Victims of Nazi Germany

Nazi Germany discriminated against and persecuted people on the basis of their race or ethnicity (actual or perceived), religious affiliation, political beliefs, sexual orientation, and, where applicable, mental or physical disabilities. Discrimination did not simply exist in practice; it was institutionalized through legislation under the Nazi Party and perpetrated at an industrial scale, culminating in the Holocaust. Men, women, and children who were deemed mentally or physically unfit for society were subject to involuntary hospitalization, involuntary euthanasia, and forced sterilization.

The vast majority of the Nazi regime's victims were Jewish, Romani, or Slavic. Jews, along with some Romani populations, were deemed unfit for society on racial or ethnic grounds and largely confined to ghettos, then rounded up and deported to concentration or extermination camps. The beginning of World War II marked a colossal escalation in the Nazis' efforts to eliminate "inferior" communities across German-occupied Europe, with methods including: non-judicial incarceration, confiscation of property, forced labour (and extermination through hard labour), sexual slavery, human experimentation, malnourishment, and execution by death squads. For Jews, in particular, the Nazis' goal was total extermination—the genocide of the Jewish people, first in Europe and eventually in other parts of the world. This was presented by Adolf Hitler as the "Final Solution" to the Jewish question.

The Nazi Party's policy of waging genocide against so-called "sub-humans" resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of people, especially during Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union, which began in 1941 and opened up the Eastern Front, where 35% to 45% of all World War II casualties occurred. By the end of World War II and the Holocaust in 1945, the Nazis had eradicated approximately two-thirds of the entire European Jewish population in what is described by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum as "the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jewish men, women and children by the Nazi regime and its collaborators."