The Holocaust: Nazi Genocide, Ghettos, Camps and Memory

Context

Introduction

Overview

The Holocaust was the systematic persecution and murder of six million Jews by Nazi Germany and its collaborators between 1933 and 1945. Millions of other people, including Roma, disabled people, Soviet prisoners of war, Polish civilians, and political opponents, were also targeted and killed. The Holocaust was built through law, propaganda, bureaucracy, ghettos, deportations, killing centres, and war, making it one of history's central warnings about state violence and dehumanisation.

What you'll learn: You'll understand how the Holocaust was built step by step — from antisemitic ideology to racial law, from mass violence to systematic extermination. You'll see who was involved, who resisted, who collaborated, and why the Holocaust's lessons remain essential to questions of prejudice, power, and human dignity today.

Key forces

The Holocaust was the deliberate, state-organised murder of approximately six million Jews — around two thirds of Europe's pre-war Jewish population — along with millions of others including Roma, disabled people, Soviet prisoners, and Polish civilians.
Persecution escalated through distinct phases: legal discrimination from 1933, mass violence from 1938, mass shooting from 1941, and systematic extermination in purpose-built killing centres from 1942.
The Nazi regime used modern bureaucratic, industrial, and transportation systems to organise genocide on a continental scale, requiring the active participation and passive complicity of thousands across multiple countries.
The Holocaust continues to shape international law, human rights frameworks, collective memory, and the understanding of how genocide becomes possible — and how it might be prevented.

1933 CE

Step 1 of 101933 CEAccessible mode

Nazi Antisemitism Takes Power

Adolf Hitler became Germany's chancellor in January 1933. For Jewish people in Germany, that moment began twelve years of persecution that would end in genocide.

Germany had long had antisemitism — prejudice against Jewish people — but the Nazis turned it into government policy. Within weeks, Jewish businesses faced organised boycotts. Jewish professionals lost their jobs. The state was acting against its own citizens.

The Nazis believed Jews were enemies of Germany — responsible for military defeat, economic collapse, and national humiliation. With power in hand, they could act on those beliefs. Jews were publicly cast as threats to the German nation.

“Antisemitism was not a fringe idea within the Nazi movement. It was the movement's central purpose.”

In 1933, concentration camps opened for political prisoners — communists, trade unionists, journalists. The instruments of terror were taking shape. Jews were already in danger. But the worst was still to come.

1935 CE

Step 2 of 101935 CEAccessible mode

The Nuremberg Laws

In September 1935, Nazi Germany turned antisemitism into formal law. Jewish people lost their citizenship. Discrimination was now bureaucratic, official, and permanent.

The Reich Citizenship Law declared that only those of German blood could be citizens. Jews became mere subjects — residents of Germany with no political rights whatsoever.

A second law banned marriage between Jews and non-Jews, and made sexual relations between them a criminal offence. Racial identity was determined through official classification based on the religion of a person's grandparents.

“Persecution did not need violence to destroy lives. A stroke of a pen was enough.”

The Laws showed that a modern state could institutionalise racial categories through bureaucracy alone. Hundreds of thousands of people suddenly found themselves legally classified as less than full human beings in the country where they were born.

1938 CE

Step 3 of 101938 CEAccessible mode

Kristallnacht

On 9–10 November 1938, mobs across Germany burned synagogues, smashed Jewish businesses, and dragged Jews into the streets. The Nazis called it a spontaneous uprising. It was organised by the state.

The trigger was the assassination of a German diplomat in Paris by a young Jewish man whose family had been expelled from Germany. The Nazis used it as justification for a nationwide pogrom — an act of coordinated mass violence.

Over 1,400 synagogues were destroyed. Around 7,500 Jewish businesses were smashed. At least 91 people were killed. Thirty thousand Jewish men were arrested and sent to concentration camps.

“Kristallnacht made one thing clear: Germany's Jews had no protection under the law.”

Afterwards, the German government fined the Jewish community one billion Reichsmarks for the damage — not the perpetrators, but the victims. The message was unmistakable. There would be no accountability, no recourse, and no safety.

Premium

You've reached the turning point

The opening chapters show persecution being turned into law, exclusion and state power. Premium follows the terrible turn from discrimination to mass murder: ghettos become traps, killing moves east, and the machinery of genocide closes around millions while resistance and survival become acts of human defiance.

Continue into the reversals, crises and human stakes that make the story matter.

Unlock full story

What Premium unlocks next