In this video, we're going to talk about what is one of the darkest chapters in human history, the Holocaust, which involved the massacre of roughly six million Jews and as many as 11 million civilians in total. In order to understand the Holocaust, we're going to start at World War I. Even prior to World War I, there were massacres, especially of Jews, in places like the Russian Empire. The term pogrom is a Russian word meaning these violent riots or attacks on people for their ethnicity. And there were several through the 19th century, but they go back even before that word was coined as early as the First Crusades, famously in the Rhineland, many of the Jewish people were killed and attacked. And you had a solid thread of anti-Semitism throughout much of Europe, including Germany and Eastern Europe, as we get up to and through World War I. Now, as we've talked about in other videos, the Central Powers lose World War I, and the Treaty of Versailles places a lot of the blame on Germany.