Holocaust Remembrance Day: Heinous actions of Hitler against humanity that killed millions

International Holocaust Remembrance Day is observed annually on January 27 by the United Nations to reflect on the Holocaust's atrocities, which resulted in the deaths of an estimated six million Jews. The day commemorates the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau in January 1945 from Nazi clutches. Holocaust is considered to be one of the most visible acts of violence and discrimination.

The United Nations General Assembly declared January 27 to be International Holocaust Remembrance Day in November 2005. Hitler's German Nazi administration targeted many groups, between 1933 and 1945 notably European Jews, whom he regarded as an inferior race. The most heinous atrocities were inflicted on Jewish men, women and children at the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland.

Atrocities by Hitler

• Adolf Hitler, the anti-Semitic Nazi leader, is said to have killed six million Jews during World War II because he saw Jews as a foreign threat to German racial purity and planned a "final solution" that became known as the Holocaust. Over a million children were killed during the Holocaust.
• Hitler established specific concentration camps, including one at Auschwitz in Nazi-occupied Poland, to carry out mass executions of Jews. Over two million people were killed in Auschwitz alone, the bulk of them were Jews, in a large-scale industrial operation.
• On September 15, 1935, Hitler drafted the Nuremberg Laws, which deprived Jews of their rights. He stripped Jews of German citizenship and prohibited Jews from marrying German nationals.
• When the Nazis started the Holocaust, they also targeted people from other communities because of their perceived racial and biological inferiority. Other groups targeted include Roma (Gypsies), individuals with impairments, and those of Slavic descent, particularly Poles and Russians.
• As it became evident that the Nazi and Axis countries would lose the war in early 1943, the Germans and their Axis partners destroyed much of the existing documentation. They also destroyed a large portion of the tangible proof of the genocide. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, there is no one wartime document generated by Nazi officials that details the number of people who died in the Holocaust or World War II.

Image: AP