Most Holocaust historians define the Holocaust as the enactment , between 1941 and 1945 , of the German state policy to exterminate the European Jews . In '' Teaching the Holocaust '' ( 2015 ) , Michael Gray , a specialist in Holocaust education , offers three definitions : ( a ) " the persecution and murder of Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators between 1933 and 1945 " , which views the events of '' Kristallnacht '' in Germany in 1938 as an early phase of the Holocaust ; ( b ) " the systematic mass murder of the Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators between 1941 and 1945 " , which acknowledges the shift in German policy in 1941 toward the extermination of the Jewish people in Europe ; and ( c ) " the persecution and murder of various groups by the Nazi regime and its collaborators between 1933 and 1945 " , which includes all the Nazis ' victims . The third definition fails , Gray writes , to acknowledge that only the Jewish people were singled out for annihilation
Kristallnacht
Kristallnacht
The Holocaust