The Holocaust was the state-sponsored, systematic persecution and murder of 6 million Jewish men, women and children by Nazi Germany and its collaborators between 1933 and 1945. (1) This genocide is also known as the Shoah, the Hebrew word for catastrophe.

The Holocaust was neither inevitable nor simply a by-product of World War II. It cannot be explained by the military, economic or territorial factors often associated with other genocides, nor solely by the fanaticism or actions of Adolf Hitler and his followers. Instead, rooted in antisemitic Nazi ideology which relied on a racialised and conspiratorial worldview and saw Jews as a mortal threat to Germany and the wider world, the Holocaust built upon centuries of antisemitism in Europe. Historian Raul Hilberg describes it as the culmination of a longstanding European tradition of anti-Jewish “conversion, expulsion, [and] annihilation”. (2) To understand the Holocaust, it is therefore essential to place it in the broader historical context of antisemitism, which preceded the Holocaust and, critically, continues beyond it.

The Holocaust began with antisemitic rhetoric and propaganda and escalated through discriminatory legislation, social exclusion, violence, segregation and expropriation, culminating in mass murder. It relied on the complicity, participation, and indifference of vast numbers of people across Europe who enabled, benefited from, or ignored the persecution and murder of their Jewish neighbours. The aim of the Holocaust was not only to kill every Jew, everywhere, but to eradicate Jewish culture, religion and history, destroying the very possibility of Jewish life itself. The Holocaust is therefore a stark warning of where antisemitism can lead if left unchecked.

The resources in this section examine what the Holocaust was, how and why it happened, and provide guidance and recommendations for teaching and learning about it.  

1. International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) (2025) Recommendations for teaching and learning about the Holocaust: second edition. Available here (Accessed: 4 February 2026).
2. Hilberg, R. (1961) The destruction of the European Jews. New York: Harper Torchbooks.