From 1933 until 1945, the National Socialist (Nazi) regime in Germany implemented a racial theory declaring the “German Aryan Race” superior and used this perverse theory, along with military and industrial power, to dominate Europe and to separate, imprison, and ultimately destroy millions of human beings. Those the Nazis deemed undesirable and sought to eliminate included political dissidents, homosexuals, the mentally and physically disabled, Roma (gypsies), and Jehovah’s Witnesses, but their chief victims were six million Jews. What began as racial laws stripping Jews of their livelihood, property, and civil rights accelerated into a campaign to systematically slaughter millions of men, women, and children. By 1942, the machinery of mass murder was in full operation, and Jews and other victims from across Europe were sent to some 9,000 concentration and labor camps throughout Europe and to killing centers at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Sobibor, Majdanek, Treblinka, Belzec, and Chelmno in Poland. The denial of human rights, combined with advanced technology and a pitiless will to dominate others, caused the deaths of innocent millions and the annihilation of most of the Jews of Europe.
