Human Saga

The Holocaust and the 'Final Solution'

1941–1945·Social & demographic·Europe·
1941–1945Date
Social & demographicCategory
14Empires active
Date
1941–1945
Category
Social & demographic
Region
Europe
Era
Modern
Significance

The Holocaust was the systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of approximately six million Jews by Nazi Germany and its collaborators. Mass killings escalated after the 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union, when mobile killing units (Einsatzgruppen) shot hundreds of thousands of Jews.

At the Wannsee Conference on 20 January 1942, senior officials coordinated the 'Final Solution to the Jewish Question', a continent-wide programme of genocide. Jews were deported from across occupied Europe to ghettos and to extermination camps such as Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka and Sobibor, where most were murdered in gas chambers. The Nazi regime also murdered millions of others, including Roma, Soviet prisoners of war, disabled people, Poles and political prisoners. The genocide reshaped the demography of European Jewry, drove postwar migration including to the future state of Israel, and underpinned the development of the legal concepts of genocide and crimes against humanity.

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Further reading

If you read one book

The Holocaust: A New History

Laurence Rees

Accessible, harrowing synthesis drawing on survivor testimony.

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