The Holocaust was the systematic, state-sponsored genocide of six million European Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators during World War II.

Nazi anti-Semitism escalated from discriminatory laws in the 1930s to forced ghettoization and eventually to mass murder.

The 'Final Solution to the Jewish Question' was the Nazi plan for the systematic extermination of all Jews in Europe, formalized at the Wannsee Conference in 1942.

Mobile killing squads called 'Einsatzgruppen' murdered over a million Jews in Eastern Europe through mass shootings.

The Nazis established a network of concentration camps and extermination camps, such as Auschwitz-Birkenau, designed for industrial-scale murder.

Victims were transported to these camps in cattle cars from all over Nazi-occupied Europe.

The methods of murder included gas chambers, starvation, forced labor, and medical experiments.

Other groups were also targeted for persecution and murder by the Nazis, including Roma, homosexuals, disabled people, and political opponents.

There were acts of Jewish resistance, most famously the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943.

The liberation of the camps by Allied forces at the end of the war exposed the full horror of the genocide to the world.