now one of the more devastating outcomes of World War II was the Nazi policy of the mass extermination of the Jews and what became known as the Holocaust and in this video we're going to look at why it happened and its results so when Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany he made no attempt to hide the racialist motivations that drove his actions you see Hitler came to find great comfort in the fact that modern Germans were the descendants of an ancient group of Germanic speaking peoples known as the arens Hitler and the rest who thought like him the Aryans were the master race of the earth and thus the master race ought to claim its place of ascendancy in the world and Hitler trained his mind to believe that the most virent threat to the flourishing of the modern Master race was the Jewish population of Europe and so once Hitler had come to power he began implementing policies to establish this new racial order so starting in 1935 Hitler's anti-jewish policies were mild compared to what they would later become the first major iteration of this plan came in the form of the nurburg laws which put Hitler's racialist ideology into law the first law established that only people of pure German blood could be citizens and thus Jews were stripped of their citizenship the second law made it illegal for pureblood Germans to intermar with Jews and then in 1939 Hitler's policy shifted towards Jewish immigration remember immigration is when people leave a country immigration is when people come into a country now the most robust plan coming out of this idea was to ship all the Jews to the African island of Madagascar however when World War II started Hitler no longer had the time or attention to manage the complexities of his Jewish immigration plans and that's when things turned much darker in 1942 something called the Vanoni Conference was held in which Nazi leaders Reinhard hyrich Hinrich himler and Hitler articulated what became known as the final solution to the Jewish problem and the final solution was not the immigration of Jews but rather their complete extermination now even before the vony conference the Nazis had been building death camps to put Jews to death and to be fair it wasn't only Jews and we'll talk more about those other groups in a moment now the death camps the most notorious of which were aitz and dohow were the Nazis way of systematizing making more efficient the process of mass extermination so essentially whenever Germany occupied a territory in the war they rounded up all the Jews in that area pack them tightly into train cars and then ship them to the death camp once they arrived each one of them had a brief Medical examin about 20 to 30% of them mostly men were sent to work in the camp on behalf of the German war effort and the other 70 to 80% were murdered shortly thereafter the group who did not make the cut were told that they would be showered and deloused so they were made to remove their clothes and then forced into a massive concrete box with shower heads sometimes they understood what was happening and they resisted but other times they did not but once they arrived in that box the doors were closed and it was pumped full of hydrogen cyanide and 5 minutes later they were dead and in this way around 6 million Jews were murdered by the Nazis and Hitler's dedication to this atrocity was so great that the transportation of Jews to the death camps always took priority on The Rail lines even if there was a desperate need on the warfront now in addition to the Jews Nazis targeted other groups for extermination as well and as a result another four to five million people were killed in addition to the Jews the Roma people were also judged to be an inferior race and for that although the number is debated up to 1.5 million of them were exterminated additionally the Nazis targeted homosexuals and Slavic people and people with disabilities to be killed in the death camp all right that's it if you need more help with Unit 8 click right here thanks for sticking with me through this difficult video and I will see you in the next one