Essays on Holocaust

1933 - 1945

German Reich and German-occupied Europe

Anne Frank, Hermann Göring, Adolf Hitler, Edith Stein, Elie Wiesel

The Holocaust was the genocide of European Jews, organized by the Nazis and their collaborators from the time they assumed power in Germany in 1933. It was a time of deliberate, organized, state-sponsored persecution and murder of some six million Jews, around two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population.

Adolf Hitler developed the idea of the Jews as an evil race struggling for world domination. Hitler was obsessed with the idea of the superiority of the “Aryan" race. Following Adolf Hitler's appointment as chancellor in 1933, the regime built a network of concentration camps for political opponents and those deemed "undesirable." Also, the Nazis used propaganda, persecution, and legislation to deny human and civil rights to German Jews.

On January 20, 1942, the policy of extermination of Europe's Jews began with a plan known by the Nazis as "The Final Solution to the Jewish Problem". The death camps were to be the essential instrument of the “final solution.” From 1942 to 1945, Jews were deported to the camps from all over Europe. At Auschwitz alone, more than 2 million people were murdered.

As the Allied armies moved into Germany and Poland, they liberated the concentration and extermination camps. The Holocaust had a deep effect on society both in Europe and the rest of the world.