Holocaust

The Holocaust refers primarily to the effort to destroy the European Jewry under National Socialist German rule during World War II, an attempt that horrified the world, gave momentum to the ending of the war, and spurred the establishment of an independent state of Israel. The term stems from the Greek word holokau[s]ton, a translation of the Hebrew word olah, meaning a burnt sacrifice offered whole to God. Used before for other human catastrophes, after 1945 the word Holocaust began to be employed exclusively for the persecution and annihilation of the European Jews by National Socialist Germany after 1933 and is, nowadays, widely accepted as the global coin for these events. While some scholars include the millions of other victims, for example, gypsies or Soviet ...