Thread by @prageru

The Holocaust: A Thread

The Holocaust was the systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of 6 million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators between 1941 and 1945.

The term "Holocaust" comes from a Greek word meaning sacrifice by fire.
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The Nazis considered Jews to be an inferior race that posed a deadly threat to the German "Volk."

Soon after taking power, the Nazis adopted measures to exclude Jews from German economic, social, and cultural life and to pressure them to leave the country.

World War II provided Nazi officials with the opportunity to pursue a “final solution" to the Jewish question: the murder of all the Jews in Europe.
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As the war began in 1939, anti-Jewish policy escalated to the imprisonment and eventual murder of European Jewry.

The Nazis first deported Polish and western European Jews to ghettos, where they lived in overcrowded and unsanitary conditions with inadequate food.

In 1941, after the German invasion of the USSR, the SS began massive killing operations aimed at entire Jewish communities.

By the fall of that year, Nazis established three killing centers in Poland—Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka—with the sole purpose of mass murdering Jews.

In the spring of 1942, Auschwitz-Birkenau was designated as a killing facility. The SS murdered approximately one million Jews at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

During Auschwitz's peak, an average of 6,000 Jews were murdered in its gas chambers every day. encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/art…

The SS and police murdered nearly 2,700,000 Jews in the killing centers either by asphyxiation with poison gas or by shooting.

In total, some 6 million Jewish men, women and children perished during the Holocaust.

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This amounted to two thirds of Jews living in Europe and over one third of the entire global Jewish population at the time.

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