75th ANNIVERSARY OF THE LIBERATION OF
27 JANUARY 2020
SPANISH DELEGATION
The Holocaust (Shoah) is the term for the murder of around six million Jews by the Nazi regime and their collaborators during the Second World War.
Between 1941 and 1945, the Nazis sought to eliminate the entire Jewish community of Europe. Six million of the eleven million European Jews perished. The Holocaust mainly occurred in Eastern Europe.
Other groups were also targeted by the Nazi regime: disabled people, Soviet Prisoners of War and civilians, homosexuals, socialists, communists and trades unionists, Freemasons and Jehovah's Witnesses.
The Nazis did not act alone. Some of the countries which were occupied by the Nazis during the Second World War assisted them.
The major camps were in German-occupied Poland and included Auschwitz, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor, and Treblinka. At its peak, the Auschwitz complex, the most notorious of the sites, housed 100,000 persons at its death camp (Auschwitz II, or Birkenau). Its poison-gas chambers could accommodate 2,000 at one time, and 12,000 could be gassed and incinerated each day. Prisoners who were deemed able-bodied were initially used in forced-labour battalions or in the tasks of genocide until they were virtually worked to death and then exterminated.
![Major Nazi camps in Europe, January 1944 [LCID: eur72160]](https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/images/large/db2e26ad-3a0a-4946-9ce2-70e513ed39d5.gif.pagespeed.ce.sWHUQw_mMQ.gif)
