What are the origins, immediate causes, course of phenomenon and consequences of the Shoah/Holocaust?

Shoah, Hebrew for catastrophe or calamity, has become a preferred term among Jewish people referring to the events of the Holocaust.

The origins of the Holocaust can be traced back to German anti-Semitic sentiment as early as the Middle Ages. The mid to late 1800s brought the Völkisch movement, which espoused a pseudo-scientific view of Jewish people as a race threatening the purity of the Aryan race. These ideas were highly influential to the development of Nazi ideals.

Germany’s anti-Semitism had three main sources—cultural, racial, and religious. Immediate causes of the Holocaust include economic pressure from the Great Depression. Before Hitler came to power, the medical community was already starting to promote euthanasia as a cost-saving measure and eugenics to encourage racially valuable traits and get rid of racially undesirable traits. Hitler’s 1925 autobiography Mein Kampf admits to hatred of Jews and announced his intention to remove them from participation in German society.

The course of the phenomenon progressed from the Nazi party taking power in 1933 and Hitler becoming chancellor. Throughout the 1930s, the rights of Jewish people in Germany were increasingly restricted. The first concentration camp was established in Dachau, originally imprisoning Communists. In 1938, the terror increased on Kristallnacht, the “Night of Broken Glass,” when Nazis attacked and vandalized Jewish people, synagogues, and businesses throughout Germany and Austria, and 30,000 Jews were sent to concentration camps. By 1940, Jews were forced into ghettos. Nazis began deporting Jews and carried out the first mass murder of Jews in Poland. By 1942, Nazi officials planned to kill all European Jews. In 1944, Hungarian Jews were deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp where they were murdered. The loss of Jewish life is estimated at close to six million people.

Consequences of the Holocaust include the plight of displaced persons, often without surviving family members and facing persistent anti-Semitism in their home countries. An estimated 170,000 Jewish survivors immigrated to Israel by 1953, but many faced economic hardship there. Of the hundreds of thousands of Nazis responsible for these injustices, only 31,651 Nazis went to trial. The long-term cultural, social, and psychological effects of this large-scale genocide are still being felt.