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Holocaust Memorial Education Center

Shimon and Sara Birnbaum Jewish Community Center

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What Was the Holocaust?

WHAT WAS THE HOLOCAUST?

The Holocaust was the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. Holocaust is a word of Greek origin meaning “sacrifice by fire.” The Nazis, who came to power in Germany in January 1933, believed that Germans were “racially superior” and that the Jews, deemed “inferior,” were an alien threat to the so-called German racial community.