שׁוֹאָה
Documentary by USC Shoah Foundation
The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was a genocide in which Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany and its collaborators killed about six million Jews. The Hebrew word ‘shoah’ is defined as “catastrophe,” denoting the catastrophic destruction of European Jews during World War II.
The Holocaust is defined as the sum total of all anti-Jewish actions carried out by the Nazi regime between 1933 and 1945: from stripping the German Jews of their legal and economic status in the 1930s; segregating and starvation in the various occupied countries; the murder of close to six million Jews in Europe. The Holocaust is part of a broader aggregate of acts of oppression and murder of various ethnic and political groups in Europe by the Nazis. Nevertheless, it has special significance due to the exceptional attitude with which its perpetrators – the Nazis – regarded their Jewish victims. In the Nazi terminology the Jews were referred to as “world Jewry,” a term unparalleled with respect to any other ethnic, ideological, or social group. The Nazis’ proclaimed goal was the eradication of European Jewry.