The Holocaust Nearly six million Jews were killed and murdered in what historians have called "The Holocaust." The word 'holocaust' is a conflagration, a great raging fire that consumes in it's path all that lives. In the years between 1933 and 1945, the Jews of Europe were marked for total annihilation. Moreover, anti-Semitism was given legal sanction. It was directed by Adolf Hitler and managed by Heinne Himmler, Reinhard Heydrich and Adolf Eichmann. There were many other great crimes and murders, such as the killing of the Armenians by the Turks, but the Holocaust stood out as the "only sysmatic and organized effort by a mo