History of the Jews during World War II

It was a broadly organized operation led by Nazi Germany, in which approximately six million Jews were murdered methodically and with horrifying cruelty.

[1] During the Holocaust in occupied Poland, more than one million Jews were murdered in gas chambers of the Auschwitz concentration camp alone.

The murder of the Jews of Europe affected Jewish communities in Albania, Austria, Belarus, Belgium, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Channel Islands, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Libya, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Moldova, the Netherlands, North Macedonia, Norway, Poland, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, and Ukraine.

[2] Before the onset of war, the first pogrom in Nazi Germany was Kristallnacht, often called Pogromnacht, or "night of broken glass," in which Jewish homes were ransacked in numerous German cities along with 11,000 Jewish shops, towns and villages,[4] as civilians and SA stormtroopers destroyed buildings with sledgehammers, leaving the streets covered in smashed windows — the origin of the name "Night of Broken Glass."

Following Operation Barbarossa launched on 22 June 1941, in the city of Lviv in the occupied territory of the General Government, Ukrainian nationalists organized two large pogroms in July 1941, in which around 6,000 Jews were murdered.

[5][6] In Lithuania, local militant groups engaged in anti-Jewish pogroms on July 25 and 26, 1941 around Kaunas even before the Nazi forces arrived, killing about 3,800 Jews and burning synagogues and Jewish shops.

[8] In January 1942, during the Wannsee conference, several Nazi leaders discussed the details of the "Final Solution of the Jewish question" (Endlösung der Judenfrage).

Sebastian Haffner published the analysis in 1978 that Hitler from December 1941 accepted the failure of his goal to dominate Europe forever on his declaration of war against the United States, but that his withdrawal and apparent calm thereafter was sustained by the achievement of his second goal—the extermination of the Jews.