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[[Image:Hgdye56.jpg|right|300px|thumb|''Selektion'' of Hungarian Jews at the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp in May/June 1944. To be sent to the right meant slave labor; to the left, the gas chambers.]]

[[Image:Warsaw ghetto.jpg|right|300px|thumb|One of the most infamous photos taken of the Holocaust, as Jewish families are forced from the Warsaw Ghetto in the aftermath of the destruction of the ghetto by the S.S. in 1943. Their final destination was the killing center at Treblinka.]]

The '''Holocaust''' is a word based on the [[Yiddish]] and [[Hebrew]] word ''hurban'' (destruction), and the [[Greek]] word ''holokaustos'' (''holos'': complete, and ''kaustos'': a sacrificial or burnt offering to a god), and has been used specifically to describe the period of 1933-1945 in [[Nazi]] [[Germany]] when [[Jews]] were barred from social life and work, imprisoned en masse, and ultimately targeted for extermination under the policy of ''die Endlösung'' (the Final Solution).  The word ''holocaust'' was chosen by survivors in reference to the large number of bodies fed to the crematoria of the [[concentration camps|extermination camps]] built for that purpose. In Hebrew, the Holocaust is known by the word "''Shoah''."

The '''Holocaust''' is a word based on the [[Yiddish]] and [[Hebrew]] word ''hurban'' (destruction), and the [[Greek]] word ''holokaustos'' (''holos'': complete, and ''kaustos'': a sacrificial or burnt offering to a god), and has been used specifically to describe the period of 1933-1945 in [[Nazi]] [[Germany]] when [[Jews]] were barred from social life and work, imprisoned en masse, and ultimately targeted for extermination under the policy of ''die Endlösung'' (the Final Solution).  The word ''holocaust'' was chosen by survivors in reference to the large number of bodies fed to the crematoria of the [[concentration camps|extermination camps]] built for that purpose. In Hebrew, the Holocaust is known by the word "''Shoah''."

====The killing centers====

====The killing centers====

In the early years of Nazi Germany concentration camps were built with the expressed purpose of housing political prisoners; this was quickly expanded to Jews and other people the Nazis considered undesirable.  But by 1942 new camps were built in eastern Poland as killing centers; the victims, once targeted by the Einsatzgruppen coming to them, had been rounded up by units of the Army and Waffen S.S., and forced to travel to their own destruction.  The victims were packed tightly into cattle cars - so tight in fact that many would die standing up – and transported by rail to the new extermination camps of Chelmno, Treblinka, Sobibor, Majdanek, and Belzec.  The camps were essentially factories which specialized in death, making the process from arrival to counting to shower to disposal coldly efficient.

In the early years of Nazi Germany concentration camps were built with the expressed purpose of housing political prisoners; this was quickly expanded to Jews and other people the Nazis considered undesirable.  But by 1942 new camps were built in eastern Poland as killing centers; the victims, once targeted by the Einsatzgruppen coming to them, had been rounded up by units of the Army and Waffen S.S., and forced to travel to their own destruction.  The victims were packed tightly into cattle cars - so tight in fact that many would die standing up – and transported by rail to the new extermination camps of Chelmno, Treblinka, Sobibor, Majdanek, and Belzec.  The camps were essentially factories which specialized in death, making the process from arrival to counting to shower to disposal coldly efficient.