Photo of silhouette of woman looking at wall of photos of Holocaust survivors

How the Holocaust happened in plain sight

Six million Jews were murdered between 1933 and 1945. How Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party turned anti-Semitism into genocide.

Nazis attempted to cover up their crimes in the Holocaust—and denial of the genocide persists to this day. Scholars say memorials—like this one in the former train station of Pithiviers, France, from which Jews were sent to death camps—are essential to fighting anti-Semitism.
Photograph by Christophe Pitit Tesson, Pool/AFP via Getty Images

Six million Jews murdered. Millions more stripped of their livelihoods, their communities, their families, even their names. The horrors of the Holocaust are often expressed in numbers that convey the magnitude of Nazi Germany’s attempt to annihilate Europe’s Jews.

The Nazis and their collaborators killed millions of people whom they perceived as inferior—including Jehovah’s Witnesses, gay men, people with disabilities, Slavic and Roma people, and Communists. However, historians use the term “Holocaust”—also called the Shoah, or “disaster” in Hebrew—to apply strictly to European Jews murdered by the Nazis between 1933 and 1945.

No single statistic can capture the true terror of the systematic killing of a group of human beings—and given its enormity and brutality, the Holocaust is difficult to understand.

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