The persecution of the Jews began years before WWII. The racial ideology that fueled Hitler’s rise to power framed history in terms of racial confrontations with absolute winners and losers. Hitler believed the German Volk (“people”) would either triumph universally or perish, and in his mind, Jews threatened his program of fanatic nationalism, militarism, and belief in the infallibility of the Führer. In 1935 the first anti-Semitic Racial Purity Laws deprived Jews of German citizenship. On November 9, 1938, known as Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass), Nazis across Germany destroyed Jewish businesses, burned synagogues, killed nearly 100 Jews, and sent 20,000 more to concentration camps.
Early on, German SS troops massacred entire Jewish towns as they rolled eastward, but as the war progressed, institutions of mass execution were developed as Nazis further expanded the persecution and deportation of minorities under their control. Seven extermination camps—Auschwitz, Buchenwald , Chelmno, Treblinka, Majdanek, Sobibor, and Belzec—and dozens of “labor” camps such as Bergen-Belsen , Dachau , and Sachsenhausen were operating before war’s end. Nearly six million Jews (two-thirds of Europe’s Jewish population), mostly from Poland and the Soviet Union, were gassed, shot, starved, worked to death, or killed by exposure, along with five million other Soviets, Slavs, Gypsies, homosexuals, the mentally disabled, and political dissenters as part of Hitler’s atrocious and systematic “final solution.”
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