LovesTheTeam.com

History of the Holocaust

The word "holocaust" comes from ancient GreekThe concept of sacrifice by burning. British newspapers used the word "holocaust" to describe national persecutions in Turkey and in tsarist Russia at the beginning of the 20th century. However, the worldwide distribution and spelling as a proper name (with a capital letter) was received in the fifties of the last century, when publicists and writers tried to comprehend the Nazi crimes towards Jews.

The Holocaust is considered one of the greatest tragedies inhistory of the Jewish people. It was the events of the Holocaust that became the starting point for the emergence of the State of Israel as a place where Jews could find safety and peace.

Since the advent of Adolf Hitler to power in 1933In Germany, persecution of Jews began, which were forcibly evicted from the country, confiscating their enterprises and property. After the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, the Nazis sought to concentrate all Jews of Europe on the territory of the conquered states. In 1941, an order was signed on the "final solution of the Jewish question," which meant the physical annihilation of an entire nation.

The tragedy of the twentieth century

During the Holocaust, massiveshootings, torture, death camps. It is believed that the number of Jews in Europe as a result of the genocide was reduced by 60%, and in the years of the Holocaust, at least six million Jews were killed. In the course of mass shootings in the occupied territories of the USSR, one to two million representatives of the Jewish nation perished. The exact number of Holocaust victims is still unknown, as often there were no witnesses to Nazi atrocities.

During the Holocaust, the Nazis sought to exterminate andother categories of people: representatives of sexual minorities, people with mental pathologies, Slavs, Gypsies, immigrants from Africa, and Jehovah's Witnesses.

In some of the captured territories, localthe population actively promoted the invaders, helping to exterminate the Jews, participating in escorts and executions. Motives for this served as ethnic differences, and the thirst for profit: the property of the exterminated Jews became the property of collaborators. However, many people tried to save the doomed Jews, often at the risk of their own safety. Only in Poland, the Nazis sentenced more than two thousand people to death for helping Jews.