Six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. That number is established beyond serious dispute by decades of demographic and archival work. It represents about two-thirds of the entire Jewish population of Europe as it stood in 1939. Whole communities that had existed for centuries were destroyed within months. There are regions of Poland, Ukraine, and the Baltic states where the pre-war Jewish population was effectively exterminated, where the cemeteries and synagogues are the only remaining evidence that Jewish communities ever existed there at all.
The Jews were the central and primary target of the Holocaust. They were also not the only people murdered by the Nazi state. The pages in this section address both: who the Jewish victims were, how they lived before the war, what they experienced inside the catastrophe, and how they responded; and who the other targeted groups were and what was done to them.
The Jewish victims
The Jewish communities of Europe before the war were not a monolithic group. Polish Jews were predominantly Yiddish-speaking, embedded in dense religious and cultural networks, many of them poor, many of them devout. German and Austrian Jews were largely secular, assimilated, German-speaking, often professionally successful, many of them veterans of the First World War who considered themselves German first. The Jews of Salonika were Ladino-speaking Sephardim, the descendants of communities expelled from Spain in 1492. The Jews of Rome could trace continuous habitation in the city to before the birth of Christianity. The Jews of Amsterdam, Vienna, Budapest, Warsaw, and Berlin each had their own character, their own political movements, their own cultural institutions.
The Holocaust destroyed all of them. The pages in the Jewish Victims section are organised around three questions. The first is who they were before the war: the communities, the culture, the intellectual life, the political movements. These pages exist because one of the things systematic murder does is attempt to erase the record of what existed before it, and that erasure is itself part of the crime. The second question is what happened to them inside the catastrophe: the Judenrat, the Kapos, the children, the women, the responses that ranged from armed resistance to the impossible calculus of the Judenräte trying to manage impossible situations with no good options. The third is the voices that survived: the memoirists and writers, from Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel to the less-known survivors whose testimony is as indispensable as the famous names.
The site also covers the Righteous Among the Nations: the non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews, from Raoul Wallenberg in Budapest to the village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon in France, which sheltered thousands of Jews throughout the occupation. Their stories belong here because rescue was possible, even under occupation, and because the existence of rescuers makes the behaviour of those who did not rescue harder to explain away.
The other targeted groups
The Nazi regime’s murderous reach extended well beyond the Jews. Around 220,000 to 500,000 Roma and Sinti were killed in what Roma communities call the Porajmos, the Romani word for devouring. Disabled people were the first group subjected to systematic state murder: the T4 programme, which ran from 1939 to 1941, killed around 200,000 people with physical or mental disabilities in a programme that used gas as a killing method before the death camps were built. Gay men were imprisoned in concentration camps; an estimated 5,000 to 15,000 died there. Jehovah’s Witnesses were imprisoned and executed for refusing to swear allegiance to the regime. Soviet prisoners of war were murdered in their millions: of around 5.7 million Soviet POWs taken captive by Germany, roughly 3.3 million died, many deliberately starved. Polish civilians were subjected to mass executions, forced labour, and a sustained attempt to destroy Polish national culture.
Each of these groups has its own section. The pages address each group’s specific experience rather than collapsing them into a generic category of victimhood. The distinctions matter. The methods used, the scale, the ideology driving the targeting, and the historical record available all differ. What they share is that the Nazi state identified them as targets and killed them deliberately.
What was looted and what was remembered
The Holocaust was also the largest organised theft in history. The Nazi state and its collaborators expropriated Jewish businesses, homes, bank accounts, insurance policies, artwork, books, and the physical contents of the death camps themselves: the hair, the gold fillings, the clothing. The Economics and Looting section addresses the mechanics of expropriation, the art looting operations, the postwar restitution efforts, and the cases, like the Klimt paintings and the Gurlitt collection, that were still being litigated in the twenty-first century.
The Memorialisation and Remembrance section addresses how the Holocaust has been preserved and presented since 1945: the museums, from Yad Vashem to the Imperial War Museum’s Holocaust Galleries, the physical memorials, the films, and the question of how the memory of events this extreme is transmitted to generations that did not live through them. The Legacy and Why It Still Matters section covers the long aftermath: the reparations agreements, the ongoing prosecutions, modern antisemitism, and the problem of what happens to Holocaust memory as the last survivors die.
Sources
- Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 3rd edition, Yale University Press, 2003
- Yehuda Bauer, A History of the Holocaust, Franklin Watts, 2001
- Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, HarperCollins, 1997 and 2009
- Israel Gutman, ed., Encyclopaedia of the Holocaust, Macmillan, 1990
- Deborah Lipstadt, The Eichmann Trial, Schocken, 2011
- Michael Berenbaum, The World Must Know: The History of the Holocaust as Told in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006