As the Allies advanced on Germany in 1945, the full scope of Nazi atrocities became apparent. Millions of people, especially Jews, had been systematically murdered through policies of removal of rights, ghettoization, mass shootings, and extermination in concentration camps using starvation, overwork, and gas chambers. The Nazi goal, declared in 1941, was the extermination of Jews and other "undesirables" in their quest to create a racially pure society under Hitler's dictatorship.

1. Holocaust
Discovered

2. Holocaust Discovered
• As the Allies advanced
on Germany, the full
scope of Nazi atrocities
became known
• Millions of people had
been murdered, and the
liberating Allied armies
found piles of corpses
and thousands of staving
survivors across Europe

3. • The anti-Semitic and
racist views of Hitler and
the Nazi government
were well known in the
1930s
• Once Hitler assumed
dictatorial powers he
began to implement his
racist policies, with a
focus on Jews

4. Nazi Anti-Jewish Policies
• Removal of civil and human rights (beginning 1933)
• Organized mob violence (Kristallnacht)
• Ghettoization (beginning 1940)
• Einsatzgruppen killing squads (established June 1941)

5. • As many as two million
Jews were killed in their
own towns and villages
• Some were confined in
ghettoes where death by
slow starvation was a
deliberate Nazi policy
• Others were taken and
shot at mass-murder
sites near where they
lived

6. • By 1941, the “Final
Solution” became official
Nazi policy — the
systematic plan to
exterminate all people
considered undesirable
• Four million Jews, and
hundreds of thousands of
non-Jews, were forcibly
sent to concentration
camps, where they were
murdered by being
worked to death, starved,
beaten, shot, or gassed

7. • In concentration camps,
prisoners were worked to
death as slaves in German
wartime industries
• Death camps were built
with the sole purpose of
killing as many people as
possible
• Camps were built across
the Reich, including
Bergen-Belsen and
Buchenwald in Germany
and Auschwitz and
Treblinka in Poland