Founding of Theresienstadt Ghetto

Date: November 24, 1941 • Location: Okres Litoměřice, Czech Republic

The Holocaust: The Theresienstadt Ghetto was founded as a waystation to Nazi extermination camps and a "retirement settlement" for elderly and prominent Jews to mislead their communities about the Final Solution.

The Holocaust, known in Hebrew as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. From 1941 to 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered around six million Jews across German-occupied Europe, approximately two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population. The murders were committed primarily through mass shootings across Eastern Europe and poison gas chambers in extermination camps, chiefly Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor, Chełmno and Majdanek death camps in occupied Poland. Concurrent Nazi persecutions killed millions of other non-Jewish civilians and prisoners of war (POWs); the term Holocaust is sometimes used to include the murder and persecution of non-Jewish groups, such as the Romani and Soviet POWs.