<P> Rivalries that had begun during the war, combined with the sense of strength in the victorious powers, laid the foundations of the Iron Curtain and of the Cold War . </P> <P> The Holocaust (which roughly means "great fire") was the deliberate, systematic murder of millions of Jews and other minorities during World War II by the Nazi regime in Germany . Several differing views exist regarding whether it was intended to occur from the war's beginning, or if the plans for it came about later . Regardless, persecution of Jews extended well before the war even started, such as in the Kristallnacht (literally "Crystal Night", Night of Broken Glass). The Nazis used propaganda to great effect to stir up anti-Semitic feelings within ordinary Germans . </P> <P> After the conquest of Poland, the Third Reich, which had previously deported Jews and other "undesirables", suddenly had within its borders the largest concentration of Jews in the world . The solution was to round up Jews and place them in Nazi concentration camps or in ghettos, cordoned off sections of cities where Jews were forced to live in deplorable conditions, often with tens of thousands starving to death, and the bodies decaying in the streets . As appalling as this sounds, they were the lucky ones . After the invasion of the Soviet Union, armed killing squads of SS men known as Einsatzgruppen systematically rounded up Jews and murdered an estimated one million Jews within the country . As barbaric and inhuman as this seems, it was too slow and inefficient by Nazi standards . </P> <P> In 1942, the top leadership met in Wannsee, a suburb of Berlin, and began to plan a more efficient way to slaughter the Jews . The Nazis created a system of extermination camps throughout Poland, and began rounding up Jews from the Soviet Union, and from the Ghettos . Not only were Jews shot or gassed to death en masse, but they were forced to provide slave labor and they were used in horrific medical experiments (see Human experimentation in Nazi Germany). Out of the widespread condemnation of the Nazis' medical experiments, the Nuremberg Code of medical ethics was devised . </P>

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