The Holocaust

This report presents a range of statistics relating to the Holocaust committed during the Second World War, which resulted in the deaths of up to 17 million people. The persecution of minorities, especially Jews, escalated in Germany following the rise of Hitler and the Nazi Party in the interwar period. After Hitler seized power in 1933, policies were implemented that led to the financial ruination of Germany's Jewish community, before things grew more violent and hostile in the late 1930s. As Germany expanded across much of Europe between 1938 and 1945, millions of Jews, Slavs, and other ethnic groups deemed to be "inferior" came under German control. These people were imprisoned in concentration camps, where they were used as slave labor, before systematic extermination campaigns (through gassing, mass shootings, and starvation) were put in place to kill them on a massive scale. This report takes a look at some aspects of the persecution of Jews in Germany in the lead up to the Second World War, before moving on to the atrocities committed during the Holocaust and across German territories in the 1940s.