The Holocaust: Nazi Germany Murders Six Million Jews
State-organized mass murder kills six million Jewish men, women, and children, and millions of others the regime targeted
Quick facts
- Jewish victims
- Six million
- Killed at killing centers
- Approximately 2.7 million
- Killing centers
- Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Auschwitz-Birkenau
- Other victims
- Millions, including Roma, disabled people, Soviet POWs, Poles, political dissidents
What happened
Nazi Germany and its allies and collaborators carried out the systematic, state-sponsored murder of six million Jewish people between 1933 and 1945, an event now known as the Holocaust, rooted in antisemitism that was a foundational tenet of Nazi ideology. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, based on Nazi German documentation and demographic records, the killing was carried out through multiple methods: approximately 2.7 million Jews were murdered at five purpose-built killing centers, Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, and Auschwitz-Birkenau, using poison gas, while roughly two million more were killed in mass shooting operations and associated massacres, and hundreds of thousands more died in ghettos or from deadly living conditions and brutal mistreatment. Nazi Germany and its collaborators also persecuted and murdered millions of non-Jewish victims, including Roma, people with disabilities, Soviet prisoners of war, Poles, political dissidents, and gay men.
Why it matters
The Holocaust is the defining atrocity of Nazi rule and one of the central moral catastrophes of the twentieth century, carried out by a modern bureaucratic state using its full administrative, industrial, and military capacity to identify, deport, and murder people on the basis of ethnicity and other targeted identities. It is documented with an unusual degree of precision because the perpetrators themselves generated hundreds of thousands of pages of records tracking deportations and killings, evidence that leaves no serious room for denial or minimization of what was done.
How we know
The USHMM's death toll figures are calculated from surviving Nazi German administrative and transport documents, combined with prewar and postwar demographic data comparing Jewish population counts across Europe before and after the war, allowing historians to cross-check perpetrator records against independent population evidence.
Sources
- Holocaust Encyclopedia, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Introduction to the Holocaust: What was the Holocaust? · Reputable sourceencyclopedia.ushmm.org · The domain "encyclopedia.ushmm.org" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
- Holocaust Encyclopedia, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. How Many People did the Nazis Murder? · Reputable sourceencyclopedia.ushmm.org · The domain "encyclopedia.ushmm.org" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
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Related timelines
- World War II → · The full course of World War II, including the war that provided the cover under which the Holocaust was carried out