The corpses were burned in crematoria.
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Crematorium: a specially place (oven) where dead bodies are burned to ash.Gas chamber: an airtight room that can be filled with poisonous gas to perform executions.In combination, they are closely associated with the Holocaust.
The Nazis called their genocide of the Jews the 'Final Solution [of the Jewish Question]'. This term was, understandably, considered offensive by others, and gradually in the late 1970s the term 'the Holocaust' came to be adopted by historians. This term referred specifically to the estimated death toll of six million Jews.For the other groups massacred the usual term was '[victims of] Nazi atrocities'.However, when the U.S. embarked on creating the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum some other groups demanded the right to be included, and the figure (for all victims of Nazis atrocities) was hastily upped to 11 million.The figure of 11 million is most unsatifactory as there is no explantion, even in outline, of how it was arrived at. If it supposed to represent the victims of Nazi genocide it is too high, and if it is supposed to include all victims of Nazi atrocities, it is too low.There are, in effect, two competing definitions of the Holocaust.
The holocaust
Absolutely. The genocidal policies of the Nazis resulted in the deaths of about as many Polish Gentiles as Polish Jews, thus making them co-victims in a Forgotten Holocaust. This Holocaust has been largely ignored because historians who have written on the subject of the Holocaust have chosen to interpret the tragedy in exclusivistic terms--namely, as the most tragic period in the history of the Jewish Diaspora. To them, the Holocaust was unique to the Jews, and they therefore have had little or nothing to say about the nine million Gentiles, including three million Poles, who also perished in the greatest tragedy the world has ever known. Little wonder that many people who experienced these events share the feeling of Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz, who anxious when the meaning of the word Holocaust undergoes gradual modifications, so that the word begins to belong to the history of the Jews exclusively, as if among the victims there were not also millions of Poles, Russians, Ukrainians, and prisoners of other nationalities. -- Richard C. Lukas, preface to The Forgotten Holocaust: The Poles under German Occupation 1939-1944
The Holocaust was not caused by one man. Even though Heydrich was called the architect of the Holocaust, it took a whole nation (in fact many nations) to make the Holocaust a reality.