A View of the Holocaust

Page 1 of 8

• 1. The enemy
• 2. Origins of the Holocaust
• 3. 1933 - 1939
• 4. The war years
• 5. Industrial killing: Auschwitz-Birkenau
• 6. The end of the Holocaust
• 7. The outside world
• 8. Find out more
• Print entire article

The enemy

The Holocaust was the Nazis' assault on the Jews between 1933 and 1945. It culminated in what the Nazis called the 'Final Solution of the Jewish Question in Europe', in which six million Jews were murdered.

'The Jews figured in Nazi ideology as the arch-enemy of the Aryan race...'

The Jews were not the only victims of Nazism. It is estimated that as many as 15 million civilians were killed by this murderous and racist regime, including millions of Slavs and 'asiatics', 200,000 Gypsies and members of various other groups. Thousands of people, including Germans of African descent, were forcibly sterilised.

These programmes are best seen as a series of linked genocides, each having its own history, background, purpose and significance in the Nazi scheme of things. The Holocaust was the biggest of the killing programmes and, in certain important ways, different from the others. The Jews figured in Nazi ideology as the arch-enemy of the 'Aryan race', and were targeted not merely for terror and repression but for complete extinction. The Nazis failed in this aim because they ran out of time, but they pursued it fanatically until their defeat in 1945. The Holocaust led to widespread public awareness of genocide and to modern efforts to prevent it, such as the 1948 UN Convention on Genocide.

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Published: 2003-01-01