Numbers have a weird way of making the brain go numb. When you hear that six million Jews were murdered, it’s almost too big to wrap your head around. It feels like a statistic from a textbook rather than a collection of six million individual lives, names, and favorite meals. Basically, it’s a black hole in human history. To understand what was the holocaust of world war 2, you have to look past the giant numbers and see the machinery behind them. It wasn't just "war stuff." It was a deliberate, state-sponsored assembly line of death.
It didn't start with gas chambers. Not even close. It started with words. It started with people being told that their neighbors were "lesser." It started with tiny laws that seemed annoying but manageable, until they weren't.
The Slow Creep Toward Genocide
History isn't a straight line. The Holocaust was a series of escalations. After Germany lost World War I, the country was a mess. Inflation was so bad people were literally carrying wheelbarrows of cash just to buy a loaf of bread. In that chaos, the Nazi Party found a scapegoat. They blamed the Jewish population for the economic collapse and the "stab in the back" of the 1918 surrender.
By 1933, Adolf Hitler was Chancellor. Then came the Nuremberg Laws of 1935. These weren't just "mean" rules; they stripped Jews of their citizenship. They couldn't marry "Aryans." They couldn't vote. Honestly, it was a legal way of turning human beings into ghosts within their own country.
Then came Kristallnacht, the "Night of Broken Glass," in November 1938. This was the tipping point. Thousands of Jewish-owned businesses were trashed. Synagogues burned. And the police? They just watched. Or they helped. It was the first time the world saw that the Nazi regime was willing to use physical violence on a massive scale against its own civilians.
The Architecture of the Final Solution
The term "Holocaust" comes from a Greek word meaning "sacrifice by fire." But the Nazis used a more bureaucratic, chilling term: the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question." This happened at the Wannsee Conference in January 1942. A bunch of high-ranking officials sat around a table in a villa outside Berlin and discussed mass murder like they were planning a new railway system.
👉 See also: Why are US flags at half staff today and who actually makes that call?
They built camps. But there were different kinds. Some were concentration camps like Dachau, which were originally for political prisoners. Others were strictly death camps, like Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka.
Auschwitz-Birkenau was a hybrid. It was both a labor camp and an extermination center. When people arrived on the cattle cars, they went through "selection." A doctor, often the infamous Josef Mengele, would point left or right. One way meant hard labor and slow starvation. The other way meant the gas chambers. Immediately. No registration, no numbers tattooed on arms—just gone within the hour.
It’s hard to grasp the scale. At the height of the deportations in 1944, Auschwitz was killing up to 6,000 people a day. Think about that for a second. That's a whole small town wiped out every single afternoon.
Not Just a Jewish Tragedy
While the Jewish people were the primary targets—two-thirds of the entire European Jewish population was murdered—the Nazi "cleansing" didn't stop there. They wanted a "pure" society. This meant anyone who didn't fit the mold was in danger.
- The Romani People: Often called "Gypsies" at the time, hundreds of thousands were killed in what they call the Porajmos.
- Disabled Individuals: Through the T4 Program, the Nazis murdered their own German citizens who had physical or mental disabilities. They called them "life unworthy of life."
- LGBTQ+ Individuals: Specifically gay men, who were forced to wear pink triangles in camps.
- Political Dissidents: Communists, socialists, and anyone who dared to say Hitler was wrong.
- Jehovah's Witnesses: Who refused to swear an oath to the state.
The Role of Collaborators and Bystanders
One of the hardest things to talk about is how much the rest of the world knew. You’ve probably heard the "we didn't know" excuse. Historians like Robert Gellately have shown through research into German archives that the camps weren't exactly a secret. People saw the trains. They saw the smoke.
✨ Don't miss: Elecciones en Honduras 2025: ¿Quién va ganando realmente según los últimos datos?
And it wasn't just Germans. In occupied countries like France, Poland, and the Netherlands, some locals helped the Nazis round up their neighbors. Sometimes it was out of fear. Sometimes it was for profit. Sometimes it was because they actually believed the propaganda. But there were also the "Righteous Among the Nations"—people like Oskar Schindler or Irena Sendler—who risked their lives to hide people. The contrast is staggering.
Why Does This Matter in 2026?
We live in an era of "alternative facts" and short attention spans. But the Holocaust isn't some ancient myth. There are still survivors alive today, though their numbers are dwindling. When we ask what was the holocaust of world war 2, we are really asking how a modern, "civilized" society could decide to commit industrial-scale murder.
The Holocaust teaches us that democracy is fragile. It shows that when you dehumanize a group of people—calling them "vermin" or "an infestation"—the path to violence becomes a lot shorter.
Actionable Steps for Understanding and Commemoration
If you want to move beyond just reading an article and actually engage with this history, there are specific things you can do.
1. Visit a Holocaust Museum or Memorial.
If you're in the US, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in DC is the gold standard. In Europe, Yad Vashem in Jerusalem or the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum in Poland offer a visceral connection to the past that a screen simply cannot provide.
🔗 Read more: Trump Approval Rating State Map: Why the Red-Blue Divide is Moving
2. Read First-Hand Accounts.
Stop reading summaries. Read the words of those who were there.
- Night by Elie Wiesel: A short, devastating account of surviving Auschwitz.
- The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank: Not just a schoolbook, but a look at a life interrupted.
- Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl: A psychiatrist’s perspective on how people found the will to live in the camps.
3. Fact-Check the Deniers.
Holocaust denial is still a thing, weirdly enough. It usually lives in the dark corners of the internet. Familiarize yourself with the evidence. The Nazis were meticulous record-keepers. They took photos. They wrote memos. We have the blueprints for the gas chambers. Use resources like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) to understand how modern antisemitism uses the same tropes that the Nazis used in the 30s.
4. Support Education Initiatives.
Many states and countries don't actually mandate Holocaust education in schools. Look into your local school board’s curriculum. Organizations like Echoes & Reflections provide vetted, primary-source materials for teachers to ensure the next generation doesn't forget.
5. Listen to Survivor Testimony.
The USC Shoah Foundation has an archive of over 50,000 testimonies. Hearing a person’s voice, seeing their face, and watching them describe the loss of their family makes the history impossible to ignore. It turns "six million" back into "one."
Understanding the Holocaust isn't just about memorizing dates like 1941 or 1945. It’s about recognizing the warning signs of hate in our own time and making sure that "Never Again" actually means something. It’s a heavy topic, but it’s arguably the most important lesson the 20th century left us.