Memory of the victims
This archive names perpetrators in order to explain how persecution and mass murder were organised. It does not treat them as protagonists to be admired, collected or compared. The centre of the history remains the millions of people whose lives, families, homes, cultures and communities were attacked by Nazi Germany and its collaborators.
Administrative words used by the regime—resettlement, evacuation, special treatment, security operation—often concealed dispossession, forced labour, deportation and murder. Nazi Report retains such terms only when they are needed to interpret a source, and explains the violence that the euphemism was designed to hide.
No profile-level estimate can represent the experience of the victims. The same person may appear in the documentary chain of a ghetto order, a deportation schedule, a train movement, a selection and a postwar trial. For that reason, the seven circles classify power and function rather than creating a ranking based on totals.
Readers who want to continue beyond the perpetrator archive should use the linked collections of memorial museums, archives and research institutions. They preserve testimony, family records, photographs, community histories and the names of people whom the occupation system tried to erase.
People and communities targeted by persecution
European Jews
Approximately six million Jewish men, women and children were murdered in the Holocaust, a systematic, state-directed genocide carried out through killing centres, mass shootings, ghettos, concentration camps, forced labour, starvation and deportation. Jewish communities across occupied Europe were devastated or destroyed.
Soviet prisoners of war
Approximately 3.3 million Red Army prisoners died in German captivity. They were shot or deliberately subjected to starvation, exposure and disease; this intentional destruction of prisoners of war was a planned war crime.
Non-Jewish Polish civilians
Approximately 1.8 million non-Jewish Polish civilians were murdered under German occupation in mass executions, village pacifications, concentration camps and prisons. German policy deliberately targeted Polish teachers, clergy, physicians, scholars and other members of the country's social and intellectual leadership.
Sinti and Roma
At least 250,000 Sinti and Roma were murdered through shootings, deportations, forced labour and camps; some historical estimates reach 500,000. The victims included families imprisoned and killed in the so-called family camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
People with disabilities
Approximately 250,000 disabled and institutionalised people, including at least 10,000 children, were murdered in Aktion T4 and its continuations. The regime called the programme 'euthanasia', but it was a campaign of coerced killing directed at people classified as unworthy of life.
Political prisoners and people labelled 'asocial'
Tens of thousands of political opponents—including communists, social democrats and trade unionists—and people stigmatised by the regime as 'asocial' or 'professional criminals' were imprisoned, tortured and killed in concentration camps and prisons. The Nazi categories were instruments of persecution, not neutral descriptions of the people targeted.
Gay and bisexual men persecuted under Paragraph 175
Tens of thousands of men were convicted under Paragraph 175, and thousands were sent to concentration camps, where many were marked with the pink triangle. Hundreds, and possibly thousands, were murdered or died from forced labour, starvation, abuse and camp conditions.
Jehovah's Witnesses
Thousands of Jehovah's Witnesses were imprisoned for refusing military service and an oath of loyalty to the regime. Approximately 1,700 were executed or died as a result of imprisonment and persecution.
Continue with victim-centred collections
German crimes against Poles
A catalogue of 54 source-led studies examines torture, burning people alive, violence against the wounded, children and patients. Each entry gives citations, source discrepancies and limits of the evidence.
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
The museum and research institution publishes the Holocaust Encyclopedia and collections on the Holocaust and Nazi persecution. The estimates summarised on this page follow its article 'Documenting Numbers of Victims of the Holocaust and Nazi Persecution'; they are scholarly estimates, not exact totals.
Yad Vashem
The World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem preserves testimony, documents and photographs and maintains the Central Database of Shoah Victims' Names.
Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum
The museum and memorial at the site of the former German Nazi concentration and extermination camp preserves records, objects, testimony and research resources relating to the victims and the camp complex.
Jewish Historical Institute
The Warsaw research institute is the custodian of the Ringelblum Archive, the underground archive created in the Warsaw ghetto, and provides access to sources on Jewish life and destruction in occupied Poland.
House of the Wannsee Conference
The memorial and education centre occupies the villa where senior officials coordinated the deportation and murder of European Jews in January 1942. Its resources explain the bureaucratic organisation of genocide.
Arolsen Archives
This international archive holds extensive documentation on victims and survivors of Nazi persecution and supports searches for individual fates across concentration camps, forced labour and displacement.