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. Although anti-Semitism has been around longer than Adolf Hitler, the term appears to have originated only since the 1870s, even though the meaning itself has evidence of being around since ancient Roman times. The problem with the Holocaust is that not only were Jews killed, but gypsies and homosexuals were also 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 combined camps; Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek. The Holocaust was the Nazis' way of "purifying" Germany, led by the mad mind of Adolf Hitler. The “purification” process was separating the “undesirables” from the “pure German” population and taking them to concentration and/or extermination camps to get rid of the “undesirables.” Hitler decided to call it the “final solution” to what he called “the Jewish question”. This "final solution" was cruel and the Einsatzgruppen (which means something along the lines of "special task force" in English) would kill around 500,000 Jewish Soviets generally by shooting. In August 1941, experimental exterminations had been underway in the Auschwitz camp and it was decided that Zyklon-B would be the pesticide to be used to gas "undesirables" and Soviet prisoners of war. 500 officials killed 500 Soviets with Zyklon-B. Subsequently, the SS soon ordered a huge quantity of Zyklon-B which was an ominous warning of the impending Holocaust. But...... middle of paper...... taken to the Polish ghettos and soon taken to extermination camps for 'purification' to make the 'Aryan race' come under the atrocious rule of Hitler. Many people today deny the existence of the Holocaust, but it will never be forgotten as something man-made. 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 because of their appearance, ethnicity, race or gender. The Holocaust may have been a devastating event, but there is a lesson to be learned from that event; even though it should have been about the division and annihilation of an entire ethnic group, it teaches us to find hope even in the darkest situations.