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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Holocaust in the Soviet Union was the genocide of at least 2 million Soviet Jews by Nazi Germany,[1] Romania,[2] and local collaborators[3] during the German-Soviet War, part of the wider Holocaust and World War II. It may also refer to the Holocaust in the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania), recently annexed by the Soviet Union before the start of Operation Barbarossa, as well as other groups murdered in the invasion (such as Roma, Soviet POWs, and others).[4][5]
The launch of Germany's "war of extermination" against the Soviet Union in June 1941 marked a turning point in the country's anti-Jewish policy from expulsion to mass murder; as a result, it is sometimes seen as marking the beginning of the Holocaust.[6][7][8][9][10] At the start of the conflict, there were estimated to be approximately five million Jews in the Soviet Union of whom four million lived in the regions occupied by Nazi Germany in 1941 and 1942. The majority of Soviet Jews murdered in the Holocaust were killed in the first nine months of the occupation during the so-called Holocaust by Bullets. Approximately 1.5 million Jews succeeded in fleeing eastwards into Soviet territory; it is thought that 1.152 million Soviet Jews had been murdered by December 1942.[11] In total, at least 2 million Soviet Jews were murdered.[12][13]
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Approximately 300,000 to 500,000 Soviet Jews served in the Red Army during the conflict.[14] The Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, established in 1941, was active in propagandising for the Soviet war effort but was treated with suspicion. The Soviet press, tightly censored, often deliberately obscured the particular anti-Jewish motivation of the Holocaust.[15]
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