Nazi Germany discriminated against and persecuted people on the basis of their race or ethnicity (actual or perceived), religious affiliation, political beliefs, sexual orientation, and so-called hereditary illness. Discrimination was institutionalized through legislation under the Nazi Party and perpetrated at an industrial scale, culminating in the Holocaust.

The vast majority of the Nazi regime's victims were Jewish, Romani, or Slavic. Jews, along with some Romani populations, were deemed unfit for society on racial or ethnic grounds and largely confined to ghettos, then rounded up and deported to concentration or extermination camps. The beginning of World War II marked a colossal escalation in the Nazis' efforts to eliminate "inferior" communities across German-occupied Europe, with methods including: non-judicial incarceration, confiscation of property, forced labour (and extermination through hard labour), sexual slavery, human experimentation, malnourishment, and execution by death squads. For Jews, in particular, the Nazis' goal was total extermination—the genocide of the Jewish people, first in Europe and eventually in other parts of the world. This was presented by Adolf Hitler as the "Final Solution" to the Jewish question.

According to Alex J. Kay, the groups subjected to mass killing by Nazi Germany, on the order of tens of thousands of victims or more, were 300,000 disabled people, as many as 100,000 Polish elites, nearly six million European Jews, 200,000 Romani people, at least 2 million Soviet urban residents targeted by the hunger policy, nearly 3.3 million Soviet prisoners of war, about 1 million rural inhabitants during anti-partisan warfare (excluding actual partisans), and 185,000 Polish civilians killed during and after the Warsaw Uprising. The total number of deaths from mass killing would thus amount to at least 13 million. Kay argues that all these groups, including Jews, "were regarded by the Nazi regime in one way or another as a potential threat" to Germany's war effort. However, viewing them as a threat was informed by Nazi racial theory, making it hard to separate racist versus strategic reasons for killing. Nazi policies in the occupied eastern territories resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of people, especially during Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union, which began in 1941 and opened up the Eastern Front, where 35% to 45% of all World War II casualties occurred.

Scope of usage

While the term Holocaust generally refers to the systematic mass-murder of the Jewish people in German-occupied Europe, the Nazis also murdered a large number of non-Jewish people who were also considered subhuman (Untermenschen) or undesirable. Some victims belonged to several categories targeted for persecution, e.g. an assimilated Jew who was a member of a communist party or someone of Jewish ancestry who identified as a Jehovah's Witness.

Non-Jewish victims of Nazism included Slavs (e.g. Russians, Belarusians, Poles, Ukrainians and Serbs), the Romani (gypsies), LGBT people; mentally or physically disabled people; Soviet POWs, Roman Catholics, Jehovah's Witnesses, Spanish Republicans, Freemasons, people of color (especially the Afro-German Mischlinge, called "Rhineland bastards" by Hitler and the Nazi regime), and other minorities not considered Aryan (Herrenvolk, or part of the "master race"); leftists, communists, trade unionists, social democrats, socialists, anarchists, and other dissidents.

Taking into account all of the victims of persecution, the Nazis systematically murdered an estimated six million Jews and millions of others during the war. Donald Niewyk suggests that the broadest definition, including Soviet civilian deaths, would produce a total of 17 million victims.A figure of 26.3 million is given in Service d'Information des Crimes de Guerre: Crimes contre la Personne Humain, Camps de Concentration. Paris, 1946, pp. 197–198. Other references: Christopher Hodapp, Freemasons for Dummies, 2005; Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 2003; Martin Gilbert, Atlas of the Holocaust, 1993; Israel Gutman, Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, 1995.

Despite widely varying treatment (some groups were actively targeted for genocide while others were not), some died in concentration camps such as Dachau and others from various forms of Nazi brutality. According to extensive documentation (written and photographic) left by the Nazis, eyewitness testimony by survivors, perpetrators and bystanders, and records of the occupied countries, most perished in death camps such as Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Racial/ethnic or national groups

Jews

The military campaign to displace persons like the Jews from Germany and other German-held territories during World War II, often with extreme brutality, is known as the Holocaust. It was carried out primarily by German forces and collaborators, German and non-German. Early in the war, millions of Jews were concentrated in urban ghettos. In 1941, Jews were massacred, and by December, Hitler had decided to exterminate all Jews living in Europe at that time. The European Jewish population was reduced from 9,740,000 to 3,642,000; the world's Jewish population was reduced by one-third, from roughly 16.6 million in 1939 to about 11 million in 1946.American Jewish Committee, Harry Schneiderman and Julius B. Maller, eds. , American Jewish Year Book, Vol. 48 (1946–1947) , Press of Jewish Publication Society of America, Philadelphia, 1946, page 599 The extermination of Jews had been a priority to the Nazis, regardless of the consequences.

In January 1942, during the Wannsee Conference, several Nazi leaders discussed the details of the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question" (Endlösung der Judenfrage) and German State Secretary Josef Bühler urged conference chairman Reinhard Heydrich to proceed with the Final Solution in the General Government. Jewish populations were systematically deported from the ghettos and the occupied territories to the seven camps designated as Vernichtungslager (extermination camps): Auschwitz-Birkenau Belzec Chelmno Majdanek Maly Trostenets Sobibór Treblinka In 1978, Sebastian Haffner wrote that in December 1941, Hitler began to accept the failure of his primary goal—to dominate Europe, after his declaration of war against the United States, and his withdrawal—was compensated for by his secondary goal: the extermination of the Jews.Sebastian Haffner, The Meaning of Hitler , translated from Anmerkungen zu Hitler, Publishing house. Fischer Taschenbuch, Frankfurt am Main. . As the Nazi war machine faltered during the war's final years, military resources such as fuel, transport, munitions, soldiers and industrial resources were still diverted from the fronts to the death camps.

In Polandhome of Europe's largest Jewish community before the warthe Nazis murdered 3 million Jews, about 90 percent of its Jewish population. Although reports of the Holocaust had reached Western leaders, public awareness in the United States and other democracies of the mass murder of Jews in Poland was low at the time; the first references in The New York Times, in 1942, were unconfirmed reports rather than front-page news.

Greece, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Lithuania, Bohemia, the Netherlands, Slovakia and Latvia lost over 70 percent of their Jewish populations; in Belgium, Romania, Luxembourg, Norway, and Estonia, the figure was about 50 percent. Over one-third of the Soviet Union's Jews were murdered; France lost about 25 percent of its Jewish population, Italy between 15% and 20%. Denmark evacuated nearly all of its Jews to nearby neutral Sweden; the Danish resistance movement, with the assistance of many Danish citizens, evacuated 7,220 of the country's 7,800 Jews by sea to Sweden, Leo Goldberger: The Rescue of the Danish Jews: Moral Courage Under Stress, NYU Press, 1987, preface pages XX-XXI Linked 2014-04-29 in vessels ranging from fishing boats to private yachts. The rescue allowed the vast majority of Denmark's Jewish population to avoid capture by the Nazis. Jews outside Europe under Axis occupation were also affected by the Holocaust in Italian Libya, Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Iraq, Japan, and China.

Although Jews are an ethnoreligious group, they were defined by the Nazis on purely racial grounds. The Nazi Party viewed the Jewish religion as irrelevant, persecuting Jews in accordance with antisemitic stereotypes of an alleged biologically determined heritage. Defining Jews as the chief enemy, Nazi racial ideology was also used to persecute other minorities.

The Yad Vashem museum has created, in an ongoing collaboration with many partners, a database with 7.5 million personal records on Jews murdered by the Nazis and their accomplices during the Holocaust, as well as those whose fate has yet to be determined. Some people appear in multiple records, and it is estimated that 5 million murdered Jews have been commemorated. The names of more than one million victims remain unknown and are still being collected.FAQs - Names’ Database // Yad Vashem: "To date (2025) an estimated 5 million murdered Jews have been commemorated. <...> More than 7.5 million personal records from a multitude of original sources appear in the Names Database. Some people appear in multiple records"

Slavs

The Slavs were one of the most widely persecuted groups during the war, with many Poles, Belarusians, Russians, Ukrainians, Slovenes, Serbs and others killed by the Nazis. According to Bohdan Wytwycky, an estimated 3 million Ukrainians and 1.5 million Belarusians were killed by the Nazis for racially-motivated reasons. The Nazis' genocide and brutality was their way of ensuring Lebensraum ("living space") for those who met Hitler's narrow racial requirements; this necessitated the elimination of Bolsheviks and Slavs:

Polish people

The Nazi occupation of Poland was among the most brutal of the war, resulting in the murder of more than 1.8 million ethnic Poles and about 3 million Polish Jews. The Polish victims represented nearly 22 percent of the country's population.Craughwell, Thomas J., The Gentile Holocaust Catholic Culture, Accessed July 18, 2008 In a 22 August 1939 speech to Wehrmacht commanders a week before the invasion of Poland, Hitler said, "Kill without pity or mercy all men, women and children of Polish descent or language.... Be merciless. Be brutal. It is necessary to proceed with maximum severity. The war is to be a war of annihilation." The Gentile Holocaust, by Thomas J. Craughwell, website catholiculture.org Address to the commanding generals, on the decision to attack Poland...CONTENTS OF HITLER'S TALK TO THE SUPREME COMMANDER AND COMMANDING GENERALS, OBERSALZBERG, 22-8-39, website for Nuremberg Trials Project at Harvard Law School, accessed August 11, 2026.

Intelligentsia, socially prominent, and influential people were primarily targeted, although ethnic Poles and other Slavic groups were also killed en masse. Hundreds of thousands of Roman Catholic and Orthodox Poles were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau and other concentration camps, and the intelligentsia were the first targets of the Einsatzgruppen death squads. The anti-Polish campaign culminated in the near-complete destruction of Warsaw, ordered by Hitler and Himmler in 1944. The original assumptions of Generalplan Ost were based on plans to exterminate around 85% (over 20 million) of ethnically Polish citizens of Poland, with the remaining 15% to be used as slaves.