Definition of the Holocaust
Definition of the Holocaust from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum:
Between 1933 and 1945, Germany’s government, led by Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist (Nazi) Party, carried out a deliberate, calculated attack on European Jewry. Basing their actions on antisemitic ideology and using World War II as a primary means to achieve their goals, they targeted Jews as their main enemy, killing six million Jewish men, women, and children by the time the war ended in 1945. This act of genocide is now known as the Holocaust. As part of their wide-reaching efforts to remove from German territory all those whom they considered racially, biologically, or socially unfit, the Nazis terrorized many other groups as well, including political opponents, Roma (also known as Gypsies), Germans with mental and physical disabilities, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, Poles, and Soviet prisoners of war. In the course of state-sponsored tyranny, the Nazis left countless lives shattered and millions dead.
