World War II and the Holocaust were two interconnected events that had a profound impact on the world. The Holocaust was the systematic murder of Europe’s Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators during the Second World War, from 1941 to 1945[1][2]. It was a central part of the Nazis’ broader plans to create a new world order based on their ideology of racial superiority[2]. The Nazi regime believed that Germans were members of a biologically “superior” race threatened with extinction through the mixing of races, particularly with Jews, whom they saw as a biological threat to the “German (Aryan) Race”[2].

The Holocaust began as soon as Hitler came to power in 1933 with antisemitic legislation, restrictions, and propaganda aimed at creating a culture of segregation and isolation for Jewish people[2]. The process of victimization escalated in the late 1930s and developed into a campaign of mass murder during the course of the Second World War[2]. The large-scale killing began during the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, with mobile execution squads known as Einsatzgruppen, supported by local collaborators, massacring over a million Jewish civilians in the name of security[2]. From the beginning of 1942, these massacres were consolidated into a programme of co-ordinated annihilation, with millions of Jews deported from ghettos or holding camps to be killed in purpose-built killing centres called death camps[2].

The Holocaust resulted in the murder of close to two out of every three Jews in Europe, with hundreds of Jewish communities disappearing forever[1]. In addition to Jews, Roma (Gypsies), physically and mentally disabled people, Poles, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Soviet prisoners of war, and political dissidents also suffered grievous oppression and death under Nazi tyranny[1]. The Nazi regime relied on the support and complicity of hundreds of thousands of people across Europe to carry out this genocide[2].

World War II ended in Europe with the unconditional surrender of German armed forces in May 1945[1]. The conditions in the remaining concentration camps exacted a terrible toll in human lives, with overcrowded, filthy, and few supplies, turning these camps into sites of mass death[1]. Around half of the concentration camp population in January 1945 died before the war’s end[1]. The Holocaust left a lasting impact on the world, shaping the course of history and serving as a stark reminder of the devastating consequences of prejudice, hatred, and violence.

Citations:
[1] https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/animated-map/world-war-ii-and-the-holocaust
[2] https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/what-was-the-holocaust
[3] https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/holocaust
[4] https://www.eisenhowerlibrary.gov/research/online-documents/world-war-ii-holocaust-extermination-european-jews
[5] https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-holocaust-and-world-war-ii-key-dates

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