The Holocaust

The Holocaust was the persecution and murder of six million Jews by the Nazis. 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 and biological inferiority. Other groups were persecuted on political, ideological, and behavioral grounds, among them Communists, Socialists, 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 killed nearly two out of every three European Jews as part of the "Final Solution" the Nazi policy to murder the Jews of Europe. As Nazi tyranny spread across Europe, the Germans persecuted and murdered millions of people.