The Holocaust
History · Key Stage 3 · The School
What happened
Between 1941 and 1945 Nazi Germany and its collaborators murdered about six million Jewish people — around two-thirds of the Jews of Europe — in a deliberate, organised, state-directed attempt to destroy them entirely. Roma and Sinti people, disabled people, Poles, Soviet prisoners, gay men, Jehovah's Witnesses and political opponents were also murdered in vast numbers.
It happened in stages
It did not begin with killing. It began with words, then law, then exclusion: boycotts of Jewish shops, the 1935 Nuremberg Laws stripping citizenship, expulsion from professions, forced identification, ghettos, and only then mass shootings and death camps. Each step made the next one thinkable. That sequence is why the subject is taught — the early stages are the ones a society can still recognise and refuse.
How we know
The evidence is overwhelming and comes from every direction: German records the perpetrators kept themselves, the camps as liberators found them, photographs and film, the testimony of tens of thousands of survivors, and the confessions of those tried afterwards. Denial is not a historical position but a rejection of evidence, and historians treat it as such.
Anne Frank's family met several of these stages. After the Nazis came to power in 1933, Otto Frank fled Germany for Amsterdam, and the family followed. German forces invaded the Netherlands in May 1940. From November 1940, Jewish government workers there lost their jobs. From September 1941, Jewish children, Anne and Margot among them, could no longer go to school with other children. That was exclusion. From May 1942, Jews had to wear a yellow star. That was forced identification. In July 1942 the Franks went into hiding. German police found them on 4 August 1944, and historians still disagree about how. The family was sent to the Westerbork camp, then in September to Auschwitz-Birkenau. In early November, Anne and Margot were moved to Bergen-Belsen. Edith died at Auschwitz in early January 1945, of illness, hunger and exhaustion. Soviet troops freed Otto there on 27 January. Anne and Margot died of typhus in February or March 1945, in a crowded camp with little food. Otto was the only one of the four Franks to survive.