The Holocaust

The Holocaust (from the Greek ὁλόκαυστος holókaustos: hólos, "whole" and kaustós, "burnt"), also known as the Shoah (Hebrew: השואה, HaShoah, "the catastrophe"), was a genocide in which Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany and its collaborators killed about six million Jews. The number includes about one million children and represented about two-thirds of the nine million Jews who had resided in Europe. Some definitions of the Holocaust include the additional five million non-Jewish victims of Nazi mass murders, bringing the total to about eleven million. Killings took place throughout Nazi Germany and German-occupied territories.

From 1941 to 1945, Jews were systematically murdered in one of the largest genocide in history, which was part of a broader aggregate of acts of oppression and killings of various ethnic and political groups in Europe by the Nazi regime. Every arm of Germany's bureaucracy was involved in the logistics and the carrying out of the genocide. Other victims of Nazi crimes included Romanis, ethnic Poles and other Slavs, Soviet POWs, communists, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses and the mentally and physically disabled. A network of about 42,500 facilities in Germany and German-occupied territories were used to concentrate victims for slave labor, mass murder, and other human rights abuses. Over 200,000 people are estimated to have been Holocaust perpetrators.

The Path

The Path may refer to:

See also

Nazism

National Socialism (German: Nationalsozialismus), more commonly known as Nazism (/ˈnɑːtsɪzəm, ˈnæ-/) or Naziism (/ˈnɑːtsi.ɪzəm/), is the ideology and practice associated with the 20th-century German Nazi Party and Nazi state as well as other far-right groups. Usually characterized as a form of fascism that incorporates scientific racism and antisemitism, Nazism developed out of the influences of Pan-Germanism, the Völkisch German nationalist movement, and the anti-communist Freikorps paramilitary groups that emerged during the Weimar Republic after German defeat in World War I.

Nazism subscribed to theories of racial hierarchy and Social Darwinism. Germanic peoples (called the Nordic race) were depicted as the purest of the Aryan race, and were therefore the master race. Opposed to both capitalism and communism, it aimed to overcome social divisions, with all parts of a homogeneous society seeking national unity and traditionalism. Nazism also vigorously pursued what it viewed as historically German territory under the doctrine of Pan-Germanism (or Heim ins Reich), as well as additional lands for German expansion under the doctrine of Lebensraum.

Genocide

Genocide is the intent to systematically eliminate a racial, ethnic, religious, linguistic, cultural or national group. Well-known examples of genocide include the Armenian Genocide, the Holocaust, the 1971 Bangladesh genocide, the Cambodian Genocide, and more recently the Rwandan Genocide, the Al-Anfal Campaign, and the Bosnian Genocide.

Etymology

Genocide has become an official term used in international relations. The word "genocide" was not in use before 1944. Before this was established, Winston Churchill referred to it as a crime with no name. In that year, a Polish-Jewish lawyer named Raphael Lemkin, described the policies of systematic murder founded by the Nazis as genocide. The word genocide is the combination of the Greek word "geno" (meaning tribe or race) and “caedere” (the Latin word for to kill). The word is defined as a specific set of violent crimes that are committed against a certain group with the attempt to remove the entire group from existence or to destroy them.

World War II

World War II (WWII or WW2), also known as the Second World War, was a global war that lasted from 1939 to 1945, although related conflicts began earlier. It involved the vast majority of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis. It was the most widespread war in history, and directly involved more than 100 million people from over 30 countries. In a state of "total war", the major participants threw their entire economic, industrial, and scientific capabilities behind the war effort, erasing the distinction between civilian and military resources. Marked by mass deaths of civilians, including the Holocaust (in which approximately 11 million people were killed) and the strategic bombing of industrial and population centres (in which approximately one million were killed, and which included the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki), it resulted in an estimated 50 million to 85 million fatalities. These made World War II the deadliest conflict in human history.