What Was The Holocaust?

The Holocaust was the systematic murder of Europe's Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators during the Second World War. This programme of targeted mass murder was a central part of the Nazis’ broader plans to create a new world order based on their ideology.

The Nazis’ programme of anti-Jewish persecution began as soon as Hitler came to power in 1933. At first, they used antisemitic legislation and restrictions alongside vicious propaganda to create a culture of segregation and hostility. This process of victimisation was intended to isolate Jewish people from the wider population in order to encourage them to emigrate. In reality, the number of people leaving fluctuated – finding places to go was difficult and the costs of doing so were high.

The process of persecution escalated in the late 1930s, before developing into a campaign of mass murder during the course of the Second World War. The large scale killing began during the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. Mobile execution squads known as Einsatzgruppen made up of Nazis and supported by local collaborators operated behind the advancing German line. They massacred over a million Jewish civilians in their newly occupied territories in the name of security. Tens of thousands of Roma were murdered alongside Jews as part of this operation.

From the beginning of 1942 these massacres were consolidated into a programme of co-ordinated annihilation. Millions of Jews were deported from ghettos or holding camps to be killed. Most were sent to a small number of purpose-built killing centres called death camps, but as the war developed, thousands more were sent to concentration camps to be worked to death in service of Germany’s deteriorating war effort. This Nazis were central to this process, but they did not act alone and relied on the support and complicity of hundreds of thousands of people across Europe.

Jewish people sent to concentration camps were incarcerated alongside hundreds of thousands of others who had been enslaved and victimised by the Nazis in pursuit of their new world order. Political opponents, homosexuals, prisoners of conscience, Roma, Jehovah Witnesses, Poles, Soviet prisoners of war and others were killed or died in camps as a result of neglect, starvation or disease.

WARNING: Please be aware that these videos contains footage of that some viewers may find disturbing.