The Holocaust is one of the darkest chapters in human history and left a deep mark on Eastern Europe. Between 1941 and 1945, millions of Jews, as well as Roma, Sinti, political prisoners and other groups considered “unworthy”, were systematically persecuted, deported and murdered. This systematic extermination, planned and carried out by Nazi Germany, was particularly cruel in Eastern Europe, as many Jewish people lived there and the Germans set up a particularly large number of ghettos and concentration and extermination camps. In the so-called Holocaust by bullets, hundreds of thousands of people died in mass shootings by the German occupiers and their helpers.
The most important memorial sites for the Shoah are in Eastern Europe. Memorial sites such as Auschwitz, Majdanek, Belzec, Babyn Yar or the former ghettos of Lviv or Lodz make it easier to grasp the enormity of the crimes committed by the hatred of Jews in Germany and Europe.
