Holocaust Background

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Holocaust

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The systemic persecution and murder of six million Jews by the Nazis, their allies, and their collaborators.

Some believe that it started with the implementation of the Final Solution (1941), while others say that it started with Hitler’s rise in 1933.  It is sometimes referred to as the Shoah, which is the Hebrew word for catastrophe. 

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Antisemitism

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Hostility to, prejudice towards, or discrimination against Jewish people.

It is considered to be a form of racism.

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Concentration Camp

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Broadly: The term concentration camp is usually applied to all camps run by the Nazis during the Holocaust.

Specifically: applies to camps who detained those seen as “enemies of the Reich”. This is different from the extermination camps (also called death camps).

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Final Solution

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This was the deliberate, planned mass murder of Jews throughout Europe from 1941 to 1945.

AKA the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question”. The Nazis did this through policies that led to starvation, disease, random acts of terror, mass shootings, and gassings.

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Ghettos

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Areas of cities or towns where Jewish people were forced to live.

The conditions were overcrowded and unsanitary, and often separated from the ‘outside’ by walls or other barriers. They did not exist only in Germany, but in the territories Germans occupied as well.

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Aryan Race

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The Nazis believed that true Germans belonged to a superior ‘Aryan’ race.

This group excluded Jewish people, Black people, and the Roma, who were considered to be non-Aryans. Aryans, however, are not a race and an "Aryan master race" does not exist.

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Genocide

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The intentional destruction of a group of people based on their ethnic, national, perceived racial, or religious group.

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Persecute

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Subject someone to ill-treatment, especially based on their race, political beliefs, or religious beliefs.