The Holocaust: Schutzstaffel chief Heinrich Himmler orders that Roma candidates for extermination be deported to Auschwitz.

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 some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe, around 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, and Chełmno in occupied Poland. Separate 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.

The Schutzstaffel was a major paramilitary organisation under Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party in Nazi Germany, and later throughout German-occupied Europe during World War II.

Heinrich Luitpold Himmler was a German Nazi politician and military leader who was the 4th Reichsführer of the Schutzstaffel, a leading member of the Nazi Party, and one of the most powerful people in Nazi Germany. He was one of the main architects of the Holocaust.

The Romani people, also known as the Roma or the Romani are an Indo-Aryan ethnic group who traditionally lived a nomadic, itinerant lifestyle. Although they are widely dispersed, their most concentrated populations are believed to be in Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Serbia, and Slovakia.