Holocaust, the

Arrival of deportees at the concentration camp at Auschwitz in 1944, during World War II.

A Nazi soldier stands outside a Jewish shop in the late 1930s. There is a Star of David pasted on the window, and a sign that says ‘Germans! Wake up! Don't buy from Jews!’

Liberation of Dachau in 1945. Inmates still in their striped prison uniforms reach through the fence as US Army corporal Larry Mutinsk distributes cigarettes. Dachau was one of the infamous Nazi concentration camps to which Jews were sent during the Holocaust.

The annihilation of an estimated 16 million people by the Nazi regime between 1933 and 1945, principally in the numerous extermination and concentration camps, most notably Auschwitz (Oświȩcim), Sobibor, Treblinka, and Maidanek in Poland, and Belsen, Buchenwald, and Dachau in Germany. Camps were built on railway lines to facilitate transport. Of the victims, around 6 million were Jews (over 67% of European Jews); around 10 million Ukrainian, Polish, and Russian civilians and prisoners of war, Romanies, socialists, homosexuals, and others (labelled ‘defectives’) were also imprisoned and/or exterminated. Victims were variously starved, tortured, experimented on, and worked to death. Millions were executed in gas chambers, shot, or hanged. It was euphemistically termed the final solution (of the Jewish question). The precise death toll will never be known. Holocaust museums and memorial sites have been established in Israel and in other countries, and many Jews remember those who died by observing Yom Ha-Shoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day.

In 1995, the Swiss Bankers' Association admitted that banks in Switzerland held funds from accounts opened by Jews before the Holocaust; see Nazism, ‘Nazi gold’. The admission triggered a wave of international claims against the banks. In December 1999, the German government and industrial groups agreed with Jewish groups to set up a DM10 billion/$5.2 billion/£3.2 billion compensation fund for Jews made to work as slave and forced labourers in Nazi Germany.

In August 2000, further controversy surrounded the decision by the local council in Oswiecim (Auschwitz), Poland, to allow a discotheque to be built in a former factory building that formed part of one of the Nazis' most notorious concentration camps. Victims were forced to work in the factory until they died.

In Germany it is illegal to deny the fact of the Holocaust, and many Germans and foreign nationals have faced court charges for doing so. Controversy also arises in Israel, the Jewish state established after the Holocaust and World War II. Although the history of Judaism has made the experience of anti-Semitism an indelible part of the Jewish identity, it has been difficult for some Jews to reconcile the events of the Holocaust with the teaching that God acts in history to maintain his chosen people. Other Jews have argued that suffering automatically comes with free will, or that Jews must work towards a future of committed and expanding Judaism if Hitler's aims are to be quashed. In 2000, an ultra-Orthodox rabbi caused outrage when he suggested that the victims of the Holocaust were being punished for their sins. The Holocaust was such a traumatic event that it continues to fuel debate and high emotions among both the survivors and post-war generations.