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It is among the most horrific moments in history, and it is the Shoah, more commonly known as the Holocaust. The Holocaust was the systematic, bureaucratic, annihilation of six million innocent Jews by Adolf Hitlers Nazi regime and their collaborators as a central act of state between 1933 and 1945. In 1933 approximately nine million Jews lived in the 21 countries that would be occupied by Nazi Germany during WW2. By 1945, two out of three European Jews had been murdered. More than three million Soviet prisoners of war were killed because of their nationality. Poles, as well as other Slavs were targeted for slave labor, and as a result, tens of thousands perished. As Nazi tyranny spread across Europe, five million other peoples were persecuted and killed, including Gypsies, homosexuals, others deemed "anti-social", and at least 250,000 mentally and physically handicapped. In addition, thousands of political and religious dissidents such as Communists, Socialists, trade unionists, and Jehovahs Witnesses were persecuted for their beliefs and behavior.

Hatred of Jews had deep roots in European culture. Even in ancient times they were persecuted. They were beaten, ridiculed, and murdered. They were a marked people, commanded to wear some sort of badge. Even as early as the year 1215 the Jews were forced to live in ghettos, in places such as Fez, North Africa; Oxford, England; Rome, Italy; Frankfurt, Germany; the Pale of Settlement in Russia and Kazimierz in Poland. Many important leaders were openly and viciously anti-Semitic, including Martin Luther. Adolf Hitler would later play on this inherent European hatred of Jews.

In the early 1930s, the mood in Germany was grim. The worldwide economic depression had hit the country especially hard, and millions of people were out of work. Still fresh in the minds of many was Germanys humiliating defeat fifteen years earlier in WW1, and the Germans lacked confidence in their weak government, known as the Weimar Republic. These conditions provided the chance for the rise of a new leader, in the form of a failed art student turned highly decorated WW1 veteran known as Adolf Hitler and his party the Nationalsozialistiche Deutsche Arbeiter Partei, also known as the National Socialist German Workers Party or, most commonly, the Nazis. Hitler was a powerful and spellbinding speaker who attracted a wide following of Germans desperate for change. With the help of the propaganda of Josef Goebbbles, he promised the disenchanted a better life and a new and glorious Germany. The partys rise to power was rapid. Before the Depression struck, the Nazis had only won 3% of the votes to the German parliament, or Reichstag. In the 1932 elections, the Nazis won 33%of the votes. In January 1933 Hitler was appointed Chancellor, the head of the German government, and many believed that they had found a savior for their nation.

Hitler quickly turned Germany into a dictatorship and suspended all personal freedoms, including freedom of the press, speech, and assembly. Individuals lost the right of privacy, which meant that officials could read peoples mail, listen in on telephone conversations and search private homes without a warrant. This created an atmosphere of distrust, fear, and suspension in which people betrayed their neighbors and family.

Hitler relied on terror to achieve his goals. He built up an army of tens of thousands of men and they became the brown-shirted Sturmabteilungen, lead by Ernst Rohm. Called the SA, these auxiliary policemen took to the streets to beat up and kill the opponents of the Nazi regime.

Another important tool of Nazi terror was the black-shirted Protective Squad, or the Schutzstaffel. Members of the infamous, brutal SS served as auxiliary policemen, concentration camp guards, and large units called Waffen SS fought at the fronts with the Wehrmacht. Eventually wiping out the SA through conspiracy and murder, the SS became, after 1934, the private army of the Nazi party.

SS chief, Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler also turned the regular police forces into an instrument of terror. He helped forge the powerful Secret State Police, also known as the Geheime Staatspolizei. The notorious Gestapo was nonuniformed police who used ruthless and cruel methods to identify and arrest the enemies of the Nazis.

In 1931, yet another organization arose: the intelligence gathering branch of the SS, known as the Sicherheitsdienst, founded by a new member of the SS, Reinhard Heydrich. The feared SD soon grew into a vast network of informers that developed dossiers on any who might oppose the Nazi regime and conducted internal espionage as well.

In the months after Hitler seized power, the SA, SS, SD and Gestapo went door to door looking for Communists, Socialists, trade unionists, and others who had spoken out against the Nazi party, and they were arrested and sent to prisons and the first concentration camps at Dachau and Buchenwald. By the middle of 1933, the Nazi party was the only political party, and nearly all organized opposition to the regime had been eliminated. Democracy in Germany was dead.

At the annual party rally held in Nuremberg in 1935, the Nazis announced new laws that made Jews second-class citizens by taking away voting and other rights. The Nuremberg Laws defined a Jew as anyone with three or four Jewish grandparents. Jews were prohibited from marrying or having sexual relations with persons of "German or related blood." They were not allowed to participate in the 1936 Summer Olympics. Jewish doctors were forbidden to treat non-Jews, and Jewish lawyers were not allowed to practice law. Their identification cards were stamped with a red "J" and they were given new middle names: "Israel" for males and "Sara" for females.

On November 9, 1938, violence against the Jews broke out across the Reich. It appeared to be unplanned, set off by Germans anger over the assassination of a German official in Paris at the hands of a Jewish teenager. In fact, Goebbles, SS leaders Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich, along with other Nazis, carefully organized the massive pogrom, called Kristallnact. The targets were Jewish synagogues, homes, businesses, cemeteries, hospitals, schools and the people themselves. 30,000 German Jewish men were arrested for the "crime" of being Jewish and sent to concentration camps. Afterwards, they were ordered to turn in any insurance money they may have collected, and then fined 1 billion reichsmarks, equal to over $400 million dollars, for their "terrible crime" against the German people.

By the late 1930s, Hitler had put together one of the most powerful war machines Europe had ever seen. Austria had been added to the Reich in 1938 and the Sudetenland in western Czechoslovakia a year later. On September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland. World War II had begun.

In September 1941,a new law was passed that declared "All Jews from the age of six are forbidden to appear in public without displaying the Jewish star." For the first time since the Middle Ages, a Jewish badge made its appearance as a mark of shame. In October 1941, Jews were forbidden to leave their homes without permission. They could no longer leave their country. They were trapped.

With the fall of Poland, two new instruments of terror arose - the Einsatzgruppen and the RSHA. The Einsatzgruppen were firing squads who followed the victorious German army through Eastern Europe and parts of Russia, and their sole purpose was to execute Jews wherever they were found. They used mobile gassing vans and firing squad techniques to murder. There were five squads known as Special Action Groups A, B, C, D, and Eichmann. One infamous execution site was at the Jewish cemetery of Babi Yar, near Kiev, where about 34,000 Jews were murdered in two days. Paul Blobel, the man in charge of Special Action Group C and the murders at Babi Yar explained the process to one of Heydrichs aides, Major Erik Dorf: "First batch of Jews lies down in the bottom of the pit, side by side. Boom-boom. Dead. Next group lies on top of them, heads facing the feet of the dead. Boom-boom. Theyre dead, too. And so on, until the ditch is filled. "It is estimated that the Einsatzgruppen killed as many as two and a half million Jews.

The RSHA was the Reichssicherheitshauptamt or the Reich Security Main Office. It combined the SD, Gestapo, and the Kripo. It became an enormous, efficient, centralized organization that would soon terrorize the entire continent of Europe and conduct mass murder on a scale unprecedented in human history. Both the Einsatzgruppen and the RSHA were headed by Reinhard Heydrich, a sadistic, cold, calculating manipulator without human compassion.

On January 20, 1942, SS Obergruppenführer Heydrich chaired a conference in the Wannsee suburb of Berlin. He had been issued an order from the Reichsmarshall Hermann Goring stating that "I further order you to submit to me as soon as possible an overall plan showing the measures for organization and action necessary to carry out the desired Final Solution of the Jewish Question." He told leading civil servants from the Ministry of Justice, the Foreign Office, other government departments and a few other select Nazis about the "Final Solution" to the Jewish problem. These men, most of them fairly well educated, all of them holding high rank and positions of importance, sat and discussed the best ways and means of murdering masses of people. Heydrich stated that "Europe would be combed of Jews from east to west."

Concentration camps already existed in Germany and most of the countries it controlled. Both Jews and non-Jews were sent there. The guards were trained to be sadistic. Many thousands had already died. But neither the camps nor the ghettos and Special Action Groups were the answer to the Nazis "Jewish Question". Other arrangements had to be made. In 1941, experiments using the poison gas Zyklon B at Auschwitz proved that it was possible to kill large groups at a time. The death center at Auschwitz was completed the following year. At Chelmno, the mass killing of Jews by gas began on a daily basis. The plans for the Final Solution of the Jewish question had been set into action.

For many Jews, the first part of the Final Solution was being forced to live in a ghetto. Many ghettos were set up in cities and towns where Jews were already concentrated. Jews would be brought in from Western Europe as well. The Germans usually marked off the oldest, most run-down sections of the cities for ghettos. Life in the ghettos was unbearable. Overcrowding was commonplace. Diseases such as tuberculosis and typhus ran rampant due to highly unsanitary conditions. The Germans also tried to starve the ghetto inhabitants and kept them from having enough heat during freezing winters, Orphaned children would often be found frozen on a ghetto sidewalk. Emanuel Ringleblum noted one night: "The most fearful sight is that of the freezing children. Little children with bare feet, bare knees, and torn clothing stand dumbly in the street weeping. Tonight...I heard a tot of three or four yammering. The child will probably be frozen to death tomorrow morning, a few hours off." Starvation was the deliberate Nazi policy. Jews were allowed 14 oz of bread, 4.5 oz of meat, 1.75 oz of sugar, and .9 oz of fat. It was about 350 calories a day, an the average adult requires 2000 per day. In 1941, 11,000 people died of starvation in the Warsaw ghetto. At its height, starvation killed 500 each week. Walls of stone or barbed wire surrounded the ghettos. However, these ghettos were only holding places. The order establishing the first ghetto in Lodz, Poland also made it clear that this was only one step toward the Nazis final goal. The order came from SS Brigadier General Friedrich Uebelhoer, and it stated: "The creation of the ghetto is obviously a temporary measure. When and by what means the ghetto, and the town of Lodz, will be cleansed of Jews I reserve to myself. Our final objective must be, in any case, to burn out this plague boil completely." The ghetto was only a hint at the horrors to come.

Jews were usually deported from the ghettos to camps in cattle cars. These cars could hold 8 horses or 40 soldiers, but 120 to 130 Jews were packed into each one. The doors were sealed shut. There was no room to sit or lie down. There was no food, no water, and no heat. The journey usually lasted several days. In the winter, many froze to death before they arrived. In the summer, thirst and suffocating heat ended lives. The filth and the stench were indescribable. A train carrying a thousand Jews would arrive with as many as two hundred already dead. When those who survived got off the cars, they would be in places of infamy and horror that many would use to define the Holocaust.

Millions of innocent victims were rounded up and shipped to hundreds of camps located around Europe. Each camp was deadly. At concentration camps, the victims were often starved or were worked to death in slave-labor conditions. There were fourteen major concentration camps: Auschwitz-Birkenau, Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Dora-Mittlebau, Flossenbürg, Gross-Rosen, Mauthausen, Natzweiler-Struthof, Neuengamme, Plaszow, Terezin, Lublin-Majdanek, Ravensbrück and Dachau-Sachsenhausen. Even more notorious were the death camps. They were equipped with incinerators and gas chambers where millions were sent for extermination. The death camps were Chelmno and Auschwitz-Birkenau. The three Operation Reinhard death camps were Sobibor, Belzec, and Treblinka.

The concentration camps were little more than killing machines. Death by torture, death by starvation, death by murder. The people who lived in these camps- and lived in the midst of the filth, starving, surrounded by disease and themselves sick, death, decay - they lived knowing that surviving another day was absolutely a matter of chance, of accident. The official policy of the concentration camps was "extermination through work". Each camp had an SS industry attached to it, and the SS would "hire out" prisoners to private companies. Some of the industries are names still well known today such as I.G. Farben, Krupp, Siemens, and famed producers of luxury and performance cars BMW, Mercedes and Porsche.

The Nazis had a camp in Czechoslovakia they called a "Jewish paradise", and they often led the Red Cross there and gave them tours. It was Theresienstadt, also known as Terezin. In reality, things were just as horrible. All the Red Cross could see were the theaters, schools, and shops of Terezin, which were all fake. Terezin held some of Europes best artists and musicians to continue the lie. There were families, with children. No one stayed in Terezin very long. They were sent to a death camp, with many going to the demon in everyones nightmares: Auschwitz-Birkenau.

"Corpses were strewn all over the road; bodies were hanging from the barbed-wire fence; the sound of shots rang in the air continually. Blazing flames shot into the sky; a giant smoke cloud ascended above them. Starving, emaciated human skeletons stumbled towards us, uttering incoherent sounds. They fell down right in front of our eyes." Auschwitz-Birkenau was the largest and most infamous of the camps. More than one million people lost their lives at this camp. The camp was split into three main parts: the labor camp was Auschwitz I Buna, the death camp was Auschwitz II Birkenau, and the third was I. G. Farbens labor camp Auschwitz III Monowitz. Upon arrival, selection was made by the SS doctor, Josef Mengele. Right or left, life or death. For those selected for work each day was a struggle for survival. They were housed in barracks, and each barracks held about 36 bunks, and inmates were place five to six on a bunk. Food was a watery soup with rancid grease and rotten vegetables. In the soup, there could be dirt, needles, hair, buttons, wood, bugs or maybe a dead rat. On a good day the soup contained tainted meat. They would eat grass - and be beaten if caught- steal crusts of bread from the bodies of dead inmates. Hunger formed the foundation of each moment of their lives in the camps. The SS guards enjoyed torture. There was one incident where a furnace was lit in a barracks and turned up to full heat in the summer. The doors were locked for three days. On the last day, a big kettle of soup was placed outside the door. After a while, the doors were opened, and the Nazis watched to see how many people would be trampled in the pursuit for cool, fresh air and food.

Cruel "medical experiments" were conducted at Auschwitz. Dr. Josef Mengele carried out painful and traumatic experiments on dwarfs, Gypsies, and twins. The aim of some of the experiments was to find better medical treatments for German soldiers and airmen. Other experiments were aimed at improving methods of sterilizing the people the Nazis considered inferior. Mengele would also experiment with organs, eye color, and limbs. There was this one certain experiment where an arm was cut off one prisoner and the leg was cut off another. Then they were switched. If the experiments did not kill them, the gas chambers would.

Being led to the gas chambers, people could see the cruel chimneys looming high overhead. There was an awful stench in the air. They did not know that it was the smell of burning bodies. They did not know that the hick black acrid smoke was the only freedom for most. In the chambers, Jews were gassed with Zyklon B crystals that were dropped through holes in the ceiling. A few minutes later, the screams are silent. The doors are opened and the Sonderkommando steps in. They must pull the bodies apart, and take them to the crematoria. There, gold teeth are pulled, hair is shaved to make mattresses, and occasionally, skin was removed to make lampshades. Then the bodies are loaded into the ovens. All that is left of the people on the previous train is the ashes falling on the shoulders of new arrivals.

In 1942, SS Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich was assassinated by members of the Czech resistance. It happened as his open top, unarmoured green Mercedes convertible was slowing to go around a turn. Out of the corner of his eye, Heydrich saw a man pointing a gun, but the gun failed to fire. He screamed at his driver to stop as he drew his gun and stood. A grenade then hit the car at the moment Heydrich was jumping out. Clutching his side, he still managed to run after them and fire back before collapsing in the street. He died eight days later of blood poisoning due to steel, auto upholstery and his own uniform that had lodged in his spleen. Hitler said "since it is the opportunity which makes not only the thief but also the assassin, such heroic gestures as driving in an open, unarmoured vehicle or walking about the streets unguarded are just damned stupidity, which serves the country not one whit. That a man as irreplaceable as Heydrich should expose himself to unnecessary danger, I can only condemn as stupid and idiotic." He also called him the "Man with an iron heart." For revenge, the town of Lidice in Czechoslovakia was razed to the ground and only four of its residents survived the rage of the Nazis.

Soon, the Reich started to crumble. The ghettos, such as Warsaw, rebelled and were liquidated. The camps, including Treblinka, Sobibor, and Auschwitz also rebelled. Camps were evacuated, and prisoners were made to walk ahead of the advancing Russian front deeper into the Reich. Liberation finally came, but not soon enough. Troops were horrified by what they saw. Half-dead Jews were wandering around, walking skeletons. Masses of unburied bodies were everywhere. The soldiers found 13,000 unburied corpses in Bergen-Belsen. The world now believed.

America and Great Britain had known about Auschwitz, and its purpose when two Jews escaped and informed the press. The Czech underground and several Jewish groups asked the Allies to bomb at least the railways, but America and England refused. The British had called it "the exaggeration...of these wailing Jews." America stated "[Such bombing] would in any case be of such doubtful efficacy that it would not warrant the use of our resources." There was also a fear that Germans would take even more vindictive action. What was more vindictive- more terrible, bloodthirsty and cruel- than Auschwitz? Nothing was dome.

Nazi leaders such as Hitler, Himmler, and Goebbles committed suicide. Some fled, like Adolf Eichmann and Josef Mengele. Many. like Goering and Blobel, were put on trial at Nuremberg and executed. Others, like SS Major Otto Günsche and Klaus Barbie were sentenced, then released. Heydrich, Christian Wirth and Martin Bormann were the only top Nazi leaders killed in action.

While the world had ignored the Holocaust, some tried to help, and they are known as the Righteous Among the Nations. They and their families risked everything to stand up for what was right. Included in the Righteous are Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenburg, Corrie ten Boom, and Nazi party member and war profiteer Oskar Schindler.

In 1945, WWII came to an end, and so did the Holocaust, after 12 long years. Over 11 million innocent people were gone, and even more souls had been lost. The figures of total number of Jewish dead are as follows: Greece: 65,000; Yugoslavia: 60,000; Romania: 40,000; Norway: 760; Holland: 106,000; Italy: 7,500; Luxembourg: 700; Belgium: 24,000; France: 83,000; Hungary: 402,000; Czechoslovakia: 277,000; Austria: 65,000; Germany: 125,000, and Poland and Soviet area: 4,565,000.

This is a poem called "Only a Number" by Isabella Leitner.

Isabella wrote the poem for her sister, who died at Auschwitz.

The seeds of hate remain, in countries such as America, Brazil, Japan and elsewhere. The Nazis are still celebrated and admired. The same kind of misunderstanding and ignorance that gave rise to Nazism and the Holocaust never goes away. Jews are still persecuted. Protestants and Catholics kill each other in Northern Ireland. Bahais are still murdered for their religion in Iran. And now, after September 11, Muslims and people of Middle Eastern decent are persecuted. "The Nazis came first for the communists. But I wasnt a communist, so I didnt speak up. Then they came for the Jews, but I wasnt a Jew so I didnt speak up. Then they came for the Trade Unionists, but I wasnt a Trade Unionist so I didnt speak up. Then they came for the Catholics, but I was a Protestant so I didnt speak up. Then they came for me. By that time there was no one left to speak up." Perhaps the nightmare of the Holocaust will never happen again. But if it is forgotten, then the six million Jews who died disappears like dust and the world has learned nothing Other, newer nightmares continue to grow. To remember the Holocaust, to remember the step-by-step growth of that monstrous machinery of death, is to help prevent the flowering of some new and possibly even greater evil.

But the terrors of the Holocaust are not easy to learn about, to remember. The figures are large and there are many of them. The details are cruel, even painful. So many innocent people were hurt, tortured, killed, broken, and destroyed because of the ignorance of one downtrodden, desperate nation. But the story cannot be made pretty. The Holocaust took the lives of millions, not only Jews. Elie Wiesel once wrote: "Not all of the victims were Jewish, but all of the Jews were victims." The nightmare that came true must always live on, so that it doesnt happen again, to anyone. Always remember the six million, those who survived, those who fought back. Never to forget, the Jews of the Holocaust.