On January 27, 1945, the Red Army entered the gates of Auschwitz in horrified awe of what they encountered. As they marched through the snow, they encountered stacks of frozen corpses and 7,000 frightened, exhausted prisoners in the wooden barracks.

On May 16, 1944, when SS men arrived in the Romani section of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Roma refused to leave their barracks and armed themselves for a fight to the death. 

Every day, the Sonderkommando was forced to operate the gas chambers and crematoria as more and more train cars full of European Jews arrived in Auschwitz-Birkenau. 

Between 1933 and 1945, the Nazi regime persecuted Roma across Europe, killing over 250,000 Romani people and sterilizing around 2,500.

Though they resisted in many ways, Amsterdam’s Jewish population suffered immensely in World War II. 

Torah scrolls recovered after the Holocaust found new homes at Touro Synagogue and Temple Sinai here in New Orleans.

The Holocaust was Nazi Germany’s deliberate, organized, state-sponsored persecution and genocide of European Jews. During the war, the Nazi regime and their collaborators systematically murdered over six million Jewish people.

When the Nazis came to clear out the Warsaw Ghetto, they were met with fierce resistance.

Stutthof concentration camp was among the sites of horror caught up in this gruesome crescendo to Adolf Hitler’s war for racial supremacy.

The commemorations on January 27 remind us that the Holocaust was the result of step-by-step decisions by individuals that led to the largest genocide in the history of mankind in a wave of antisemitism, intolerance, and hatred.

Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass, was the Nazi dictatorship’s declaration of war against German and Austrian Jews in November 1938.

In October 1943, SS leader Heinrich Himmler gave two speeches, showing the full depravity of the exterminationist mindset.