Section: What was the Holocaust?

What was the Holocaust?


This map featured as part of the Stahlecker report and was used in the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials.
German Wehrmacht soldiers capture on film the massacre of Jews in the Lvov Pogroms of July 1941, carried out by the Einsatzgruppe C and the Ukrainian National Militia.
Three young Roma women walk together along a road in 1930s Europe. Roma were judged to be racially ‘undesirable’ and therefore were also highly persecuted under Nazi rule.

The Holocaust (Shoah) is the term for the murder of around six million Jews by the Nazi regime and their collaborators during the Second World War.


The term ‘Holocaust’ can also refer to the orchestrated murder of Roma. Other groups were also targeted by the Nazi regime: disabled people, Soviet Prisoners of War and civilians, Polish civilians, homosexuals, socialists, communists and trades unionists, Freemasons and Jehovah’s Witnesses.




The Holocaust Explained





The Holocaust Explained is run by The Wiener Holocaust Library.


Topics in this section

What is genocide?
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Life before the Holocaust

Life before the Holocaust

What happened in August