"The term Holocaust addresses the systematic annihilation of Jews by Nazi Germany during World War II. It has since evolved into a global icon representing the perils of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and other forms of state-sponsored atrocities."
--from Credo Reference.
Many Holocaust memorials and museums have exhibits of shoes. One such display is at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, in Washington, D.C. Many display women's shoes, some are very nice dressy shoes, indicating they believed what they were told, that they were going to have new lives somewhere else. None of them knew they were going to their deaths.
Train arriving at Auschwitz concentration camp, 1944
Most trains carried in excess of a thousand victims. On arrival at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Jews were thrown out of the railway wagons and made to leave their belongings behind them.
The fate of child and youth prisoners was no different in principle from that of adults (with the exception of the children in the family camps). Just like adults, they suffered from hunger and cold, used as laborers, and punished, put to death, and used as subjects in criminal experiments by SS doctors.
After Jews prisoners were sent to the poisonous gas chambers, their bodies were burned in a crematorium.
A U.S. soldier inspects thousands of gold wedding bands taken from Jews by the Germans and stashed in the Heilbronn Salt Mines, on May 3, 1945 in Germany.
Construction workers build the brick wall meant to block off the Jewish ghetto portion of Warsaw, Poland, 1940.
The ghettos created by the Nazis were transitional areas between deportation and the “Final Solution,” extermination. Many, though not all, were enclosed areas; barbed wire at Lodz, a brick wall in Warsaw and Cracow. Almost all were heavily guarded by armed military personnel.
Beginning in 1941, registration of Jews consisted of a tattoo, which was placed on the left breast of the prisoner; later, the tattoo location was moved to the inner forearm. It was not only Jews who were marked: all prisoners other than ethnic Germans and police prisoners were tattooed. These tattoos were just one of the ways in which the Nazis dehumanized their prisoners. Despite the perception that all Holocaust prisoners were given tattoos, it was only the prisoners of Auschwitz after 1941 who were branded this way.
As Allied troops moved across Europe and into Germany in 1945, they encountered the Nazi concentration camps. While liberating the camps was not their primary objective, US, British, Canadian, and Soviet troops freed prisoners from their SS guards, provided them with food and badly needed medical support, and collected evidence for war crimes trials.