The Holocaust was the systematic, state-organised genocide carried out by Nazi Germany and its collaborators between 1941 and 1945, murdering some six million European Jews alongside Roma, disabled people, political prisoners and other targeted groups. It proceeded through ghettoisation, mass shootings by mobile killing units, and industrialised extermination at camps such as Auschwitz-Birkenau and Treblinka. The machinery relied on census data, bureaucratic identification and the railway network to deport victims across occupied Europe. It was halted only by the Allied defeat of Germany.
A defining atrocity of the modern era, it underpinned postwar human-rights law, the 1948 Genocide Convention and the Nuremberg principles. Its memory continues to shape commemorative landscapes, memorials and the ethics of how cities remember.
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