The Holocaust: Roots, Progress, and Response

The Holocaust was the systematic murder of nearly $6,000,000$ Jews and millions of others including Slavic people, homosexuals, and individuals with physical or mental disabilities.
Hitler’s early campaign focused on economic boycotts and the Nuremberg Laws of September $1935$ , which stripped Jewish Germans of citizenship and prohibited marriages between Jews and other Germans.
Jewishness was legally defined as having at least one Jewish grandparent, leading to individuals being barred from voting, holding public office, or working in civil service, banking, and medicine.

Kristallnacht, or the "night of broken glass," occurred on $11/09/1938$ following the killing of a German diplomat by a Jewish refugee in Paris.
The Gestapo arrested at least $20,000$ wealthy Jews, and the Nazi interior minister subsequently fined the Jewish community to pay for the resulting property damage.
Immigration to The US was restricted by Nazi policies limiting refugees to only $4$ dollars and American "public charge" laws during the high unemployment of the Great Depression.

In January $1942$ , Nazi leaders at the Wannsee Conference determined the "final solution of the Jewish question," transitioning from mass shootings to systematic extermination via detention centers.
Concentration camps forced healthy individuals into slave labor until death, while the infirm and young children were sent to extermination camps for execution in gas chambers.
Auschwitz alone housed $100,000$ prisoners and utilized gas chambers to kill up to $12,000$ people per day; of the $1.6 \text{ million}$ that died there, $1.3 \text{ million}$ were Jews.

Critics argue that the West, including the US State Department, could have acted sooner given that they made a "conscious effort" to block Jewish immigration before and during the war.
While the Allies acknowledged reports of mass killings in Poland, no immediate intervention was taken to stop the process.
The full nature of Nazi crimes and the malnutrition of survivors became widely known only as Soviet and American troops liberated the camps at the end of World War two.