This is a large number by anyone's account, whether it is dollars, days, or human lives. How could one measure the significance of six million lives, it would be impossible to. The intentional annihilation of six million people has affected the world in ways that we will never know, maybe the person who could have discovered the cure for Cancer or AIDS died in the gas chambers at Auschwitz. Six million people are fully one fifth of one per-cent of the world's population. This may not sound like a huge number, but it is. Six million lives, gone. Whole families, wiped out. All this in the span of only five short years. These five years are now known as the holocaust. These five years were possibly the worst in human history, to consider the effects of this event and learn to never repeat it is important.
The holocaust was the principle part of Adolf Hitler's master plan to have the white Aryan race dominate the world. All other life was unimportant. It was to be used as either slavery, or be exterminated. Most minorities were counted as the peoples that must be wiped out, but primarily Jews. The holocaust was not only Jews however. An estimated 5.5 million other Slavs, gypsies, homosexuals, Jehovah's witnesses, mental defects, socialists, communists, and any other groups that did not fit into his vision of the master race were murdered in the same concentration camps in the same manor as the Jews. The main difference between Hitler's killing of the Jews, and these cases, is that there was no intention to kill all of them, or cause a genocide, as was true with the Jews. Whether or not Hitler would have killed them all given the proper time is an interesting question, however there is not sufficient evidence on which to base an answer to it.
Almost all of the killing during the holocaust was done in prison like facilities called concentration camps. These large camps were guarded my German SS officers who were told to kill any inmates they deemed necessary.
