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The
Holocaust was the murder of approximately six million Jews by the
Nazis and their collaborators. Between the German invasion of the
Soviet Union in the summer of 1941 and the end of the war in Europe
in May 1945, Nazi Germany and its accomplices strove to murder every
Jew under their domination. Because Nazi discrimination against the
Jews began with Hitler's accession to power in January 1933, many
historians consider this the start of the Holocaust era. The Jews
were not the only victims of Hitler's regime, but they were the only
group that the Nazis sought to destroy entirely.
The term
Holocaust is defined by the New Lexicon Webster's Dictionary of the
English Language (1989) as a large-scale sacrifice or destruction,
especially of life, especially by fire. As the research of Jon
Petrie shows, Holocaust was already used by some writers during the
war itself to describe what was happening to the Jews. Alongside it,
various other terms such as destruction, disaster, and catastrophe
have been and are still being used today to describe the fate of the
Jews in Nazi-dominated Europe, although the dominant usage in
American English since the middle of the 1960s is of the word
Holocaust. In Hebrew, the word Shoah is used, and it appears more
and more frequently in English-language texts. Genocide is a legal
term for the destruction of the essential foundations of the life of
national groups. It may include, but does not necessarily include,
the physical annihilation of the group. The Holocaust is an
expression, and arguably the most extreme expression, of genocide. |
