The Holocaust
History · Key Stage 3 · The School
What happened
Between 1941 and 1945 Nazi Germany and its collaborators murdered about six million Jewish people — around two-thirds of the Jews of Europe — in a deliberate, organised, state-directed attempt to destroy them entirely. Roma and Sinti people, disabled people, Poles, Soviet prisoners, gay men, Jehovah's Witnesses and political opponents were also murdered in vast numbers.
It happened in stages
It did not begin with killing. It began with words, then law, then exclusion: boycotts of Jewish shops, the 1935 Nuremberg Laws stripping citizenship, expulsion from professions, forced identification, ghettos, and only then mass shootings and death camps. Each step made the next one thinkable. That sequence is why the subject is taught — the early stages are the ones a society can still recognise and refuse.
How we know
The evidence is overwhelming and comes from every direction: German records the perpetrators kept themselves, the camps as liberators found them, photographs and film, the testimony of tens of thousands of survivors, and the confessions of those tried afterwards. Denial is not a historical position but a rejection of evidence, and historians treat it as such.
1933: Jews excluded from the civil service. 1935: the Nuremberg Laws strip citizenship and ban marriage. 1938: Kristallnacht — synagogues burned, thousands arrested. 1939–41: ghettos in occupied Poland. 1941: mass shootings by the Einsatzgruppen, over a million killed. 1942: the Wannsee Conference coordinates the extermination camps. Nine years, each step making the next thinkable. The dates are the argument.