Those who remained at the camps were rescued and taken to hospitals or to shelters to recuperate from their terrifying experience at the hands of the Nazis. All told, the toll that the Holocaust took on the people of Europe, especially Jews, was staggering. By the time it was all over, an estimated 12 million people lay dead, nearly 6 million of which were Jews ("Jewish Holocaust." Compton's Interactive Encyclopedia 1996). It is believed that 3 million of these Jews died in concentration and death camps, such as Auschwitz, alone ("Holocaust, the." Microsoft Encarta 1996). An additional 1.5 million died by the bullets of the mobile death squads, and over 600,000 died in the ghettos of the cities ("Holocaust, the." Microsoft Encarta 1996). I find it incredible that such a loss of human life could have occurred in a period of just 12 years. For the vicious atrocities carried out by
some of the top men in Hitler's Nazi regime, dozens were killed or imprisoned. In the trials at Nuremberg, Germany in 1946-47, a multinational allied commission called 22 of Hitler's highest ranking
Nazis. The end result of these trials were eleven men being sentenced to hang, one of which committed suicide in his cell, seven men were imprisoned for life, and only three were acquitted of the crimes they were accused with. Other trials were held in subsequent years that successfully convicted hundreds of Nazis for atrocities carried out in wartime.

The Holocaust is one of the most famous events in modern history. The senseless slaughter of millions upon millions of innocent people at the hands of Nazi butchers was incited when a man by the name of Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933. The Nazis wrought terrible death and destruction on Europe in the following years, beginning with Aryanization and ending with the Final Solution in a maniacal plot to exterminate and purify the human race. The Holocaust should be remembered by all as a dark point in modern history.