THE WORLD ATLAS

Atrocity · 1941–1945

The Holocaust

Auschwitz-Birkenau, Oświęcim (Poland)

From 1941 to 1945 Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered around six million Jews, about two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population, in mass shootings across Eastern Europe and in the gas chambers of extermination camps in occupied Poland. At the Auschwitz complex, the deadliest killing centre, at least 1.1 million people were killed, about a million of them Jews, before Soviet troops liberated it on 27 January 1945.

See it on the map

Front page: “Planer på att utrota judarna förverkligas” (“Plans to exterminate the Jews being carried out”), on the Allied declaration of 17 December 1942
Front page: “Planer på att utrota judarna förverkligas” (“Plans to exterminate the Jews being carried out”), on the Allied declaration of 17 December 1942 Upsala Nya Tidning; via Wikimedia Commons · Public domain

Why it mattered

The Holocaust was state-sponsored mass murder on an unprecedented scale; the Nazi regime also killed Roma and Sinti, disabled people, Soviet prisoners of war and millions of other civilians.

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