The term Holocaust refers to the effort of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party to exterminate the Jews and others considered to be inferior in order to purify Germany and its citizens from what they considered to be unclean. As a result, 12,000,000 people, about half of them Jews, were murdered. Murders were committed in every possible manner, but most of the victims died as a result of shooting, starvation, disease, and most often, poison gas. Others were tortured to death or died during horrible medical experiments, thus the term Holocaust meaning a thorough destruction involving extensive loss of life.
             Hitler took power in Germany in 1933 and immediately began the chain of events that led to the Holocaust. The first phase began by persecuting the Jews in Germany, and eventually, any European Jew. This was done by limiting their rights, public humiliation, and destruction of most Jewish properties. In 1939, Hitler invaded Poland, beginning World War II. In 1941, Hitler invaded the Soviet Union and during this time, Hitler built his power, persecuted and brutalized the Jews, but there was not yet an organized effort to systematically murder them. After the invasion of the Soviet Union, Hitler began to form his "Final Solution" to the Jewish question. The "Final Solution" was to become the extermination of the Jews.
             During the first part of this extermination, 1, 500,000 men, women, and children were murdered by military groups that rounded them up and shot them. Gradually, the emphasis changed to concentration camps, where the prisoners were worked to death as slave laborers, and extermination camps, or death camps, where they were murdered in gas chambers. The most famous of these camps was Auschwitz; approximately 1,000,000 Jews were killed in the gas chambers. The Nazis targeted many groups for persecution. Among them were the Catholic, Poles, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, and Commu
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