The Holocaust was the state-organised murder of about six million European Jews by Nazi Germany and its collaborators between 1939 and 1945, carried out in three overlapping ways. From June 1941 the Einsatzgruppen and Order Police battalions, assisted by Wehrmacht units and local auxiliaries, shot Jewish communities at the edge of their own towns in the occupied Soviet territories, killing about 33,771 people at Babi Yar outside Kyiv alone on 29-30 September 1941 and at least 1.5 million in all. From 1939 Jews were concentrated in more than 1,300 ghettos, where hunger and disease killed hundreds of thousands. From December 1941 six killing centres using gas - Chelmno, then Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka under Operation Reinhard, and Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek - received deportation trains from across the continent: approximately one million people were murdered at Auschwitz, about 925,000 at Treblinka, 435,000 at Belzec, at least 167,000 at Sobibor and at least 152,000 at Chelmno. The Wannsee conference of 20 January 1942 coordinated the deportation of Jews from the whole of Europe among the agencies of the German state. The concentration camp system, more than 44,000 camps and incarceration sites in all, worked prisoners to death in armaments production, and the last months of the war added the death marches westward from the evacuated camps. Alongside Jews, the Nazi state killed at least 250,000 Roma, some 3.3 million Soviet prisoners of war, about 1.8 million non-Jewish Polish civilians and 250,000 to 300,000 disabled people. The figure of six million rests on prewar and postwar census comparison, German transport and camp documentation and community-by-community reconstruction; Raul Hilberg's lower reconstruction of about 5.1 million and Yad Vashem's and the Museum's figure of close to six million mark the working range, and about 4.9 million victims have been identified by name.
Nazi Germany, its agencies and its allies and collaborators across occupied Europe systematically murdered Europe's Jews
Standard demographic reconstructions, used by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Yad Vashem, put Europe's Jewish population at about 9.5 million in 1933-39, roughly 60 per cent of world Jewry, with the largest communities in Poland (about 3.3 million) and the Soviet Union (about 3 million). About six million were murdered, roughly two-thirds of the European Jewish population.
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Yad Vashem give six million Jewish dead. The lower bound of about 5.1 million is Raul Hilberg's reconstruction from German documentation; higher figures around 6.2 million come from demographic reconstructions such as Wolfgang Benz's country-by-country study. The disagreement turns chiefly on the number shot in the occupied Soviet Union, where documentation is thinnest, and on how Jews who died of hunger and disease in ghettos and in flight are classified. Deaths of other groups killed by the Nazi state - Roma, Soviet prisoners of war, Polish civilians, disabled people - are counted in separate entries.
Shooting operations, gassing, starvation in ghettos and camps, extermination through labour, medical experimentation, the plunder and destruction of Jewish property and synagogues and the stripping of citizenship are documented in German state, SS and railway records, in the judgments of the Nuremberg tribunal and successor trials, and in the survivor testimony collections of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Yad Vashem.
Poland, Hungary, Netherlands, Greece