The United Nations has designated January 27, the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, as a time to remember the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust and the millions of other victims of Nazi persecution. The Holocaust, sometimes referred to as “the Shoah,” the Hebrew word for “catastrophe”, was the systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its allies and collaborators. The Holocaust was an evolving process that took place throughout Europe between 1933 and 1945. The Nazi regime targeted German Jews with discriminatory laws and violence that escalated and evolved into the Nazi “Final Solution”. The Nazi German regime implemented this genocide between 1941 and 1945 with organized and systematic mass murder of European Jews.
More than 1.1 million people died at Auschwitz, including nearly one million Jews. Those Jews who were not sent directly to gas chambers were selected for forced labor. Auschwitz consisted of three camps. The first opened in 1940. Auschwitz closed in January 1945 with its liberation by the Soviet army.
The Holocaust ended in May 1945 when the major Allied Powers (Great Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union) defeated Nazi Germany in World War II. As Allied forces moved across Europe in a series of offensives, they overran concentration camps. There they liberated the surviving prisoners, many of whom were Jews.