Holocaust, also known as the shoah is a word of Greek origin meaning sacrifice

of fire. The holocaust was the killing of millions of Jews by the Nazis during World War
II. It was also a dark time in which many people were killed and many things were
destroyed especially by fire. There were different types of attacks that the Nazis used
used on the Jewish. They used genocide, mass murder, ethnic cleansing and
deportation.
The Holocaust and Germanys war in the east was based on Hitlers view that the
Jews were the enemy of German people. Hitler was born in Braunau am Inn, Austria on
April 20, 1889. He was the fourth of six children to be born to his parents, Alois Hitler
and Klara Polzl. He gained power in German politics as a leader of the National
Socialist Workers Party, also known as the Nazi Party. Hitler served as a dictator from
1934-1945. His policies caused World War II and the Holocaust. He committed suicide
with his wife Eva Braun the day after their wedding on April 30, 1945 in his Berlin
bunker.
At the start of World War I, Hitler applied to serve in the German army. He got
accepted in 1914, though he was still an Austrian citizen. Although Hitler spent most of
his time away from the front lines, he was at a number of significant battles and was
wounded at the Somme. After World War I, Hitler returned to Munich and continued to
work for the military as an intelligence officer. In 1940, during World War II, Hitler was
invading many places such as, Denmark, France, Norway, Luxembourg, the
Netherlands and Belgium. Hitler ordered bombing raids on the United Kingdom, with the
goal of invasion. Germany's alliance with Japan and Italy was signed to discourage the
United States from supporting and protecting the British. On December 7, 1941, Japan
attacked Pearl Harbour in Hawaii. Hitler was now at war against a coalition that included
the world's largest empire, Britain, the worlds greatest financial power, the United
States, and the worlds largest army, the Soviet Union. By early 1945, Hitler realized that
Germany was going to lose the war. The Soviets had driven the German army back to
Western Europe, and the allies were advancing into Germany.
In June, 1941, Germany attacked the Soviet Union and began the final solution.
For killing groups were formed called Einsatzgruppen A, B, C and D. Each group have
several commando units. The Einsatzgruppen gathered Jews town by town, marched
them into huge pits that they dug earlier, lined them up and shot them with automatic
weapons. The dead and dying would fall into the pits to be buried in mass graves.
30,000-35,00 Jews were killed in two days. By the end of 1942, the Einsatzgruppen had
murdered over 1.3 million Jews.
The Holocaust, was a genocide in which Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany and its
collaborators killed about 6 million Jews. The victims included about 1.5 million children
and represented about two-thirds of the 9 million Jews who had resided in Europe. The
holocaust started January 30, 1933 when Hitler took over Germany and ended on May
8, 1945. The Germans, like the Poles, Austrians, French, Croats, Slovaks, Ukrainians,
Lithuanians and others, were all taught, almost from the moment they could understand
language, that Jews were evil, that they worked together with the devil, that they were

bent on defiling the Christian mind, taking over the economies of the world to enslave
Christians, that they abducted and murdered little Christian boys to extract their blood to
make Passover bread, that they desecrated the host, that they rejected Christian
revolution
and murdered Jesus Christ. Many Jewish people died from overwork and starvation but
they also died by gas chambers, sickness, and being shot by guards. Over 200,000
people are estimated to have been Holocaust perpetrators. By the end of 1942, victims
were being regularly transported by freight trains to extermination camps where, if they
survived the journey, most were systematically killed in gas chambers. This continued
until the end of World War II in Europe in AprilMay 1945.
Jews from Germany and German-occupied Europe were deported by rail to the
killing centers in occupied Poland. The Germans attempted to disguise their deadly
intentions, referring to these deportations as resettlement to the east. The victims were
told they were being taken to labor camps, but in reality, from 1942, deportation for most
Jews meant transit to extermination camps. The Germans used both freight and
passenger cars for the deportation. They did not provide the Jews with food or water.
Without food or water, many deportees died before they reached their destinations. The
people deported in sealed freight cars suffered from intense heat in summer, freezing
temperatures in winter and and the smell of urine. Armed guards shot anyone trying to
escape. Between the fall of 1941 and the fall of 1944, millions of people were
transported by rail to the extermination camps and other killing sites in occupied Poland
and the occupied Soviet Union. There were many different kinds of railway cars used for
deportations, different in size and weight.
Between 1933 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its allies established more than 40,
000 camps. They used these sites for a range of purposes, including forced labour,
detention of people thought to be enemies of the state, and mass murder. Following the
German invasion of Poland in September 1939, the Nazis opened forced-labor camps
where thousands of prisoners died from exhaustion, starvation, and exposure. During
World War II, the Nazi camp system expanded rapidly. In some camps, Nazi doctors
performed medical experiments on prisoners.
Children were especially vulnerable during the holocaust. Lots of the children
were killed when they arrived in killing centers and immediately after birth. In the
ghettos, Jewish children died from starvation, exposure, and a lack of proper clothing
and shelter. The German authorities were indifferent to this mass death. They
considered most of the younger ghetto children to be unproductive and hence useless
eaters. Since children were generally too young to be used for forced labor, German
authorities generally selected the elderly, ill, and disabled, for the first deportations to
killing centers, or as the first victims led to mass graves to be shot. Many children
discovered ways to survive. Children smuggled food and medicines into the ghettos,
after smuggling personal possessions to trade for them out of the ghettos. Children in
youth movements later participated in underground resistance activities. Many children
escaped with parents or other relatives and sometimes on their own family camps run
by the Jewish.