The Holocaust

The word Holocaust that is a Greek word that can stand or "holos"(whole) and  "Kaustos"(burned) was historically used to describe a sacrificial offering burned on an altar. Since 1945, the word has taken on a new and horrible meaning the ideological and systematic state-sponsored prosecution and mass murder of millions of European Jews as well as millions of others, including Gypsies, the intellectually disabled, dissidents  and homosexuals by the German Nazi regime between 1933 and 1945. The anti-Semitic Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, Jews were an inferior race, and alien threat to German racial purity and community. After years of Nazi rule in Germany, during which Jews were consistently persecuted, Hitlers final solution now known as the Holocaust came to fruition under the cover of World War 2, with mass killing centers constructed in the concentration camps of occupied  Poland. Approximately six million Jews and millions of others, targeted for racial, political, ideological and behavioral reasons, died in the Holocaust. More than one million of those who perished were children. Anti-Semitism in Europe did not begin with Adolf Hitlers. Though use of the term itself only to  the 1870s, there is evidence of hostillity towards Jews long before the Holocaust even as far back as the ancient world, when Roman authorities destroyed the Jewish temple in Jerusalem and forced Jews to leave Palestine. The Enlightenment, during the 17th and 18th centuries, emphasized religious toleration, and in the 19th century Napoleon and other European rulers enacted legislation that ended long-standing restrictions on Jews. Anti Semitic feeling endured, however in many cases taking on a racial character rather than a religious one.