The Holocaust and systematic murder

After taking power in 1933, Nazi authorities excluded Jews through racial policies and removed access to occupations, education, and political rights. The Nuremberg Laws restricted citizenship and marriage in 1935. Violence in 1938 intensified dispossession and flight. Wartime occupation brought more Jewish communities under German control. Ghettos, hunger, and forced labour expanded through police, administration, transport systems, population registers, and property records.

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After the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, mobile killing units and other forces conducted mass shootings. Killing centres and gas murder expanded subsequently. The Wannsee meeting in 1942 coordinated deportation and extermination arrangements. About six million Jews were murdered. Roma, disabled people, and other groups also suffered persecution and killing. Victims preserved writings, helped one another, and sometimes resisted under extreme conditions, leaving accounts from different places.

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Liberation left survivors with illness, missing families, and uncertain places to return. Nuremberg trials used documents and testimony, followed by further judicial and historical investigation. Destroyed communities left losses in population, property, and culture, while migration and remembrance shaped postwar society. The Genocide Convention formed part of the new legal response. Archives, museums, schools, and personal accounts preserve names and lives as well as evidence of the methods and institutions that carried out murder.

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