What is the Holocaust?

World War II started in 1933 after Hitler became Chancellor in January, and the first concentration camp opened on March 22 northwest of the city of Munich, Germany. Concentration camps are places where people are forced to stay, usually confined under the poor treatment of a specific group of people, and the people sent to them are unlikely to even have committed a crime worth this extent of cruel punishment. The Nazis created these camps to completely exterminate the entire Jewish race, not only in Germany, but the rest of Europe as well. This bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution was considered the Nazi’s “Final Solution.” The term was used as code instead of saying that they were annihilating the Jewish population. Surprisingly, not only Jewish people were targeted during this event. The Germans formulated their ideology of race based on Darwin’s theory of “survival of the fittest.” People with mental or physical disability were targeted, along with Gypsies,  the Polish, Russian war prisoners, and African-Germans. As the Germans conquer countries during WWII, they set up concentration camps and capture the Jewish civilians living in that country. There were about 20,000 Nazi-run concentration camps created during the years of 1933 and 1945. The German Protection Squadrons, also called the “SS,” was a group of Nazi elite guards, who took complete control over all of the concentration camps by December 1934. On July 24, 1944, the first concentration camp was discovered and liberated at Majadanek by the Russians. About 360,000 people had already been killed there. As the liberations continued, Nazis began to evacuate prisoners from their camps in attempt to move them further away from Allied troops, these transports were known as “death marches.” On January 27, 1945, the largest concentration camp, Auschwitz, was liberated. Over two million people were killed there, one and a half million of them Jews.