The Holocaust

The Holocaust was the genocide of six million European Jews from 1942 to 1945 during World War II, committed by the Schutzstaffel of Nazi Germany. It was the deadliest genocide ever, and is universally considered one of the darkest moments of human history. Most concentration camps were erected in Poland, and most victims were either Polish or Soviet civilians.

Information
Though Nazi concentration camps and Jewish persecution had been enforced in Germany ever since outspoken anti-Semite Adolf Hitler came into power in 1933, the Holocaust didn't truly begin until 1942, when SS official Reinhard Heydrich signed the Final Solution to the Jewish Question, which passed a policy that authorized the genocide of Jews. All Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe were rounded up by the Gestapo (the police branch of the SS) into ghettos and death trains, where they were then herded into concentration camps. They were worked to death, malnourished, and executed in gas chambers, where their corpses were then hidden in mass graves or incinerated by ovens. There was also unethical human experimentation secretly performed in the camps by SS doctors. The most infamous and deadliest of the camps was Auschwitz. The Holocaust ended in spring of 1945, when Nazi Germany surrendered and the Allied Powers liberated the camps. The Nazi officials responsible were tried and executed in the Nuremberg Trials.