The Holocaust Era
The six years of law and propaganda that came first, then the machinery, the killing, and the resistance that followed.
The murder of six million Jews did not begin with killing. It began with six years of laws, boycotts, and propaganda, from 1933 onward, that made the later catastrophe possible.
The Unit then follows the era in order. Under Aktion T-4, the regime’s first killing program, disabled Germans were murdered in six killing centers. Sealed ghettos held whole communities before deportation. The camps grew into a network of concentration camps, transit camps, and killing centers. In the East, the mass shooting of Jews began before the killing centers opened. Persecution reached Jewish communities in the Middle East and North Africa. Jews resisted throughout, and some non-Jews risked their lives to rescue them.
How big was it?
Two thousand September 11ths.
Six million Jewish people were murdered in the Holocaust, about 2,000 times the 2,977 people killed on September 11, 2001.
- About 1.5 million of them were children, more than the entire population of Rhode Island.
- Nearly two of every three Jews in Europe were killed.
- Yad Vashem has recorded the names of an estimated four and a half million of them. The rest have not yet been identified.
- Reading all six million names aloud, at two seconds a name, day and night without stopping, would take more than four months.
It was not the first. Between 1918 and 1921 alone, pogroms killed at least 50,000 Jews in Ukraine and Belarus. The Evolution of Antisemitism (Unit 3) →
Sources: USHMM, “How Many People did the Nazis Murder?” · USHMM, “Children during the Holocaust” · USHMM, “Introduction to the Holocaust” · 9/11 Memorial & Museum, “9/11 FAQs” · Yad Vashem, Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names · U.S. Census Bureau, 2020 Census apportionment results. The comparisons are arithmetic from these figures.
Chapters in this Unit
Seven Chapters carry the era from the years before the killing to the resistance and rescue of the war years. Liberation and its aftermath follow in Unit 6. Full Table of Contents →
The Years Before the Killing
The six and a half years between Hitler taking power in January 1933 and the invasion of Poland in September 1939. There were no death camps yet, but the laws, the boycotts, and the propaganda that made them possible were all built in this window.
Read the Chapter →Aktion T-4
Before the death camps, the Nazi regime murdered at least 70,273 disabled Germans in six killing centers, by its own count. After its official halt, the killing went on in hospitals and took another 100,000 to 200,000 lives. It was the first organized Nazi killing program, and it built the methods and the personnel later used against Jews.
Read the Chapter →The Nazi Ghettos
Whole Jewish communities were sealed into ghettos in occupied Poland and beyond (Warsaw held some 400,000) and held under starvation and forced labor until the trains came. They were a different institution from the early-modern ghettos of Unit 3.
Read the Chapter →The Camp System
“The camps” were not all alike. A concentration camp, a transit camp, and a killing center had different purposes. The network reached across occupied Europe, and governments allied or collaborating with Germany helped carry out the deportations that filled it.
Read the Chapter →The Einsatzgruppen
Between one and a half and two million Jews were shot at the edges of forests and ravines across the occupied Soviet territories, village by village. The killing began before the death camps existed and ran alongside them, carried out by mobile killing units and the wider network around them. It is often called “the Holocaust by bullets.”
Read the Chapter →The Holocaust in the Middle East and North Africa
The war reached Jewish communities far beyond Europe, in Vichy-controlled North Africa, in Libya, and in the 1941 Farhud in Baghdad, Iraq. The record there includes anti-Jewish laws, labor camps, deportations, killings, and propaganda.
Read the Chapter →Jewish Resistance & Rescue
The record of those who fought back and those who helped. It includes uprisings in the ghettos and even in the killing centers, and partisans in the forests of Belarus, Lithuania, and Ukraine. It also includes an archive buried in milk cans under the Warsaw Ghetto, and the fishing-boat evacuation that saved most of Denmark's Jews.
Read the Chapter →Last updated: November 2026.