The Holocaust

During World War II, Nazis in Germany sought to create a “pure” race of humans, which they called the Aryan race. The Nazis engaged in systematic extermination of groups of people considered by the Third Reich to be impure, such as Jews, Roman Catholics, gypsies (or Roma), homosexuals, the disabled, and anyone who disagreed with their politics. This extermination of an estimated 11 to 26 million people is called the Holocaust. European Jewry was practically erased, with at least 6 million Jews killed by the end of the war. This catastrophe is called Shoah in Hebrew. Anti-Semitism, or hatred of Jewish people, was intensified in Germany before the war by the Nazi propaganda machine, which convinced many people that Jews, along with many others, were the cause of economic depression and other social problems and that they should be removed from society.

Nazi soldiers collected these so-called undesirable people...