The Holocaust (from the
Greek :
hólos, "whole" and
kaustós, "burnt"), also known as the
Shoah (
Hebrew: ,
HaShoah, "the catastrophe"), was a
genocide in which approximately six million
Jews were killed by
Adolf Hitler's
Nazi regime and its collaborators. Some historians use a definition of the Holocaust that includes the additional five million non-Jewish victims of Nazi
mass murders, bringing the total to approximately eleven million. Killings took place throughout Nazi Germany and
German-occupied territories.