Shoah is the Jewish term for the extermination of the Jews in Europe during the Second World War. The Shoah was planned and executed by the Nazi party, which had come to power in Germany in 1933 with the nomination of Adolf Hitler as Chancellor.
In 1935, the Nuremberg racial laws were passed and Hitler incited the whole of German society to persecute Jews with his book “Mein Kampf”.
In September 1939 Germany invaded Poland and war broke out in Europe. In the years that followed, the Nazis occupied the countries to the east and pushed further north and westwards, as far as the USSR and into France.
The Jews were expelled and forced into ghettos and labour camps in Poland, where thousands died of starvation, hardship and disease.
Then the Einsatzgruppen came into action: these were militia specialized in mass executions, carried out by firing squads. The victims were then either thrown into mass graves or their corpses burnt in piles.
In 1942, at the Conference of Wansee, the Nazi leaders approved the “final solution”, i.e. the genocide of the Jewish people proposed by Hitler. This led to the voluntary Corp of the SS planning the extermination, with the organizational support of the German State apparatus.
In each European country occupied by Hitler’s army anyone belonging to the “Jewish race” was rounded up and deported, including the elderly, women and children, often with the complicity of the local authorities. Hundreds of convoys of goods trains and cattle trucks transported them into Poland and the neighbouring territories, where the Germans had built the extermination camps such as Auschwitz-Birkenau, Bergen Belsen, Ravensbruck, etc. Here the first selection was made: the weaker Jews were sent directly to the gas chambers, while the others were set to work and exploited until they dropped dead.
Only the end of the war and the defeat of Germany in 1945 interrupted the genocide.
The International Military Tribunal – set up in Nuremberg to try the Nazi criminals – calculated an approximate figure of six million Jewish victims. Today, on the basis of more thorough research, historians put that number at around five million two hundred thousand.