murder the Jews of Europe. Although Jews, whom the Nazis deemed a priority danger to Germany, were the primary victims of Nazi racism, other victims included some 200,000 Roma (Gypsies). At least 200,000 mentally or physically disabled patients, mainly Germans, living in institutional settings, were murdered in the so-called Euthanasia Program.

As Nazi tyranny spread across Europe, the Germans and their collaborators persecuted and murdered millions of other people. Between two and three million Soviet prisoners of war were murdered or died of starvation, disease, neglect, or maltreatment. The Germans targeted the non-Jewish Polish intelligentsia for killing, and deported millions of Polish and Soviet civilians for forced labor in Germany or in occupied Poland, where these individuals worked and often died under deplorable conditions. From the earliest years of the Nazi regime, German authorities persecuted homosexuals and others whose behavior did not match prescribed social norms. German police officials targeted thousands of political opponents (including Communists, Socialists, and trade unionists) and religious dissidents (such as Jehovah’s Witnesses). Many of these individuals died as a result of incarceration and maltreatment.

Answer #2

Part Two

In the early years of the Nazi regime, the National Socialist government established concentration camps to detain real and imagined political and ideological opponents. Increasingly in the years before the outbreak of war, SS and police officials incarcerated Jews, Roma, and other victims of ethnic and racial hatred in these camps. To concentrate and monitor the Jewish population as well as to facilitate later deportation of the Jews, the Germans and their collaborators created ghettos, transit camps, and forced-labor camps for Jews during the war years. The German authorities also established numerous forced-labor camps, both in the so-called Greater German Reich and in German-occupied territory, for non-Jews whose labor the Germans sought to exploit.

Following the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing units) and, later, militarized battalions of Order Police officials, moved behind German lines to carry out mass-murder operations against Jews, Roma, and Soviet state and Communist Party officials. German SS and police units, supported by units of the Wehrmacht and the Waffen SS, murdered more than a million Jewish men, women, and children, and hundreds of thousands of others. Between 1941 and 1944, Nazi German authorities deported millions of Jews from Germany, from occupied territories, and from the countries of many of its Axis allies to ghettos and to killing centers, often called extermination camps, where they were murdered in specially developed gassing facilities.

In the final months of the war, SS guards moved camp inmates by train or on forced marches, often called “death marches,” in an attempt to prevent the Allied liberation of large numbers of prisoners.

Answer #3

the word means an act of mass destruction and loss of life

it has come to be known as the mass murder of Jews under the German Nazi regime during the second world war, of course people tend to forget that a lot more than jews were killed during this time period (and ignore the obvious ignorant self centered American who apparently doesnt recognize the fact that the rest of the world was in the war for far longer than the Americans were, and America didnt win that war on their own)

and no, the war in Iraq was for oil. Since everyone’s been asking where all the oil is, now that the Iraqis have decided to stop nationalizing their oil supply, uhm that should answer their question…

Answer #4

* the Holocaust is the survivors of the concentration camps.

WRONG, sorry but you are wrong. The Holocaust refers to the entire action of the mass killings, the attempted genocide of the jewish people in Europe…NOT to the survivors.

Answer #5

Part Three

To those of you who answered that the Holocaust was the fault of Hitler, that he did these things to the millions killed…you are wrong. Hitler had many, many join him in this horror. This would not have been possible without the cooperation of tens of thousands…from Hitler to his henchmen to the SS and the doctors, to the prison guards, to the regular citizens who turned a blind eye or actually supported this mass killing. Do not ever get the idea that America stopped Germany single-handed. Many countries were in the war long before the U.S. entered. The U.S. president was told years before about the treatment of jews in Germany and he ignored the problem. How could the U.S. criticize Germany for enforcing laws against the jews…when the U.S. had laws against blacks…at the SAME time. The U.S. didn’t enter the war to stop the horrible treatment of the jews.

Answer #6

*wrong wrong and more wrong it was when Hilter (a communist)

Hitler was NOT a communist. He was a socialist.

*and anyone who was not german but Jewish

Hitler did not order the mass killing of non-germans.

Maybe you need you revisit what you studied in school.

Answer #7

When the jews were tortured and killed because jerks like hitler blamed all their problems on them.

-Its called genocide: when a race of people are trying to do away with another race of people. It still happening in places like Africa, Im pretty sure thats a reason for the war in Iraq.

Answer #8

The holocaust was a sad time when Jews were tortured by an evil man called Hitler. He made the Jews all go to a concentration camp. There he would work them and eventually kill most of them. It was a sick thing. It didn’t take place in America, and finally the Americans helped the Jews and it ended.

Answer #9

it was when jews were tortured and killed but the Holocaust is the survivors of the concentration camps.

Answer #10

that is just horrible..

Answer #11

A holiday