The Holocaust was a devastating event in Europe. The Greek words “holos” (meaning whole) and “kaustos” (meaning burned) combined came to mean a devastating massacre of approximately 6 million Jews in Europe. Even though anti-Semitism had been around longer than Adolf Hitler, the term only appears to originate from the 1870s, even though the meaning itself appears to have been around since the days of ancient Rome. The problem with the Holocaust is that not only were Jews killed, but also Gypsies and homosexuals were massacred in extermination and concentration camps. There were six extermination camps, four of which were "pure" extermination camps, and there were at least 22 concentration camps. There were only 2 camps combined; Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek. The Holocaust was the Nazis' means of "purifying" Germany, under the direction of the mad mind of Adolf Hitler. The “purification” process separated the “undesirables” from the “purely German” population and led them to concentration and/or extermination camps to get rid of the “undesirables.” Hitler decided to call this the “final solution” to what he called “the Jewish question.” This "final solution" was cruel and the Einsatzgruppen (meaning something like "special task force" in English) would kill approximately 500,000 Jewish Soviets, usually by gunfire. By August 1941, experimental exterminations had been taking place in the Auschwitz camp for some time, and it was decided that Zyklon-B would be the pesticide they would use to gas "undesirables" and Soviet prisoners of war. 500 officials killed 500 Soviets with Zyklon-B. Subsequently, the SS quickly ordered a huge quantity of Zyklon-B, which served as an ominous warning of the impending Holocaust. Ma...... middle of paper ...... taken to the Polish ghettos and soon taken to the extermination camps for "purification" to make the "Aryan race" under Hitler's atrocious reign . Many people today deny the existence of the Holocaust, but it will never be forgotten as a human cause. Humans did the work, humans killed others simply because they were different. If we could teach people to fear and hate people because of their differences, then perhaps we could teach each other to love people for who they are; not for their appearance, ethnicity, race or gender. The Holocaust may have been a devastating event, but there is a lesson to be learned from this event; even though it was supposed to divide and wipe out an entire ethnic group, it teaches us to find hope even in the darkest situations..