Many wonder what the Holocaust was, who the NaziÕs were, why they killed numbers of innocent people, how they carried out their policy, and most importantly how the world responded to their actions. Reading this will cover those questions and many others people have about the Holocaust.
The Holocaust was a systematic persecution of European Jews by the NaziÕs in Germany and itÕs collabrators between the years of 1933 and 1945. In 1933, before the Holocaust, about nine million Jews lived in the 21 countries of Europe that would be soon taken over by Germany during World War II. By 1945 many Jews had died and many were still being killed.
You ask who the NaziÕs were. ÒNaziÓ is a short term for National Socialist German Workers Party, a political party formed in 1919 primarily from unemployed German veterans of World War I. In about 1921 a man named Adolph Hitler became the leader of the party making it a very powerful political force in German elections.The party was strongly anti-Communist, antisemetic, racist, nationalistic, imperialistic, and militaristic people.
Nazis had the feeling that they were the Germans superior race and that all other races such as Jews, Gypsies, handicaped Germans and many others were inferior and should be exterminated. They put blame on the other races for wars and other major problems. Thus they decided that it was time to abolish the other races.
Mainly Jews, Gypsies, Poles, Soviet prisoners of war; dissidents, homosexuals and JehovahÕs witnessess were the main target of Nazi hatered. These people and many more were killed by lethal injection, poisionous gas and others were lined up stark naked and shot into mass graves with their family friends, children and loved ones. Eventually over six million Jews alone were dead. The Nazis later established six extermination centers in Poland where large-scale murder, by gas and body disposal, were conducted systematically. The victims were transfered from Western Europe and from the ghettos in Eastern Germany to those centers. In these camps millions were almost literally murdered by forced labor, exposure to harsh weather,starvation, execution and disease. This was all along with all of the killing happening in the ghettos and concentration camps.
