What was the Holocaust?
Answer
Nazi Germany's murder of six million Jews
Explanation
The Holocaust was the systematic, state-sponsored murder of approximately six million Jews and millions of other victims by Nazi Germany and its collaborators between 1933 and 1945. The word Holocaust comes from the Greek for sacrifice by fire, and the Hebrew term Shoah, meaning catastrophe, is also widely used. Adolf Hitler's racial ideology, set out in his 1925 book Mein Kampf, claimed that Aryan Germans were a master race and that Jews, Slavs, Roma, and others were biologically inferior.
Persecution began as soon as Hitler became chancellor on January 30, 1933. The Nuremberg Laws of September 1935 stripped Jews of German citizenship and banned marriages between Jews and non-Jews. On the night of November 9 to 10, 1938, called Kristallnacht or the Night of Broken Glass, organized mobs destroyed about 7,500 Jewish businesses, more than 1,000 synagogues, and arrested 30,000 Jewish men.
After Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, more than three million Polish Jews fell under Nazi rule, and they were forced into ghettos such as the Warsaw Ghetto, where overcrowding and starvation killed tens of thousands. Mass killings began in 1941 with mobile execution units called Einsatzgruppen, who shot more than 1.5 million Jews and others behind the German invasion of the Soviet Union.
The Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942, presided over by Reinhard Heydrich, formalized what the Nazis called the Final Solution to the Jewish Question, an industrialized program of extermination at death camps, mostly in occupied Poland. The largest were Auschwitz-Birkenau, where about 1.1 million people were killed, Treblinka with about 900,000, Belzec with 600,000, Sobibor with 250,000, Chelmno with 320,000, and Majdanek with 90,000. Victims were transported in sealed freight trains, gassed in chambers using carbon monoxide or Zyklon B, and their bodies burned in crematoria.
About six million Jewish men, women, and children were murdered, two-thirds of European Jewry. Other targets included approximately 200,000 to 500,000 Roma, more than three million Soviet prisoners of war, hundreds of thousands of Polish civilians, disabled people murdered in the T4 program, gay men, Jehovah's Witnesses, and political opponents. The Nuremberg Trials of 1945 to 1946 tried surviving Nazi leaders for crimes against humanity, and the term genocide entered international law.
Why this matters for your test
USCIS asks about the Holocaust because it is the most extreme example of state-sponsored racial violence in modern history and because the American response shaped postwar refugee policy and human rights law. Knowing the basic facts helps applicants understand why the United States supports international institutions that protect minorities.
Source: USCIS 128 Civics Questions (2025)
