Tur audio Shoah itinerary

The term Shoah refers to the genocide of Jewish people perpetrated in Germany and in countries occupied by the Rome-Berlin Axis powers during the Second World War according to the racist anti-Semitic ideology preached by Adolf Hitler and implemented by the German National Socialist Party.

Anti-Semitism has been a cornerstone of the Nazi party’s program since the publication of Mein Kampf, a collection of Hitler’s thoughts in prison that was published in 1925. Jews are conceived as absolute evil, responsible for the defeat of the German Second Reich in 1918 and the subsequent social and economic crisis.

Since 1935, with Nuremberg laws, Jews lost the right to German citizenship and were involved in a wide range of impositions and exclusions isolating them from life in civil society. The aim of this first stage, culminating in November 1938 Night of Broken Glass, was to deprive Jews of their possessions and to force them to pay the possibility of escape. There was no international reaction.

With Wannsee conference held in January 1942 the term final solution started to be used, which designated the Jewish genocide organized and managed with modern tools, perpetrated by dedicated and diligent bureaucrats such as Adolf Eichmann, the main responsible of forced emigration and the transfer of Jews, mainly in railway cattle cars, from ghettos and prison camps to extermination camps, real factories of death, where Jews were concentrated and sent to die in gas chambers using labour of other Jews who were temporarily spared from selection.

In the memory of the Jewish people and in the final ruling of the International Military Tribunal, it was estimated that 6,000,000 people had been exterminated.

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