English:The Holocaust
The Holocaust
Introduction
The Holocaust was the systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million European Jews by Nazi Germany and its allies and collaborators between 1933 and 1945. It developed over time: discrimination and exclusion were followed by forced segregation, deportation, mass shootings, forced labor, imprisonment, and organized mass murder. Nearly two out of every three European Jews were killed.
Nazi Germany also persecuted and murdered millions of non-Jewish people for racial, political, ideological, and other reasons. These victims included Romani people, people with disabilities, non-Jewish Poles, Soviet prisoners of war, political opponents, resistance members, Jehovah's Witnesses, and gay men. It is important to study these crimes while also keeping the Holocaust's central definition clear: it was the genocide of Europe's Jews.
This course is designed for Grades 9–10. You will study causes, choices, systems of persecution, experiences of victims, resistance, liberation, justice, evidence, and remembrance. You will work with maps, photographs, testimony, historical concepts, and questions about how historians know what happened.
Some sources in this course describe persecution, imprisonment, and murder. They are included for serious historical learning. The media selected here avoids unnecessary graphic imagery.
The Yad Vashem video above provides a chronological overview. As you watch, identify moments when Nazi policy became more radical and consider why war created new opportunities for mass violence.
Learning Goals
By the end of the course, you should be able to explain what the Holocaust was, place major developments in chronological order, distinguish among ghettos, concentration camps, forced-labor camps, and killing centers, analyze how antisemitism and dictatorship shaped Nazi policy, and use evidence to evaluate historical claims.
You should also be able to compare different forms of Jewish resistance, explain why choices were constrained under persecution, discuss the roles of perpetrators, collaborators, helpers, rescuers, and people who remained passive, and describe why testimony, documents, photographs, artifacts, and physical sites matter for historical knowledge.
Historical Context
Jewish Life in Europe Before Nazi Rule
Before 1933, Jewish communities had lived in Europe for many centuries. Jews were not one single social or cultural group. They spoke different languages, practiced religion in different ways, held many political views, and worked in a wide range of professions. Large Jewish communities existed in countries including Poland, the Soviet Union, Romania, Germany, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia.
Understanding this diversity matters. The Holocaust did not happen to an abstract statistic. It destroyed families, neighborhoods, schools, businesses, religious communities, cultural institutions, friendships, and individual futures. When you study a victim's diary, photograph, letter, or testimony, treat that person as an individual with a life before persecution.
Antisemitism, Racism, and Nazi Ideology
Antisemitism means prejudice against or hatred of Jews. It existed in Europe long before the Nazi movement. The Nazis combined older antisemitic ideas with conspiracy theories, extreme nationalism, and false racial theories. They presented Jews as a supposed biological and political threat to Germany.
Nazi racial thinking was pseudoscience. Human beings cannot be divided into superior and inferior biological "races" in the way Nazi ideology claimed. Yet the regime used these ideas to justify exclusion, persecution, forced sterilization, imprisonment, and murder.
The yellow badge shown above represents one method used to mark and isolate Jews in Nazi-controlled Europe. Rules differed by place and time. A badge did not cause persecution by itself; it was part of a wider system of laws, propaganda, surveillance, coercion, and violence.
From Democracy to Dictatorship
Adolf Hitler was appointed German chancellor on 30 January 1933. The Nazi regime then dismantled democratic institutions and civil liberties. Political opponents were arrested, organizations were brought under Nazi control, and the first concentration camps were created to imprison people outside normal legal protections.
The process was not a single sudden step. Institutions and individuals made choices: officials drafted and enforced laws, judges and police implemented policies, teachers and media organizations spread or accepted propaganda, businesses benefited from confiscated property, and many citizens adapted to the new system. This does not mean everyone acted in the same way, but it shows why historical responsibility must be studied at more than one level.
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum film above, The Path to Nazi Genocide, connects the collapse of democracy, Nazi ideology, propaganda, war, and mass murder. When using it, distinguish background conditions from decisions made by perpetrators. Economic or political crises did not make genocide inevitable.
Legal Exclusion and Organized Violence
The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 stripped Jews of German citizenship rights and prohibited marriage or sexual relations between Jews and people classified as "German or related blood." Nazi authorities increasingly defined Jewish identity by ancestry rather than by personal religious belief.
On 9–10 November 1938, Nazi leaders organized nationwide anti-Jewish violence known as Kristallnacht. Synagogues were burned, Jewish-owned businesses and homes were attacked, and about 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and sent to concentration camps. This marked a major escalation from legal discrimination to openly organized mass violence.
Propaganda supported these policies by repeating lies, stereotypes, and dehumanizing claims. When analyzing propaganda, ask who produced it, for whom, for what purpose, what emotions it tried to create, and what information or people it excluded.
War, Occupation, and Radicalization
The Geography of Persecution
Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, beginning World War II in Europe. As Nazi Germany conquered and occupied more territory, millions of additional Jews came under German control. Occupation made it possible for German authorities and their allies and collaborators to impose new systems of forced movement, confiscation, segregation, and violence.
The map above shows major ghettos, camps, killing centers, massacre sites, and deportation routes. A map can reveal scale and connections, but it also simplifies. Not every site or local experience can appear on one map. Use maps together with local histories and individual testimony.
Ghettos
In occupied eastern Europe, German authorities and their allies forced many Jews into designated urban areas called ghettos. Conditions were often overcrowded, unsanitary, and deliberately deprived of adequate food, medicine, fuel, and housing. Ghettos isolated and controlled Jewish communities and, later, often became collection points for deportation to killing centers or mass shooting sites.
This photograph shows construction of part of the Warsaw ghetto wall in 1940. When you analyze it, look for evidence of how a normal city street was transformed into a boundary of forced segregation.
Despite brutal conditions, Jews in ghettos organized schools, religious life, welfare, cultural activities, underground archives, smuggling networks, and resistance. These activities challenge the false idea that victims were passive.
Mass Shootings and the Expansion of Murder
On 22 June 1941, Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union. Behind the military front, German SS and police units, including the Einsatzgruppen, carried out mass shootings of Jews and others. German military units, local auxiliaries, and collaborators also took part in or supported many killing operations.
Mass murder did not depend on a single method. Jews were killed in shootings, gas vans, gas chambers, forced labor, ghettos, camps, and through deliberately imposed starvation, disease, and brutal treatment. Historians study orders, reports, demographic evidence, photographs, testimony, physical sites, and perpetrator records to reconstruct these crimes.
The "Final Solution" and Killing Centers
The Nazi phrase "Final Solution to the Jewish Question" referred to the plan to murder Europe's Jews. By late 1941 and 1942, Nazi leaders coordinated the deportation and systematic killing of Jewish communities across German-controlled Europe.
Nazi Germany created killing centers in occupied Poland specifically for mass murder using poison gas. These included Chełmno, Bełżec, Sobibór, Treblinka, and Auschwitz-Birkenau. Auschwitz was also a large concentration-camp and forced-labor complex, so a single site could have several functions.
A concentration camp was primarily a place of detention, terror, forced labor, and brutal exploitation. A killing center was created specifically for mass murder. Both were part of the Nazi system, but the terms are not interchangeable.
The gate shown above is at Auschwitz I. The deceptive phrase "Arbeit macht frei" means "Work sets you free." Historical sites and preserved objects can become evidence, but they must be interpreted with documents and testimony rather than treated as self-explanatory.
Victims, Individuals, and Human Stories
Jewish Victims and the Scale of Genocide
Approximately six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. This estimate is based on extensive documentation, including Nazi records, transport lists, community records, demographic studies, testimony, and postwar research. There is no single complete wartime list of all victims because records were incomplete and perpetrators destroyed evidence as the war ended.
Numbers show scale, but they do not replace individual histories. A responsible study moves between both: the large structures of genocide and the particular experiences of people, families, and communities.
Other Groups Persecuted and Murdered by Nazi Germany
The Nazis and their allies and collaborators also murdered millions of non-Jewish people. Soviet prisoners of war were deliberately starved, exposed, and shot on a massive scale. Non-Jewish Polish civilians were murdered under occupation policies. Roma were persecuted and murdered on racial grounds. People with disabilities were targeted in the so-called "euthanasia" program. Political opponents, resistance members, Jehovah's Witnesses, gay men, and others were imprisoned and persecuted.
Different groups were targeted for different reasons and experienced different policies. Avoid collapsing all victims into one category. Historical precision helps you understand both shared patterns of persecution and important differences.
Anne Frank and the Use of Diaries
Anne Frank was a Jewish teenager whose family fled Germany for the Netherlands. After the German occupation, Anne, her family, and four other people hid in a concealed annex in Amsterdam from 1942 to 1944. Anne's diary records ordinary teenage concerns alongside fear, confinement, conflict, hope, and reflections on war and persecution.
A diary is a powerful primary source, but it is one person's perspective. You should not use Anne Frank's experience as a substitute for the experiences of all Jewish people during the Holocaust.
The Anne Frank House video above reconstructs a typical day in the Secret Annex. Compare what a reconstruction can show with what a diary entry can show. Ask what is based directly on evidence and what must be interpreted.
Choices, Resistance, and Rescue
Forms of Resistance
Resistance included armed revolt, escape, smuggling, underground education, maintaining religious or cultural life, documenting crimes, producing illegal newspapers, and helping others survive. Under conditions of extreme coercion, even preserving evidence or sustaining community life could oppose Nazi efforts to isolate and dehumanize victims.
The Yad Vashem video above introduces armed and non-armed forms of Jewish resistance. When discussing resistance, avoid asking why victims "did not simply fight back." Prisoners and ghetto inhabitants faced starvation, family responsibilities, misinformation, collective punishment, isolation, and overwhelming armed force.
The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
In April 1943, Jewish fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising resisted German forces attempting to deport the remaining ghetto population. The uprising became the largest Jewish armed revolt during the Holocaust. Fighters had few weapons and little chance of military victory, but they resisted deportation and destruction for nearly a month.
This photograph from the German Stroop Report shows captured Jews being led toward an assembly point for deportation during the suppression of the uprising. Because the image was made by perpetrators, analyze it critically: who created it, why it was included in a report, and how the photographer's purpose differs from the experiences of the people shown.
Rescue, Help, Collaboration, and Complicity
Some non-Jews hid Jews, supplied false papers, provided food, helped people cross borders, or joined rescue networks. Such actions could involve severe personal danger. The term Righteous Among the Nations is used by Yad Vashem for non-Jews recognized for risking their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust without seeking financial or other rewards.
Other people collaborated with German authorities, benefited from stolen property, denounced neighbors, or helped enforce occupation policies. Many more people had limited information or limited power, yet still faced choices. Historians should avoid simple labels when evidence shows complicated behavior. Ask what a person knew, what options were available, what risks existed, and what actions they actually took.
Liberation, Aftermath, and Justice
Liberation of Camps
From 1944 into 1945, Allied forces advancing across Europe liberated concentration camps and encountered survivors, abandoned prisoners, mass graves, and extensive evidence of Nazi crimes. Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz on 27 January 1945. American forces liberated camps including Buchenwald and Dachau, while British forces liberated Bergen-Belsen and other camps in northern Germany.
Liberation ended Nazi control over surviving prisoners, but it did not instantly end suffering. Many survivors were seriously ill, had lost relatives and homes, and faced years of displacement and rebuilding.
Survivors and Displaced Persons
After the war, survivors searched for family members, returned to hometowns, or lived in displaced persons camps. Some encountered continued antisemitism and violence. Many eventually emigrated to countries including the United States, Canada, Australia, and the newly established State of Israel.
Survival did not create one common postwar experience. Testimony shows grief, trauma, uncertainty, rebuilding, family formation, political activism, religious reflection, and many different ways of remembering.
The Nuremberg Trials
The International Military Tribunal opened in Nuremberg in November 1945 to try major surviving Nazi leaders. The defendants faced charges including crimes against peace, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and conspiracy. Later trials prosecuted additional officials, doctors, SS personnel, industrialists, and others.
The trials created a major public record of Nazi crimes through documents, film, photographs, and testimony. They did not prosecute every perpetrator, and many criminals were never tried.
The Nuremberg trials influenced later debates about international criminal law and individual responsibility. "Following orders" did not automatically remove personal responsibility for criminal actions.
Evidence, Historical Thinking, and Denial
How Do We Know What Happened?
The Holocaust is documented by an enormous body of evidence. Historians use records created by perpetrators, victims, witnesses, resistance groups, governments, and liberating armies. Evidence includes laws, orders, reports, railway records, photographs, film, diaries, letters, camp documents, architecture, mass-grave investigations, artifacts, demographic data, and survivor testimony.
No single source tells the whole story. A strong historical argument compares sources, checks origin and context, explains gaps, and distinguishes evidence from interpretation.
When you encounter a claim online, use a source-checking routine: identify the author or institution, locate the original evidence, compare the claim with reputable scholarship, check whether quotations or images are taken out of context, and examine whether the claim can be independently verified.
Holocaust Denial and Distortion
Holocaust denial falsely rejects or minimizes established facts about the genocide of the Jews. Distortion may misuse facts, remove evidence from context, or draw false equivalences. The correct response is evidence-based historical reasoning, not treating denial as an equally valid "side" of a debate.
A useful rule for school research is to prefer archives, museums, universities, peer-reviewed scholarship, and well-edited reference works. Social media can lead you to useful sources, but popularity is not evidence.
Remembrance and Historical Responsibility
Memorials and Public Memory
Societies remember the Holocaust through museums, memorials, school curricula, commemorations, survivor testimony, archives, literature, film, and public ceremonies. Memorials do not all communicate the same message. Their design, location, inscriptions, and selection of names or symbols shape how visitors interpret the past.
The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin uses thousands of concrete stelae. Instead of asking only whether you "like" a memorial, analyze what it asks visitors to notice, feel, remember, or question.
Stolpersteine, or "stumbling stones," are small memorial plaques placed in pavements near the last freely chosen homes of victims of Nazi persecution. They connect large historical events to specific streets, homes, names, and lives.
Ethical Study of the Holocaust
Responsible learning avoids turning victims into symbols without individual identities, avoids graphic material that does not serve a clear educational purpose, and avoids simulations that ask students to pretend to be victims or perpetrators. You can study difficult choices through evidence, structured discussion, and historical case studies without reenacting trauma.
The goal is not to search for a simple slogan or a single "lesson." Instead, examine how prejudice, authoritarian power, institutions, war, individual choices, and organized systems interacted. Then consider what careful historical study can contribute to civic responsibility and human rights education today.
Interactive Tasks
Quiz: Test Your Knowledge
What best defines the Holocaust? (The systematic persecution and murder of six million European Jews) (!Only the military battles fought in Europe) (!The destruction of German cities during the war) (!A single event that happened only in one camp)
Which prejudice was central to Nazi persecution of Jews? (Antisemitism) (!Pacifism) (!Environmentalism) (!Federalism)
What did the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 do? (They legally excluded Jews from full German citizenship) (!They ended Nazi rule in Germany) (!They liberated prisoners from concentration camps) (!They created the United Nations)
Why did German authorities establish ghettos in occupied eastern Europe? (To isolate and control Jewish communities) (!To give Jewish communities political independence) (!To provide safe housing during air raids) (!To prepare cities for Allied occupation)
What major development followed the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941? (Mass shootings of Jews expanded dramatically) (!All concentration camps were immediately closed) (!Germany ended its racial policies) (!The Nuremberg Trials began)
What distinguished a killing center from a concentration camp? (It was created specifically for mass murder) (!It was always located inside Germany) (!It held only captured soldiers) (!It was controlled by the Allied powers)
What was the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising? (An armed Jewish revolt against German deportation and destruction) (!A German military victory over the Soviet Union) (!A postwar trial of Nazi leaders) (!A conference that created the Nuremberg Laws)
Which action could be a form of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust? (Secretly documenting life and persecution) (!Repeating Nazi propaganda) (!Enforcing anti-Jewish laws) (!Confiscating Jewish property)
Which forces liberated Auschwitz in January 1945? (Soviet troops) (!Japanese troops) (!Italian Fascist troops) (!Spanish troops)
What was one major purpose of the Nuremberg Trials? (To prosecute leading Nazi officials for international crimes) (!To restore Nazi rule in Germany) (!To organize Jewish deportations) (!To create concentration camps)
Memory Game
| Antisemitism | Prejudice against or hatred of Jews |
| Ghetto | Forced urban area used to isolate Jews |
| Deportation | Forced removal of people from one place to another |
| Killing center | Site created specifically for mass murder |
| Resistance | Actions that opposed persecution or preserved dignity and survival |
| Liberation | Ending Nazi control over prisoners by advancing Allied forces |
| Testimony | A person's account of events they experienced or witnessed |
| Memorial | A public form of remembrance |
Drag and Drop
| Match the correct terms. | Topic |
|---|---|
| Legal exclusion | Nuremberg Laws |
| Forced segregation | Ghettos |
| Systematic mass murder | Final Solution |
| Armed Jewish resistance | Warsaw Ghetto Uprising |
| Postwar prosecution | Nuremberg Trials |
...
Crossword Puzzle
| Antisemitism | What word means prejudice against or hatred of Jews? |
| Ghetto | What one-word term describes a forced urban area used to isolate Jews? |
| Deportation | What word means forced removal from one place to another? |
| Resistance | What word describes actions that oppose persecution or domination? |
| Liberation | What word describes the freeing of prisoners from Nazi control? |
| Testimony | What word describes a first-person account given by a witness or survivor? |
LearningApps
Cloze Text
Open-Ended Tasks
Easy
- Timeline of the Holocaust: Create a one-page timeline with eight turning points from 1933 to 1945. For each event, write one sentence explaining why it changed the situation for people under Nazi rule.
- Historical photograph analysis: Choose one non-graphic photograph from this course. Describe what you can see, identify who created the image if known, and write three questions the image cannot answer by itself.
- Map reading: Use the Holocaust map in this course to trace one deportation route or connect one ghetto with a killing center. Write a short explanation of what the map shows and what it leaves out.
- Vocabulary in context: Write a clear paragraph using the terms antisemitism, ghetto, deportation, resistance, and liberation correctly in historical context.
Standard
- Diary as a historical source: Compare one passage from a young person's Holocaust-era diary with a museum or encyclopedia account of the same period. Explain what each type of source contributes.
- Memorial design: Create an image, sketch, or digital model for a small school memorial focused on names and individual lives. Add a 200-word designer statement explaining your choices.
- Local memory research: Visit a local memorial, museum, archive, cemetery, or virtual exhibition connected to World War II or persecution. Produce a photo essay or written report about how the site presents evidence and memory.
- Interview about remembrance: Interview a history teacher, librarian, museum educator, archivist, or family member about how difficult history should be taught. Ask permission to record, then summarize the interview and compare it with two course principles.
Advanced
- Source verification project: Select one online claim about the Holocaust and test it against at least three reputable sources. Present your verification process in a short report that distinguishes primary evidence, secondary scholarship, and unsupported assertion.
- Resistance documentary: Produce a three-to-five-minute video or podcast on one form of Jewish resistance. Use at least one primary source and one scholarly or museum source, and explain the limits of the evidence.
- Microhistory project: Research one person, family, school, neighborhood, ghetto, rescue network, or camp subsite. Build a digital exhibit that connects the small-scale story to larger Holocaust developments without treating the case as typical of every victim.
- Justice and responsibility debate: Prepare a structured evidence-based discussion on the statement "International trials can provide justice after mass atrocity." Use the Nuremberg Trials as your main case, identify strengths and limits, and propose criteria for responsible judgment.
Learning Assessment
- Causation analysis: Explain how antisemitism, dictatorship, bureaucracy, war, and individual decisions interacted in the development of the Holocaust. Distinguish background conditions from deliberate choices.
- Source comparison: Compare a perpetrator-created document or photograph with a victim or survivor source. Evaluate perspective, purpose, reliability, and what can be learned only by reading the sources together.
- Geography and policy: Use a map to explain why Nazi occupation of eastern Europe changed the scale and methods of persecution after 1939 and especially after 1941.
- Resistance reasoning: Analyze two different forms of Jewish resistance and explain why judging them only by military success would misunderstand the conditions people faced.
- Evidence and denial: Write a response to a false or distorted historical claim by identifying the claim, selecting relevant evidence, checking source quality, and explaining why the evidence supports a more accurate conclusion.
- Memory and transfer: Compare two forms of Holocaust remembrance, such as a museum, memorial, diary, testimony project, or commemorative day, and evaluate how each connects historical accuracy with public responsibility.
Evidence of Learning
- Knowledge evidence: You can accurately explain key terms, chronology, major policies, victim groups, resistance, liberation, and postwar justice while keeping the genocide of the Jews central to the definition of the Holocaust.
- Historical skills: You can source, contextualize, compare, and corroborate photographs, maps, documents, testimony, artifacts, and secondary accounts.
- Learning products: Your timeline, source analysis, map work, interview, memorial design, documentary, digital exhibit, or verification report uses evidence accurately and communicates respectfully.
- Transfer achievement: You can apply source-checking, media-literacy, ethical reasoning, and human-rights concepts to other historical or contemporary questions without making careless equivalences.
- Discussion evidence: You can participate in difficult historical discussions by using precise language, distinguishing fact from interpretation, listening to evidence, and revising claims when stronger evidence is presented.
OERs on the Topic
For further study, use reliable educational resources:
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: Introduction to the Holocaust
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: Holocaust Explainer Videos
- Yad Vashem: International School for Holocaust Studies
- Anne Frank House
- Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum: Education
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