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The Beginning.....
The Holocaust era began in January 1933 when Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party came to power in Germany. -
The Nazi Posting
The Nazi Party promoted a particularly virulent form of racial antisemitism. It was central to the party’s race-based worldview. The Nazis believed that the world was divided into distinct races and that some of these races were superior to others. -
Others in the Holocaust
The Holocaust specifically refers to the systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jews. However, there were also millions of other victims of Nazi persecution and murder. In the 1930s, the regime targeted a variety of alleged domestic enemies within German society. -
The Beginning of WW2
Nazi Germany’s territorial expansion began in 1938–1939. During this time, Germany annexed neighboring Austria and the Sudetenland View This Term in the Glossary and occupied the Czech lands. On September 1, 1939, Nazi Germany began World War II -
The Final Solution
The Nazi “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” (“Endlösung der Judenfrage”) was the deliberate and systematic mass murder of European Jews. It was the last stage of the Holocaust and took place from 1941 to 1945. -
Come down to the Killing Center
In late 1941, the Nazi regime began building specially designed, stationary killing centers in German-occupied Poland. In English, killing centers are sometimes called “extermination camps” or “death camps.” -
The First Ghetto
German officials first created ghettos in 1939–1940 in German-occupied Poland. The two largest were located in the occupied Polish cities of Warsaw and Lodz (Łódź). Beginning in June 1941 -
The Ending
It ended in May 1945, when the Allied Powers defeated Nazi Germany in World War II. The Holocaust is also sometimes referred to as “the Shoah,” the Hebrew word for “catastrophe.”