Читать книгу The Holocaust: History in an Hour - Jemma Saunders J. - Страница 4

The Holocaust is the most documented and infamous genocide in human history. It is the name given to the murder of an estimated 6 million Jews in Europe under the Nazi regime, the vast majority of whom were systematically exterminated during the Second World War. Anti-Semitism was by no means a new phenomenon in Germany – or, indeed, in wider Europe – but when the Nazis came to power in 1933, discrimination against the Jewish people gained an unprecedented, deadly momentum.

Jews were not the only victims of the Nazis during the Holocaust era: as the 1930s progressed and bigoted legislation against the Jewish population gradually developed into physical violence, so too did such persecution extend to other minority groups in German society, including Romani, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Communists, Slavs and people with physical and mental disabilities. Hundreds of thousands of people from these groups, which in Nazi eyes threatened the purity of the German race, were murdered or perished in camps alongside Jewish prisoners.

How and why did a cultured European nation allow this methodical destruction of millions of lives? From the early roots of anti-Semitism to the inhumane horror of death camps such as Auschwitz and Treblinka, this, in an hour, is the story of the Holocaust.