This Deutsche Welle special report marks the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camp Auschwitz.  Anti-semitism wasn't invented by the Germans, but nowhere else in the world did it lead to such a perfect system of industrialized extermination. Step by step, Jewish citizens were deprived of civil rights and their livelihoods after 1933. During the war, the National Socialists set up ghettos in the occupied territories of Eastern Europe, where people starved miserably. In 1942, the systematic extermination of all European Jews was decreed. Cynically, they were promised a new life in the East, but they died in the extermination camps of Chelmno, Auschwitz, Majdanek and Treblinka.

LEARN MORE:
For more on Auschwitz and the Nazi holocaust:
The Simon Wiesenthal Center

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Association of Holocaust Organizations

In Focus documentaries and reports cover business and science, culture and education, historical and present day events as well as sports and leisure. This wide variety of topics is investigated in depth and presented in an informative format, making for captivating television, courtesy of Germany's Deutsche Welle news network.