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This is a list of victims of Nazism who were noted for their achievements. Many on the lists below were of Jewish and Polish origin, although Soviet POWs , Jehovah's Witnesses , Serbs , Catholics , Roma and dissidents were also murdered.
Also referred to as the Shoah (in Hebrew), the Holocaust was a genocide in which some six million European Jews were killed by Nazi Germany and its World War II collaborators. About 1.5 million of the victims were children. Two-thirds of the nine million Jews who had resided in Europe were murdered.
The Holocaust (/ ˈ h ɒ l ə k ɔː s t / ⓘ), [1] known in Hebrew as the Shoah (שואה), was the genocide of European Jews during World War II.Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe, around two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population.
If we did not fight the Jews, they would destroy us. It's a life-and-death struggle between the Aryan race and the Jewish bacillus." [29] In November 1941, Goebbels published an article "The Jews are to blame" which returned to Hitler's prophecy of 1939 and stated that world Jewry was suffering a "gradual process of extermination". [26]
By April 1942, when the operation finished, at least 6,000 and as many as 20,000 people had been killed [37] [38] – the first act of systematic killing in the camp system. [39] Beginning in August 1941, selected Soviet prisoners of war were killed within the concentration camps, usually within a few days of their arrival.
The Nazis also used agents who were Jewish to arrest Jews hiding outside the ghetto or trying to escape from it. These agents also helped find people involved in smuggling, producing illegal documents or having contacts with the underground. [14] They were widely regarded as influential people who could get things done with the Germans. [15]
Perhaps the deadliest of these Holocaust-era pogroms was the Iași pogrom in Romania, in which as many as 14,000 Jews were killed by Romanian citizens, police, and military officials. By December 1941, Adolf Hitler decided to completely exterminate European Jews. [ 8 ]
Hilberg estimates that between 1941 and 1945 the Einsatzgruppen and related agencies killed more than two million people, including 1.3 million Jews. [130] The total number of Jews murdered during the war is estimated at 5.5 to six million people. [131]