When Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party came to power in 1933, antisemitism was leveraged to an extreme, eventually leading to the deaths of millions. Hitler and the Nazi regime set up networks of concentration camps before and during World War II to carry out a plan of genocide.
The Nazis believed that by annihilating those of Jewish descent and other groups, including the disabled, homosexuals and gypsies, they could achieve a pure Aryan "master race." At the camps, people were subjected to forced labor, medical experiments and mass murder.
Nearly 1.3 million people were deported to the Auschwitz camp, alone, in Nazi-occupied Poland, and more than 1.1 million perished at that camp. By the end, 6 million Jews and some 5 million others were murdered in the Holocaust.
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