The Holocaust 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.
Other groups targeted after Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in January 1933 include those whom the Nazis viewed as inherently inferior (chiefly Slavs, the Roma, and the disabled), and those targeted because of their beliefs or behavior (such as Jehovah’s Witnesses, communists, and homosexuals)
The murders were carried out in pogroms and mass shootings; by a policy of extermination through labor in concentration camps; and in gas chambers and gas vans in German extermination camps, chiefly Auschwitz, Bełżec, Chełmno, Majdanek, Sobibór, and Treblinka in occupied Poland.
