During World War II (1939–45), the leader of Germany, Adolf Hitler
(1889–1945), created a program of ethnic cleansing that came to be
called the Holocaust. His intention was to purify the German Aryan
race. He used the power of the government to organize the mass murder
of people he considered to be impure for his race. During the twelve
years that Hitler was in power, he particularly targeted Jews and Gypsies
for extermination from Germany. Not only were they uprooted and
placed in labor camps, but by the end of the war, five- to six million had
been murdered.
Millions of other groups of people who did not fit into Hitler’s plan
for a supreme Aryan race were victims of the Holocaust. Political dissidents, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, the disabled, and prisoners of
war were among those harassed and imprisoned in concentration camps
alongside Jews and the Gypsies. These people, however, were not consistently and thoroughly targeted as groups. Hitler’s prejudice was not rooted in political
or religious concerns alone. He believed the
Jewish people were an evil race working to take
over the world. He was not interested in converting them or expelling them from Germany.
In Hitler’s mind, the only adequate solution to
his “Jewish problem” was complete extermination of the Jewish people.
Hitler’s Holocaust policies were first aimed
at defining the Jewish race and inspiring antiJewish, or anti-Semitic, feelings among
Germans. What began as boycotts of Jewish
businesses evolved into restrictions on the rights
of Jews. Eventually the Nazi Party confiscated
and destroyed Jewish properties and moved people into Jewish ghettos or labor camps. Life was
severely restricted, and conditions were harsh.
Many died of disease and malnutrition.
In 1941, the policy of the Nazi Party turned to the systematic murder of the Jewish people. As the German army advanced through Europe
in the battles of World War II, it killed thousands of Jews in conquered
territories. Labor camps evolved into concentration camps where people
were sent to be worked to death or murdered.
The German army continued its extermination tactics until the
Allied armies invaded Germany in 1945. The concentration camps that
the liberating armies found in Germany shocked the world. The
Holocaust took a terrible toll on the Jewish people, and the memory of
it continues to haunt generations who study what happened in Germany during World War II.