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The Holocaust began in 1933 when Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany and ended in 1945 when the Nazis were defeated by the Allied powers.

Many Germans were willing to tolerate Nazi antisemitism since Germany suffered a humiliating defeat in World War I (1914–1918).

Many believed the Nazi Party was restoring Germany’s status as a world power. The Nazis also promised to restore Germany’s economy. They vowed to end political instability and violence.

The term Holocaust is derived from the Greek word holocaust, which means sacrifice by fire. It refers to the Nazi persecution and planned slaughter of the Jewish people and others considered to be inferior to "true" Germans.

The Hebrew word Shoah—which means devastation, ruin, or waste—also refers to this genocide.

In addition to Jews, the Nazis targeted the Roma, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, and people with disabilities for persecution. Those who resisted the Nazis were sent to forced labor camps or murdered.

The Nazis sometimes used the term "Final Solution" to refer to their plan to exterminate the Jewish people, although the origins of this are unclear, according to historians.

According to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, a little over 17 million people were killed during the Holocaust, but no single document exists recording the total number. Six million of these were Jews—approximately two-thirds of all Jews living in Europe.2 An estimated 1.5 million Jewish children and thousands of Romani, German, and Polish children died in the Holocaust.

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After the beginning of World War II, Nazis began ordering all Jews to live in small, segregated areas of big cities, called ghettos. Jews were forced out of their homes and moved into smaller dwellings, often shared with one or more other families.

Some ghettos were initially open, which meant that Jews could leave the area during the daytime but had to be back by a curfew. Later, all ghettos became closed, meaning that Jews were not allowed to leave under any circumstances. Major ghettos were located in the Polish cities of Bialystok, Lodz, and Warsaw.

In most ghettos, Nazis ordered the Jews to establish a Judenrat (Jewish council) to administer Nazi demands and to regulate the internal life of the ghetto. The Nazis routinely ordered deportations from the ghettos. In some of the large ghettos, 5,000 to 6,000 people per day were sent by rail to concentration and extermination camps.﻿ To get them to cooperate, the Nazis told the Jews they were being transported elsewhere for labor.

As the tide of World War II turned against the Nazis, they began a systematic plan to eliminate or "liquidate" the ghettos they had established through a combination of mass murder on the spot and transferring the remaining residents to extermination camps.

When the Nazis attempted to liquidate the Warsaw Ghetto on April 13, 1943, the remaining Jews fought back in what has become known as the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The Jewish resistance fighters held out against the entire Nazi regime for almost a month.

Although many people refer to all Nazi camps as concentration camps, there were actually a number of different kinds of camps, including concentration camps, extermination camps, labor camps, prisoner-of-war camps, and transit camps. One of the first concentration camps was in Dachau, in southern Germany. It opened on March 20, 1933.

From 1933 until 1938, most of the people held in concentration camps were political prisoners and people the Nazis labeled as "asocial." These included the disabled, the homeless, and the mentally ill. After Kristallnacht in 1938, the persecution of Jews became more organized. This led to the exponential increase in the number of Jews sent to concentration camps.

Life within Nazi concentration camps was horrible. Prisoners were forced to do hard physical labor and given little food. They slept three or more to a crowded wooden bunk; bedding was unheard of. Torture within the concentration camps was common and deaths were frequent. At a number of concentration camps, Nazi doctors conducted medical experiments on prisoners against their will.

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In the wake of the Great Depression, German democracy was destroyed. Its place was taken by the Nazi dictatorship, led by Adolf Hitler.

The new rulers brutally attacked real and imagined opponents. Many victims were taken to early camps. In 1933, most inmates were political prisoners, above all German Communists. Many faced abuse and violence. Deaths were still rare, however, and most prisoners were released after a few weeks or months. Fear of the camps helped to break the anti-Nazi resistance. As a result, fewer opponents ended up inside, and by October 1934 only 2,400 prisoners were left in concentration camps. Some observers thought the camps would disappear completely.

But Adolf Hitler wanted to keep the camps: He saw the benefits of lawless terror, without courts and judges. And so Hitler supported the creation of a permanent concentration camp system under SS leader Heinrich 🤬. When war broke out in autumn 1939, after the German invasion of Poland, this SS system included six purpose-built camps holding 21,400 prisoners.

During the Second World War, concentration camps spread through much of Nazi-occupied Europe. Auschwitz, set up in 1940 to crush the Polish resistance, was the first of many new camps. Conditions inside camps, always poor, now became deadly. Many inmates died from illness and starvation. Many more were executed or died during horrific medical experiments.

From 1942, the camps participated in the Holocaust. Most of the six million European Jews murdered by the Nazis died outside concentration camps, shot or gassed on the killing fields of eastern Europe. Still, the single most lethal site of the Holocaust was a concentration camp: Auschwitz. Here, the SS killed some one million Jews; most were murdered on arrival in gas chambers.

In Auschwitz and other concentration camps, prisoner numbers grew fast during the second half of the war. Those regarded as fit for work by the SS (Jews and non-Jews alike) were used as slave laborers. Prisoners toiled for many hours each day, building roads, digging tunnels, breaking rocks, and more. Inmate numbers reached over 700,000 in early 1945. By then, the SS held most prisoners in satellite camps, which had sprung up near factories and building sites.

The end came in the first months of 1945 when Allied troops conquered what was left of the Third Reich. But liberation came too late for many concentration camp inmates. Between January and May 1945 (when Germany capitulated), an estimated 300,000 prisoners died. Victims of disease, starvation, and execution, they died inside the hellish compounds and on death marches away from abandoned camps.

Liberation was no happy end. Most prisoners had died before the Allies arrived. And the camps left a bitter legacy for survivors. They suffered from injuries and haunting memories, while most perpetrators got away unpunished. Meanwhile, ordinary Germans often pleaded ignorance.