Holocaust - Shoah

The Shoah was the systematic, state-organized murder of approximately six million European Jews by Nazi Germany and its collaborators, roughly two thirds of the Jewish population of Europe and including about 1.5 million children. It developed in stages rather than as a single decision: legal exclusion and expropriation in Germany from 1933, forced emigration and the violence of Kristallnacht in 1938, ghettoization across occupied Poland from 1939, mass shootings by the Einsatzgruppen behind the eastern front from June 1941, and finally industrialized killing in the extermination camps of Operation Reinhard and Auschwitz-Birkenau from 1942. Entire communities that had existed for eight centuries in Poland, Lithuania, Hungary, and the Ukrainian lands were destroyed along with their yeshivot, libraries, languages, and liturgical traditions, ending Eastern Europe as the demographic and intellectual center of the Jewish world. Its aftermath reshaped everything that followed: the survivors in displaced persons camps, the collapse of remaining opposition to Jewish statehood, the Law of Return, and the permanent centrality of the Shoah in Jewish memory and Israeli identity.