The murder of c. 1.5 million Jews, largely by firing squad, between 1941 and 1944 during the invasion of the Soviet Union. Victims are buried in mass graves throughout eastern Europe, particularly Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova, and Romania.
Jewish populations in Nazi-occupied territory were segregated into designated, enclosed districts called “ghettos.” Ghettos allowed Nazi forces to consolidate Jewish populations for deportation and extermination. These ghettos were extremely overcrowded and inadequately resourced; forced labor, starvation, and death were common. The Nazis established some 1,143 ghettos in occupied eastern Europe, the largest of which was the Warsaw Ghetto with over 400,000 people crowded into 1.3 square miles.
The word “genocide” was created in 1944 by Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin to describe Nazi actions against Jews during the Holocaust. According to Lemkin, genocide signifies “a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. Genocide is directed against the national group as an entity, and the actions involved are directed against individuals, not in their individual capacity, but as members of the national group.”
From the German word meaning “leader” or “guide,” Hitler used the title Fuehrer (Führer) to indicate his total authority over the Third Reich from 1933 to 1945.
The “Final Solution to the Jewish Question,” often shortened to the "Final Solution," refers to the Nazi plan to annihilate the Jews of Europe through mass murder. [...]