The Holocaust (from Hebrew “Shoah,” meaning “catastrophe”) refers to the systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of approximately six million European Jews by Nazi Germany and its collaborators between 1941 and 1945, during World War II. The term is also used in a broader sense by some scholars to include the murder of millions of other victims targeted by Nazi policy, including Roma, disabled people, Soviet prisoners of war, Polish and Slavic civilians, homosexual men, and political dissidents; this broader usage is contested by those who reserve “Holocaust” specifically for the Jewish genocide. See holocaust-definitional-scope-debate.
The genocide was carried out through mass shootings, forced labor, starvation, and extermination camps using gas chambers, primarily targeting Ashkenazi Jews communities across German-occupied Europe. It is among the most extensively documented genocides in history, supported by Nazi administrative records, perpetrator testimony, survivor accounts, physical evidence at camp sites, and postwar trials.
Historians broadly agree on the core facts of the Holocaust: its perpetration by the Nazi German state and collaborators, the use of industrialized killing methods, the targeting of Jews as a defined racial-ideological category under Nazi law, and a death toll of approximately six million Jewish victims, drawn from demographic studies, Nazi documentation, and postwar investigations. Estimates of total victims across all groups targeted by Nazi racial and political policy vary by scope of definition and methodology, ranging from approximately eleven to seventeen million. Debate among historians continues on narrower questions, including the precise chronology of the decision-making process leading to genocide (the “intentionalist” versus “functionalist” debate, see holocaust-intentionalist-functionalist-viewpoint-debate), the degree of involvement and culpability of collaborator governments and populations (see holocaust-collaborator-complicity-controversy), and comparative analysis with other twentieth-century genocides (see holocaust-comparative-genocide-viewpoint). See Holocaust - History for background on the events themselves.
A small number of individuals and organized movements reject core elements of this historical record, a position generally termed Holocaust denial; this is treated as a fringe viewpoint rejected by mainstream historiography and is addressed further below.
There is broad consensus among historians, independently arrived at across academic institutions, archives, and national research bodies in multiple countries, that the Holocaust occurred substantially as described above: a deliberate, state-organized genocide resulting in the deaths of approximately six million Jews. This consensus rests on convergent documentary, physical, demographic, and testimonial evidence developed over decades by researchers with no coordinated institutional mandate to reach a particular conclusion. See holocaust-occurrence-consensus.