Holocaust

The Nazis believed that they were descendants of the Aryan race, a master race of Northern European origin which had ruled the world ten thousand years ago, and whose members were described as tall with blond, red, or light brown hair, and blue, grey, or green eyes. They believed that all other races were inferior, which is why they were convinced of their right to rule the world. Since all other races were inferior, the Nazis developed a program of “racial hygiene” to eliminate “defective” human beings from their society in an effort to cleanse it.
The purpose of the “racial hygiene” program was the removal of the sick, the disabled, the mentally retarded, the insane, homosexuals, gypsies, Jews, and other ethnicities from German society. Members of other groups such as Jehovah’s Witnesses, Communists and political dissidents, trade unionists, Freemasons, and some Catholic and Protestant clergy, were also persecuted and killed. These discriminatory policies culminated in the Holocaust.
The Holocaust is the name given to the persecution and genocide of the Jews and other minority groups of Europe and North Africa, which began in 1938 and continued for the duration of World War II, by Nazi Germany. The Jews of Europe were the main victims of the Holocaust. It is estimated that as many as six million of them were cruelly exterminated by a systematic effort of the Nazi government led by Adolf Hitler and with the help of collaborators like Josef Mengele, a Nazi physician who used the Jews as guinea pigs in his cruel medical experiments without any consideration for the suffering of these human beings. As part of this systematic effort, Jews were put in camps where those considered undesirable on ethnic or political grounds were grouped and made to work as slaves or simply killed after being made to suffer. These camps were known as “concentration camps”. Some of the most renowned of these torturing camps were Dachau, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, and Auschwitz-Birkenau.
The historical relevance or importance of the Holocaust is that it united Jews to join in a movement to obtain a country of their own, in which they could live without the fear of persecution and be free to practice their customs, their language, and their religion. It also made other countries of the world aware of the need for a Jewish state. This effort of Jews and gentiles resulted in the creation of the Jewish State of Israel in 1947, when the United Kingdom allowed the United Nations to divide Palestine into Jewish and Arab portions, believing that this would bring peace to the region.
The division of Palestine by the United Nations solved the problem of a Jewish homeland, but created a new problem between Arabs and non-Arabs, specially Jews, due to the resentment of the Palestinian people, who felt that a part of their own country had been stolen from them. This problem still persists today, and is at the root of the conflict between Arabs and the rest of the world.