The Holocaust — Six million Jews murdered

Key points

What to understand first

Nazi persecution escalated from exclusion and lost citizenship to mass murder.
The state defined Jewishness by ancestry, often regardless of personal belief.
Mass shootings destroyed communities before and alongside killing centres.
The victims belonged to diverse, centuries-old Jewish societies.

Connect the events

Persecution became genocide

1933 — Exclusion
Jews are progressively removed from public and professional life. 28
1935 — Citizenship removed
The Nuremberg Laws define Jewishness by ancestry and strip rights. 60
1938 — Organised violence
Synagogues, homes and businesses are attacked across Germany and annexed territories. 27
1939–1941 — Confinement
Occupation brings ghettos, forced labour, starvation and deportation. 62
1941 onward — Mass murder
Shootings and killing centres become instruments of systematic genocide. 63 64

Documented history

Three stages documented

1935Nazi Germany

Nuremberg Laws

What happened: German Jews lost citizenship rights and people were classified by ancestry.
Responsible: The Nazi state
Why it matters: Legal belonging could be removed by a government committed to racial antisemitism.

November 1938Germany and annexed territories

November Pogrom

What happened: Synagogues, homes and businesses were attacked; Jewish men were imprisoned.
Responsible: Nazi leadership, police and organised participants
Why it matters: State persecution escalated openly into mass violence and incarceration.

1941–1945German-occupied Europe

Systematic mass murder

What happened: Jewish communities were murdered through shootings, starvation, forced labour and killing centres.
Responsible: Nazi Germany with allied regimes and collaborators in many regions
Why it matters: Six million Jews were murdered and major centres of European Jewish life were destroyed.

28 63 64

A state removes its Jewish citizens

After taking power in 1933, the Nazi regime progressively excluded Jews from government work, professions, education and public life. The 1935 Nuremberg Laws deprived German Jews of full citizenship and classified people by ancestry. 60

November 1938: organised destruction

During the November Pogrom, often called Kristallnacht, Nazi leaders directed attacks on synagogues, Jewish homes and businesses. More than 1,400 synagogues were burned or damaged and tens of thousands of Jewish men were imprisoned in concentration camps. 27

War, ghettos and mass shootings

Germany’s invasion of Poland brought millions more Jews under Nazi rule. Occupation authorities imposed ghettos, forced labour, starvation and deportation. After the 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union, mobile killing units and other German forces murdered entire Jewish communities in mass shootings. 62 63

Killing centres

Nazi Germany created killing centres primarily to murder human beings on a vast scale. Auschwitz-Birkenau combined concentration-camp functions with a killing centre; Treblinka, Bełżec, Sobibór and Chełmno were principally killing centres. The terms are related but not interchangeable. 64

These were communities, not statistics

Before the Holocaust, Europe’s Jews sustained families, schools, synagogues, shops, hospitals, sports clubs, publishing houses, artistic movements and centres of scholarship. The genocide destroyed people and centuries of accumulated communal life. 28 68

Evidence

Sources for this article

S27
Kristallnacht
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. State-directed anti-Jewish violence in Nazi Germany.
S28
The Holocaust, 1933–1945
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Nazi persecution and murder of six million European Jews.
S60
The Nuremberg Race Laws
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Nazi racial definitions and removal of Jewish citizenship.
S62
German Invasion of Poland
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Occupation, ghettos, forced labour and escalating anti-Jewish persecution.
S63
Einsatzgruppen: An Overview
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Mobile killing units and the murder of more than one million civilians, primarily Jews.
S64
Killing Centers: An Overview
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Purpose-built centres of mass murder in German-occupied Poland.
S68
The Holocaust: 1933–1945
Yad Vashem. Chronology and documentation of the destruction of European Jewry.

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