Sadly, the Holocaust, the mass murder of Jews by the Nazi regime, was all too real.

Historians differ about the precise number of victims murdered by the Nazis, but the general consensus is that at least six million Jews were systematically killed, many of them in concentration or extermination camps.

The Nazis carried out the Holocaust because they thought that the Jews were an inferior race and so needed to be destroyed. At the same time, they also believed in the long-standing anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that the Jews were somehow secretly running the world from behind the scenes, pulling the strings and making bad things happen.

Such theories were dangerous enough in peacetime, but when the Second World War began and the Germans under Hitler began to conquer more and more territory, it became possible to step up the level of persecution against the Jews and begin to carry out mass murder against them on an industrial scale.

The Holocaust has gone down in history as one of the biggest crimes ever committed. Even today, almost eighty years after the end of the Second World War, people all over the world still commemorate the victims of this monstrous act of genocide and hope that such a hideous crime will never be repeated.