Key facts about the Nazi Holocaust

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http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L13514804.htm

JERUSALEM, March 13 (Reuters) - Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial opens a new museum on Tuesday to teach about the Nazi genocide of the Jews.

Following are some facts on the Holocaust, state-sponsored persecution and murder of European Jews and other groups by Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945.

-- Nearly 6 million Jews were murdered in Europe as part of Adolf Hitler's "Final Solution" to what the Nazi dictator called the Jewish problem, according to Yad Vashem.

-- The decision to kill Europe's Jews was formulated in late 1941, and Nazi officials at the Wannsee Conference in January 1942 coordinated the apparatus of mass murder.

-- Most victims were murdered in six extermination camps. Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland was the largest and at least 1.1 million Jews were killed there before its liberation by the Red Army on Jan. 27, 1945. In total 85 percent of the Jewish population in Poland died -- some 2.8 million people.

-- Only an estimated 11 percent of Jewish children who were alive in 1933 survived the Holocaust.

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