Holocaust - what is it? Definition, meaning, translation. A Brief History of the Holocaust Time of the Holocaust

English holocaust from Greek holokaustos (burnt offering, sacrifice by means of fire)

the most common term for the persecution and extermination of Jews by the Nazis and their accomplices after Hitler came to power in Germany and until the end of World War II in Europe (1933-45). It is used in Russian along with the terms Shoah (from Hebrew Shoah - Catastrophe) and Catastrophe. First used in American journalism in the 1960s. as a symbol of the crematoriums of the Auschwitz death camp. Gained worldwide fame since the mid-1970s. after the release of the Hollywood feature film Holocaust.

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holocaust

from English. Holocaust), Shoah (from Hebrew - disaster, catastrophe), Holocaust - concepts widely used to characterize the tragedy when millions of Jews were exterminated as a result of the Nazi policy of genocide during the Second World War.

The ideology of National Socialism, based on the racial doctrine of the superiority of the Aryan, Nordic race, justified the enslavement and physical destruction of entire peoples, which were declared inferior, "inferior" races, "subhuman" (Untermenschen) - for example, Slavs or Gypsies. But it was against the Jews that the genocide in the "Third Reich" and in the occupied territories acquired a large-scale, massive character and led to the almost complete destruction of Ashkenazi Jews - Eastern European Jewry.

The anti-Semitism of the Nazis grew out of old nationalist prejudices that existed in Europe for centuries. But in the XX century. he acquired a qualitatively new character. The traditional Jewish community that autonomously existed in European states within the ghetto for many centuries, as a result of profound changes in the second half of the 19th - early 20th centuries. ceased to exist. With its collapse, the active integration of Jews into the economic, political, and cultural life of their countries of residence began.

The Jewish national movement has become a prominent factor in international life. Former residents of the ghetto began to play an important and often leading role in political life many states. The leadership of the Bolshevik party that seized power in Russia in October 1917 (see October Revolution) consisted mainly of Jews. The Nazis always used this circumstance in their propaganda, identifying Bolshevism and Jewry, and justified the monstrous atrocities against the latter by the need to save European civilization from communist barbarism.

The influence of Jewish financial capital was also great on the formation of the foreign and domestic policy of the United States, which by the beginning of the 20th century had become to the center of world Jewry (and still is). In defeated Germany, key positions in the economy, politics, and culture were also seized by Jews. The Weimar Republic was often called even Judenrepublik. It is not surprising that post-war economic difficulties, devastation, poverty, multiplied by a sense of national humiliation, soon led to the fact that it was in the Jews that ordinary Germans began to see the main culprits of all their troubles.

These elemental moods were skillfully used by Hitler. The Nazis accused the Jews of undermining German national traditions, the German state, and the foundations of economic life. International relations of Jewish capital and politicians Jewish nationality with the financial and political circles of the USA, Great Britain, France - the recent enemies of the Reich - were presented by Hitler's propaganda as evidence of a worldwide "Jewish Masonic conspiracy", the purpose of which is to establish Jewish domination on the planet. And only the "Aryan race" can prevent this.

The Nazis, from the moment their party was founded, set as their goal not just the isolation of the Jews, their exclusion from political and economic life, but the complete physical extermination of all Jews, the "final solution of the issue." Back in 1922, Hitler declared that in the event of coming to power, “the destruction of the Jews will be my first and main task ... If hatred is properly stirred up and a struggle against them unleashed, then their resistance will inevitably be broken. They will not be able to defend themselves, and no one will be their protector.” And after coming to power in 1933, he consistently began to put this program into practice, skillfully combining the spontaneous anti-Semitism of the street, the pogroms of stormtroopers with systematic state violence, the role of which increased with the strengthening of the fascist regime.

With the outbreak of World War II, violence against Jews became massive, and the pogrom within the country turned into a genocide on a European scale. According to some estimates, about 9 million Jews lived in the states of the continent controlled by the Nazis. To bring their monstrous plans to life (the physical elimination of such a significant number of people), "ordinary" methods were not enough. And then the Nazis created a system of concentration camps - "death factories", where millions of people, mostly civilians, were killed during the years of the "Third Reich".

In total, the Nazis created 1634 concentration camps and over 900 "labor" ones. All of them, in essence, were "death camps", where both Jews and representatives of other "inferior" peoples perished by the thousands. In Germany itself, as early as 1939, such large camps as Dachau, Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, Ravensbrück, and Flossenburg began to operate. And in occupied Poland, stationary centers appeared, specially designed (or converted) for massacres on an industrial scale: in the territories included in the Reich - Auschwitz and Chełmno, in the "general government" - Majdanek, Treblinka, Sobibor and Belzec. This is not accidental - it was in Poland, as well as in Belarus and Ukraine, that the bulk of Eastern European Jewry lived.

Death camps were built near transport arteries. In the General Government, which Hitler called "a huge Polish camp", the ghettos were concentrated next to the railways. Without their network (about 1.5 million people were employed on the Reisbahn), the Holocaust would simply have been impossible.

Even during the Battle of Stalingrad, when it was necessary to urgently transfer new military formations and equipment to the Eastern Front, the train schedule was drawn up in such a way that priority was given to those trains that were transporting Jews to concentration camps.

Most Germans knew about the purpose of these trains, which rumbled in the dark. Some even said: "Damned Jews, they don't even let you sleep at night!"

The Germans profited from massacres. Things confiscated from the unfortunate, from watches and pens to linen, were distributed in the armed forces and among the civilian population. There is a known case when on the "Home Front", i.e. in Germany itself, in just 6 weeks 222 thousand men's suits and sets of underwear, 192 thousand sets of women's clothes and 100 thousand children's clothes were distributed. All this was taken from people sent to the gas chambers in Auschwitz. And the recipients were well aware of this.

There were, of course, many cases when the Germans, risking their lives, saved Jews from imminent death. But in general, we have to admit: the German people knew about the genocide and contributed to it.

Mass extermination was also carried out by mobile teams - SS Einsatzgruppen. They were created 4 - one for the army group that invaded the USSR. Of the 4 million Jews living in the Soviet territories occupied by the Germans in 1941-42, 2.5 million managed to evacuate before the arrival of the Nazis. The remaining 90% were concentrated in cities, which greatly simplified the task of destroying them for the Einszatzgruppen.

Executions were carried out both by mass executions and using mobile gas chambers. Behind a short time small groups of executioners (in each punitive battalion, there were from 500 to 900 military personnel) managed to exterminate a huge number of civilians, mostly of Jewish nationality. So, in Riga, 22 SS men killed 10,600 Jews.

In just a month and a half, starting in mid-October 1941, Einsatzkommandos A, B, C and D in the occupied Soviet territory destroyed 125, 45, 75 and 55 thousand Jews, respectively. In 1942, 900 thousand of them were exterminated on the territory of Ukraine and Belarus.

Genocide against this people was carried out both in the occupied territories and in the countries of the fascist bloc, although everywhere in different ways. The Austrians, who after the war began to be presented as the "first victim of Nazism", in fact warmly welcomed the Anschluss and participated in the Holocaust even with more zeal than the Germans.

Not only Hitler, but also the chief executioners Eichmann and Kaltenbrunner were Austrians. Immigrants from Austria Seyss-Inquart and Rauter led the mass extermination of Jews in Holland. The Austrians made up one third of the personnel of the SS destruction battalions, they commanded four of the six "death factories". According to some estimates, it is the Austrians who account for half of all Jews killed during the Holocaust.

Responsibility for the monstrous catastrophe also lies with Romania, where 757,000 Jews lived before the war. The pro-fascist regime of Antonescu pursued an anti-Semitic policy at the state level within the country. And in occupied Bessarabia, 200,000 Jews were killed by Romanian soldiers. Together with Einsatzkommando D, they killed 218,000 Jews in Transnistria alone. The cruelty of the Romanians amazed even the SS executioners.

Part of the French, both those who lived in the northern part occupied by the Nazis, and subjects of the puppet Vichy regime of Pétain, supported Hitler's "final solution". The collaborators helped the Germans deport 75,000 French Jews, of whom only 2,500 survived.

In other European countries - Italy, Holland, Greece, the Nazis did not find such support from the population. Even Mussolini hesitated to enforce the "Final Solution". The genocide of Jews in these states was carried out mainly by the SS.

The number of victims of the Holocaust would have been an order of magnitude smaller if not for the wait-and-see policy of the United States and Great Britain. The Allies could well have accepted more refugees from Germany and occupied Europe (and thus saved them from certain death) than they did.

During the entire war, the United States allowed only 21 thousand emigrants into the country - 10% of the number provided for by the quota law. In America, anti-Semitic sentiments were strong; there, for the most part, citizens refused to believe even in the very fact of the Holocaust, despite the numerous testimonies of those who were lucky enough to survive. A passive position was taken by President Roosevelt, who was a resolute opponent of the mass emigration of Jews from Europe to America.

The British were also opposed to the mass reception of refugees, the Foreign Office rejected even individual petitions. Goebbels wrote in his diary on December 13, 1942: "I think both the British and the Americans are happy that we are vigorously exterminating the Jews."

The United States and England assured the world community that the most effective method saving the Jews - the quick and final defeat of Hitler. But the second front in Europe was opened only on June 6, 1944, when the Red Army was rapidly advancing to the west, liberating the countries of Europe and saving the civilian population, including Jews, from destruction.

The delay of the allies with the opening of the second front cost the lives of more than one hundred thousand Jews. In this sense, the military-political leadership of the United States and Great Britain is also responsible for the Holocaust.

Why did it become possible? Why were the Jews themselves unable to put up serious resistance to the executioners, as other, less numerous peoples did? The reasons are in the historical experience of the Jews, who for many centuries got used to adapting to reality, and not to fight. In addition, the most businesslike of the Ashkenazi emigrated to America before the war, and the energetic and warlike - to Palestine. The remaining, mostly religious Jews, were not capable of organized resistance. These features of the Jewish social psychology and took into account the Nazis, reducing the victims to a minimum the very idea of ​​​​resistance.

The Jews believed that the terrible punishment sent down on them, the instrument of which was Hitler, was the work of God's hands and at the same time proof that God had chosen them. The understanding of the Holocaust as sacrifice, suffering, redemption, followed by rebirth, is still relevant for most Jews to this day. Shoah, the Holocaust is for the Jewish consciousness the central event of the Second World War, which was allegedly unleashed only because Hitler pathologically sought to destroy the Jews.

But in 1939-45. the participants in the war solved different problems based on their understanding of national interests (albeit a false one that led their own people to disaster, as in the case of Hitler), and did not fight solely to destroy or save the “chosen people”.

Pulling the events of the Holocaust out of the context of the world war leads to the mythologization of the historical process. The sacralization of the Holocaust, its transformation in the public consciousness from a historical fact into a variant of the biblical Scriptures (Ketubim), an event only in Jewish history, does not allow other, "non-Talmudic" interpretations. Even the number of victims of the Holocaust is declared unchanged and final - 6 million people. Doubters are subject to harsh judgment, and at the highest international level.

In fact, the religious and metaphysical perception of the Holocaust by the Jews is prescribed to the rest of the world as a norm of international law, and a different point of view on the history of the mass genocide against the Jews is unacceptable.

In some countries, Holocaust denial is a criminal offence. However, there is a "revisionist" literature that attempts to look at the events of the Second World War and the Holocaust not only through the eyes of the Jews (see, for example, Jurgen Graf).

According to the “revisionists”, the number of victims of the Holocaust is greatly exaggerated, many peoples suffered no less losses in the war, and on this basis alone it is wrong to make the Jewish people the main subject (and object) of the Second World War, its main victim. The most radical authors generally operate with the figure of all Jewish losses at 300 thousand people, and not 6 million. Quite serious arguments confirm the figure of about 4 million people. (V. Kozhinov). There is also a point of view that there was no Holocaust - it is common in Arabic and Muslim world, and the myth of the Holocaust was inflated by the Jewish press in order to make the whole world feel guilty.

Christian orthodox publicists, without denying the extermination of the Jews, oppose the use of the word "holocaust", because it had the meaning of a sacred sacrifice - "burnt offering", and it is blasphemous to extend this word to the fact of genocide.

In general, the genocide of Jews in the XX century. for a long time to come will remain a subject of interest for historians and a fact that determines the international political climate.

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(emphasis on the third "o") is the catastrophe of European Jewry of 1933-1945, during which more than six million Jews were killed by the Nazis.

Hitler, wanting to finally "solve the Jewish question" in Eastern Europe, exterminated the Jews as he moved east, shooting and burning them in gas chambers in the hundreds of thousands, including the elderly, children and women. At the same time, the local population often offered no resistance to the Nazis in the extermination of the Jews, and sometimes even helped. As a result of this genocide, almost the entire Jewish population of Eastern Europe was destroyed, with the exception of those who managed to escape to the United States or evacuate to the eastern regions of the USSR. Especially many Jews were burned in the Polish concentration camps Auschwitz, Treblinka and Sobibor.

The Greek word "holocaust" is usually translated as "burnt offering". It was borrowed from the Bible, translated into Latin, and was used exclusively to refer to the genocide of Jews during the Second World War. Numerous memorials have been erected to the victims of the Holocaust from Poland to America, films have been and continue to be made about those terrible events. In Israel, on the day of memory of the victims of the Holocaust, sirens sound, during which the whole country freezes in a moment of silence.

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The history of the Second World War is not only “pages of valor and glory”, but also a tragic tale of the suffering of millions of people. The story about the Holocaust helps schoolchildren to imagine the picture of war and genocide carried out by the Nazis in a more three-dimensional way.
The purpose of the manual is to help the teacher introduce the theme of the Holocaust into the narrative of the causes and events of the war.
Of course, this is not easy. Many teachers prefer not to touch on this topic because of its versatility and complexity.
First of all, the teacher does not have enough hours to talk about a person in war and during war, about his suffering, about how war breaks people's lives and destinies, about how difficult it is to save oneself in extreme situations.
The papers are grouped under five headings. All of them can become the basis of an elective.
Some teachers find it possible to time the story of the Holocaust with memorials. calendar dates, for example, on the anniversaries of the Wannsee Conference, the shooting at Babi Yar, the liberation of Auschwitz.
There is another option. It seems possible to talk about the Holocaust in the context of topics included in existing programs. Information about the events of the Catastrophe can form an organic whole with a presentation of other events of the war.
The main place should be occupied by the organization of students' work on documents, their analysis under the guidance of a teacher or independently - in the classroom or at home. This form of training will make it possible to comprehend the document as a historical source and monument of the era, to teach how to work with it.
The most productive form of studying documents is group work.
In this case, all students should be provided with texts. To do this, it is enough to have 4-5 copies of the documents collected in the manual.
If the history room has the appropriate equipment (epiprojector, graph projector), you can project the document onto the screen, which will help students concentrate and create favorable conditions for teamwork. Placement of documents on the stand or on the wall is possible. The materials placed on the stand are used by the teacher and students during the lesson at all its stages.
Here's what a paperwork diagram might look like in a lesson on the topic "The rise of the Nazis to power in Germany."
The teacher's task is to help students get an idea of ​​how the country gradually turned into a totalitarian state. Students will inevitably come across new and difficult theoretical positions, concepts that are not explained at all in most modern history textbooks.
Methods for introducing documents into the fabric of the lesson can be different. Working with texts, the teacher writes on the blackboard (or introduces with the help of banners for a graph projector, computer display) key concepts: racism, national discrimination, anti-Semitism, human rights, genocide. Students are invited to reveal one of these concepts, based on documents (orally or in a short written message).
Another example is the study of the topic “Nazi occupation regime on the territory of the USSR” (course “History of Russia”, XI grade).
When studying this topic, we are talking about the goals of the invaders in the occupied territories, about economic exploitation, about the attitude towards the population, about the destruction of "hostile elements" in the conquered zones (the Nazis included Jews among such "elements"). The documents included in the manual allow you to talk about the last two thematic stories. In the general scenario of the disclosure of the topic, these plots are important because they provide an opportunity to show how the Nazis suppressed the human dignity of those living in the occupied territory, how the terror regime was established and implemented.
To organize work on questions for documents, the teacher distributes students into groups (4-5 students in each).
The lesson can start with a short introduction by the teacher, in which he talks about the huge number of victims, not only on the battlefield, but also in the occupied territory. The papers are then distributed to the students. One group of schoolchildren receives a document “From the protocol of the interrogation of SS Gruppenfuehrer Ohlendorf”, the other gets acquainted with excerpts from the diary of Olga Shargorodskaya, a resident of Yalta. The third group of students reads an excerpt from the diary of a student from Mariupol, Sarah Gleich. Another group of schoolchildren receive a photo document “Prisoners of the Ghetto in Smolensk” and excerpts from a diary kept by 16-year-old Kremenets schoolboy Roman Kravchenko.
Collectively prepare answers to the proposed questions. The teacher leads the discussion by involving students in the discussion of problems.
Another topic related to the Holocaust is the "Resistance Movement". When studying it, it is possible to emphasize the general humanistic motives of this movement - the nobility of goals, the heroism and self-sacrifice of its participants, the solidarity of representatives different peoples who participated in this movement.
It is appropriate to note the participation of the Jewish population in this struggle. The teacher can bring to the attention of schoolchildren calls for an uprising in the Vilnius ghetto, documents about the actions of an underground detachment of children, about the actions of underground workers in Minsk (all these texts are reproduced in the manual).
The schemes of conducting lessons discussed above can also be used in the optional (special course) classes on the history of the Holocaust. Some of his classes should be devoted to watching and discussing fragments of documentaries and feature films related to the events of World War II, meetings with ghetto prisoners and members of the Resistance.
Documents about the Holocaust collected in the manual can also serve as material for a teacher-student conversation. elementary school. In this context, we should mention the story of an underground detachment of children in the ghetto, the memoirs of 12-year-old ghetto prisoner Roman Levin about his desire to survive, stories about the righteous people of the world.
Sheets of a package of documentary materials can become the basis of expositions that students, under the guidance of a teacher, prepare after school hours. In this case, publications of newspapers and magazines are also used. Such stands can be dedicated to memorable dates from the history of the Holocaust - the anniversaries of Kristallnacht or the Wannsee Conference, the Nuremberg trials or the execution in Babi Yar, the release of prisoners of death camps. Similar stands can be hung in the history room or in the recreation area adjacent to the room.
Documents that have the power of emotional impact that evoke empathy (for example, diary entries, photographs, etc.) can be the starting point for research work, for participation in essay competitions, etc.

Holocaust is one of the worst events that took place in the 20th century, and one of the greatest crimes against humanity as such. In the period from 1933 to 1945, inhuman discrimination and extermination of Jews and not only was carried out.

Mass persecution, persecution, ghettos and concentration camps, and ultimately physical extermination along racial lines.

In 1941, there were about 11 million Jews living in Europe; by May 1945, the Nazis had destroyed six million of them. Approximately one and a half million of them are children. In the broad sense of the word, the Holocaust is not limited to the extermination of the Jews. Also under the Nazi machine of destruction were:

• gypsies;
• people with physical and mental disabilities;
• sexual minorities.

Holocaust Slavs.

The Slavs were considered by the Nazis to be an "inferior race" who were to be enslaved and ultimately wiped off the face of the earth. According to the estimates of various historians, 3 million Ukrainians, 1.6 million Russians and 1.5 million Belarusians were destroyed at the hands of the Nazis due to racial hatred. In total, up to 20 million people living in the territory of the Soviet Union became victims of the Slavs.

In world practice, there are few examples of events during which the destruction of people on the basis of their ethnicity was practiced and even welcomed at the state level. The most striking and memorable modern people became two: the Armenian genocide in the territory of the Ottoman Empire during the First World War and the massacre of Jews during the Second World War. It is the second example that received the name Holocaust for its mass character and global character.

Much has been devoted to the study of this phenomenon of world history since the end of the war. scientific papers. In them, pundits tried to find the roots of this process and sum up its results, at least roughly counting the number of people who were exterminated. The testimonies of German war criminals given to the investigators of the International Tribunal, as well as archival documents of Nazi Germany from the period 1933-1945, were taken as the basis. And although there is still no exact number of Jews who died in this campaign, most researchers divide its process into 3 stages.

1. 1933-1940- solution Jewish question on the territory of Germany, as well as the areas occupied by it by that time through discrimination and eviction.
2. 1940-early 1942- a period of concentration of Jews in compact areas of residence (as a rule, in the form of a ghetto).
3. 1942-1945 - the mass liquidation of the ghetto by deporting Jews to death camps, where people were killed.

The longest and "loyal" to the Jews was the first stage, during which the Nazis tried not to destroy, but to squeeze out the Jews from Germany, and then from the countries it occupied. This happened through the adoption of laws that discriminated against them, and various anti-Jewish actions. There is an opinion that at the initial stage, the Nazi leadership itself did not yet know what to do with the 600,000 Jews who lived at that time in Germany, so they managed with purely administrative measures.

The second stage began to be carried out after the capture of new territories by Germany: the states of Central and Western Europe who had their own Jewish population. Massively began to form Jewish districts in large cities, referred to as "ghettos" with the organization of self-government systems in them - Judenrats and police units from among the Jews themselves. The Judenrats were supposed to be engaged in the life support of the ghetto, while fulfilling all the orders of the German occupation administrations. Police formations kept order, and were also sometimes involved in escort service.

The third stage was marked by the mass extermination of the Jews. By this time, a complex of camps had already been put into operation, the task of which was to receive the Jews brought on their territory, to kill them as quickly as possible and to dispose of the bodies of the killed people. As a rule, some of the imprisoned Jews were used as laborers, sorting the clothes of the dead, transporting their bodies to crematoria for disposal and a number of other functions. In addition, a number of people were used for medical experiments. However, for most Jews, the end life path was this: death followed by burning in the nearest crematorium.

The mass extermination of Jews was put to an end by the offensive of the allied forces in 1944-1945, during which all concentration camps were liberated, and Nazi Germany ceased to exist. Thus, an end was put to the Holocaust, during which about 6 million European Jews were exterminated, and several hundred thousand more were forced to emigrate to other countries.

The chronology of the Holocaust has clear dates, representing a gradual pressure on the Jewish population. It began with the publication of Hitler's Mein Kampf in 1924. It was in it that the principles of the superiority of the German nation relative to other peoples were first formulated. In the future, the flywheel of repression spun more and more, in its essence somewhat reminiscent of a medieval garrote - an execution tool that slowly suffocated people. Here is such a chronology.

1. January 1933 Adolf Hitler becomes Chancellor of Germany.
2. May 1933- mass actions to burn the books of Jewish authors.
3. September of the same year Jews are banned from participating in cultural events.
4. May 1934- speech by Reinhard Heydrich, in which he called for making Germany unpromising for the Jews, forcing them to emigrate.
5. July 1934 Jews are prohibited from intermarrying with Germans.
6. January 1935- the entry into force of a document according to which grassroots structures were supposed to simplify the exit of Jews from the country, while at the same time making it as difficult as possible to enter it for the purpose of long-term or permanent residence.
7. September 1935- the adoption of the Nuremberg racial laws, according to which all Jews and people with mixed blood were to be fired from state and law enforcement agencies by December 1, providing for sanctions up to deprivation of citizenship for these people. In addition, the Aryans were forbidden under the threat of imprisonment to enter into relations with the Jews.
8. October 1938- the beginning of putting down the letter "J" in the passports, meaning "Jude" - a Jew.
9. November 1938- a wave of Jewish pogroms, called "", in response to the provocative murder in Paris by the Polish Jew Herschel Grynszpan of the secretary of the German embassy Ernst von Rath. The authorities themselves pointedly distanced themselves from holding them, however, the security forces were unambiguously hinted not to interfere with the holding of actions, protecting only German citizens and their property. During the pogroms, dozens of Jews were killed and wounded, 20,000 people were sent to prison, and hundreds of synagogues and shops were destroyed.
10. September 1939- the appearance of an instruction on the organization of Jewish ghettos in the territory of occupied Poland and an instruction in the future for Jews to wear the sign "Star of David" on their sleeves.
11. May 1940- laying of the concentration camp "Auschwitz" near the Polish Auschwitz.

It should be clarified here that all the previous time the Nazi elite was looking for ways to quickly get rid of the excess number of Jews. The compulsion to emigrate to other countries did not give the desired effect, since even from Germany itself only about 2/3 of the Jews left. The victories in the battles of the Second World War added to Germany the territories in which their Jews lived. Simple executions in terms of finances and image were losing options, so a way was found to use poisonous gas in camps specially organized for this purpose. The laying of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp symbolized the technical readiness of the Nazis to carry out such work.

1. June 1941- the beginning of the war of Germany against the USSR, which was marked at its first stage by the seizure of significant territories.
2. July 1941- the signing of a document on the "final solution of the Jewish question", after which mass executions of Jews began in the occupied territories of the USSR with the involvement of special SS teams and local collaborators. The surviving Jews were concentrated in the ghetto.
3. March 1942- the beginning of the gas chambers of Auschwitz, followed by a series of ghetto closures, during which a series of uprisings of Jews took place, brutally suppressed by the invaders.
4. February 1944 - May 1945- the offensive of the allied forces from the west and east, accompanied by the gradual liberation of the territories occupied by the Nazis and the concentration camps located on them.
5. January 1945- liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp.
6. May 9, 1945- The capitulation of Germany and the end of the Holocaust.

The last stage of the Holocaust was marked by a monstrous extermination of Jews brought to the territory of death camps from all over Nazi-occupied Europe. Only the liberation of the territories occupied by the Nazis could stop this Moloch. It began with the counteroffensives of the Red Army, which at first slowly, and then with increasing speed, began its advance to the west. By the summer of 1944, she reached the borders of the USSR and entered the territory of Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and then moved on, freeing the lands of Yugoslavia, Hungary and Norway.

In turn, from the west and south, the combined troops of the coalition of the United States, Great Britain and France began their offensive, squeezing out the invaders from Western Europe. In 1945, as Germany's forces were depleted, the offensive of the Allied forces accelerated significantly. This made it possible to liberate hundreds of large and small concentration camps, in which millions of prisoners worked and expected to die in unbearably difficult conditions, among which Jews made up a significant part. The Holocaust machine slowed down sharply and finally stopped in May after the surrender of Germany.

The surviving witnesses of this terrible period in history Jewish people subsequently became the main witnesses in the trials of war criminals. Most of the German leaders and their subordinates, who carried out criminal orders to destroy people, were punished, and the search for the most odious of them continued over the next decades. As a rule, the Israeli special services were engaged in this, performing this work quite successfully.

In addition to the Germans themselves and the traitors who collaborated with them in the field of murder, there were people who, at the risk of their lives, helped the Jews survive in that terrible situation. The statistics of such people, known in Israel as the Righteous Among the Nations, is maintained by the Yad Vashem Museum. The latest figure announced by the museum is 23,226 people, but it is constantly updated with new heroes, the work to establish them is ongoing.