Holocaust

You ask for just one reason ... Here you have more.

• Hitler found that when he made speeches in the beer-halls of Bavaria in 1920-23 raving and ranting against the Jews sent his audiences into a right regular frenzy of hysterical applause- and he decided that Jew-baiting was a real political winner.
• He believed that Jews were Communists and homosexuals.
• He believed that Jews had caused Germany's defeat in World War 1.

The holocaust was so significant in WW2 because 15 million people died in the concentration camps and half of them were Jews alone.

To be clear, the broader definition of the Holocaust - which includes not just Jews, but other racial groups, such as the Roma and Poles, and also the extermination of gays and mentally ill - does NOT include those merely "mistreated" to death (e.g. Russian POWs and those sent to the camps for political reasons). The Holocaust is concerned with the intentional systematic attempt to exterminate all segments of a specific group, identifiable by certain "racial" or "inherent" traits. Merely being killed as an "enemy of the state" does not qualify one as being a victim of the Holocaust. As such, the broad definition of the Holocaust encompasses a total death toll around 9 million. Additional deaths of Soviet POWs and civilians, Jehovah's Witnesses, Catholics, anti-Nazi politicians and activists, and communists are certainly victims of Nazi persecution (and number between 5-10 million), but aren't really part of the systematic, intentional policy of racial "cleansing" which is the root of the Holocaust.

Besides the sheer numbers of deaths involved, the other historically significant marker of the Holocaust is that it was the first time (and, so far, the last time) that an industrialized nation attempted a genocide using the full organization and industry of the state itself. Both before and after, genocides have been committed by mostly unorganized forces, generally at the encouragement of the government. In the cases where the genocidal forces were actually well-organized, they were nonetheless never officially recognized or supported by the government. That is, the unique characteristic of the Nazi-run Holocaust was that the genocide was not only incredibly well organized and committed by official government forces, but that it was both official government policy AND a part of the actual government bureaucracy. The terror here is that this level of official recognition and organization leads to an almost unimaginable level of concentrated violence against the victims; a systematic extermination (in terms of deaths, timeframe, and geographic area) unreachable by any other prior (or subsequent) genocide.

As to the actual effects of the Holocaust and how they are significant, here is a short (and incomplete) list of how all those Holocaust deaths have impacted the world since:

• Polish Jewish culture was effectively exterminated. almost 99% of all Jews in Poland were killed, and the remainder mostly emigrated. Out of a pre-1939 population of over 3 million Jews in Poland, as of 2011, there are fewer than 5,000 remaining. Normal population growth should assume a 2011 population of 6-8 million.
• It has poisoned relations between much of Europe (and the US) and Switzerland, for over half a century, as much property seized (or more properly, stolen) from the Jews by the Nazis was moved to Switzerland, and the Swiss have been slow to recognize (and return) this stolen property to the rightful owners (or heirs).
• The world is much more attentive to the possibility of genocide, and at least tries to stop them. Not that the international community has been that successful, but it's at least become a major point in international relations, while before, it was effectively treated as an internal affair of nations, and ignored.
• To go with the prior point, Genocide is now an internationally-recognized crime, and is one of the founding pillars of the new area of International Law. Genocide has been defined as a concern for all of humanity, and not just an internal nation-state's business.
• The Holocaust effectively resulted in the post-war creation of the State of Israel, and all the attendant problems therein.
• It established the American Jewish community as being the world leader of the Jewish movement (even after the creation of Israel), since there were effectively no Jews left anywhere else.
• The collective social guilt enforced on the German population by the Allies has greatly shaped post-war German foreign policy, as well as many internal German laws and social customs, all in an attempt to insure that Germany never again attempts such a thing.
• Anti-Semetism is now a very significant social stigma in most of the world, and most countries are very conscious of any attempts to play upon such anti-semetic feelings by demagogues. Before the Holocaust, anti-Semetism was endemic (and, at least tolerated) by most countries in the world. Now, it is mostly shunned or officially surpressed by most countries.

exterminate, incinerate, kill, murder, torture, work, select, experiment, wipe out, burn, separate, undress, shave, ban

concentrate, capture, Einsatzgruppe(n), euthanasia, gas van, inmate, criminal, exhaust fume, Zyclon-B, dwarfs, disease,luggage, tatoo, gold , teeth, fire, guard, human beings, ghetto, trial, outrage, war guilt, war criminal, International military Tribunal, conspiracy, agression, humanity ; death, gas chamber, crematorium, camp, Jew, sacrifice, "shoah', destruction, homosexuals, disabled, handicapped, survivor, barracks, victim, enemy, prisoner, evidence, law, Nazis, David's star, genocide, starvation, grave, shower, desinfection, oven, hair, pit, fat, corpse

systematical(ly), cruel, final, illegal, harsh, political, horrible, genocidal, mobile, killing, appalling

Beside Jews, the Nazis murdered:

• -Roma/Sinti (Gypsies, Romanies)
• -Freemasons
• -Opponents of the Nazis, including communists, socialists, labor leaders and people who opposed the Nazis on religious grounds
• -Soviet political advisers ('Politruks')
• -Soviet prisoners of war (with 3.3 million to 3.5 million killed, this was by far the -largest group after the Jews)
• -Resistance fighters
• -'Unco-operative' Poles
• -Polish academics and other intellectuals and other members of the Polish elite
• -Gays
• -Jehovah's Witnesses
• -Various incurables (mental and physical)
• -Social 'misfits' (for example, prostitutes and people with no fixed address, beggars, the 'unemployable')

If you mean victims when you say 'involved' the key groups were:

• Jews
• Roma/Sinti (Gypsies, Romanies)
• Freemasons
• Opponents of the Nazis, including communists, socialists, labor leaders and people who opposed the Nazis on religious grounds
• Soviet political advisers ('Politruks')
• Soviet prisoners of war (with 3.3 million to 3.5 million killed, this was by far the largest group after the Jews)
• Resistance fighters
• 'Unco-opertiave' Poles
• Polish academics
• Gays
• Jehovah's Witnesses
• Various incurables (mental and physical)
• Social 'misfits' (for example, prostitutes and people with no fixed address, beggars, the 'unemployable')

The exact number of people killed by the Nazi regime may never be known, but scholars, using a variety of methods of determining the death toll, have generally agreed upon common range of the number of victims.

The estimates:

• 5.1-6.0 million Jews, including 3.0-3.5 million Polish Jews

1. 1.8 -1.9 million non-Jewish Poles (includes all those killed in executions or those that died in prisons, labor, and concentration camps, as well as civilians killed in the 1939 invasion and the 1944 Warsaw Uprising)

• 500,000-1.2 million Serbs killed by Croat Nazis

• 200,000-800,000 Roma & Sinti

• 200,000-300,000 people with disabilities

• 80,000-200,000 Freemasons [23]

• 100,000 communists

• 10,000-25,000 homosexual men

• 2,000 Jehovah's Witnesses

Why? His goal was to create an anglo saxon race.

People didn't want to realize that he was doing it. Some people still don't believe it today.

What you are asking makes a decent point. Germany hadn't done anything to the US for example, so we didn't bother them. But when the started conquering Europe, that's when European countries and their Allies got involved. I know that the United States was just coming out of a recession and was reluctant to get into another war after still recovering from World War I. To go with the first answer. That is true. People deny things in history such as the Holocaust.

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The question makes the assumption that it would have been easy to 'do something' about the killings. A roar of condemnation from both Houses of Congress wouldn't have been enough. Moreover, the routine, systematic killing of the Jews started in 1941 and reliable information reached the US only around the time of the bombing of Pearl Harbior.