Holocaust

The Holocaust, also known as The Shoah is the name applied to the state-led systematic persecution and genocideof the Jews and other minority groups of Europe and North Africa during World War II by Nazi Germany and its collaborators ]. Early elements of the Holocaust include the Kristallnacht of the 8th and 9th November 1938 and the T-4 Euthanasia Programleading to the later use of killing squads and extermination camps in a massive and centrally organized effort to exterminate every possible member of the populations targeted by Adolf Hitler and the Nazis

The Jews of Europe were the main victims of the Holocaust in what the Nazis called the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question " (die "EndlÐ"¶sung der Judenfrage"). The commonly used figure for the number of Jewish victims is six million though estimates by historians using, among other sources, records from the Nazi regime itself, range from five million to seven million. Many gentiles were killed in addition to this figure.

About 220,000 Sinti and Roma were murdered in the Holocaust (some estimates are as high as 800,000), between a quarter to a half of the European population. Other groups deemed "racially inferior" or "undesirable": Poles (5 million killed, of whom 3 million were Jewish), Serbs (estimates vary between 100,000 and 700,000 killed, mostly by Croat Ustashas Soviet military prisoners of war and civilians on occupied territories including Russians and other East Slavsthe mentally or physically disabled homosexuals Jehovah's Witnesses Communists and political dissidents ,trade unionists.Freemasons , and some Catholic and Protestant clergy, were also persecuted and killed. Many scholars do not include the Nazi persecution of all of these groups in the definition of the Holocaust, with some scholars limiting the Holocaust to the genocide of the Jews; some to genocide of the Jews, Roma, and disabled; and some to all groups targeted