On June 28, 1941, German forces conquered the Belorussian city of Minsk. The Germans had killed thousands of its 80,000 ghettoized Jews by mid-autumn, but Masha Bruskina, a 17-year-old girl, was among the Jews who resisted. The Germans caught her, and she was hanged on October 26. Starvation, forced labor, shooting, gassing...Nazi Germany destroyed European Jews and millions of non-Jews in many ways, but each person perished one by one.

Individual deaths multiplied into mind-boggling statistics. One leading Holocaust scholar, Raul Hilberg, estimates that 5.1 million Jews perished in the Holocaust. Most scholars now believe that the Jewish death total approached six million. Israel Gutman and Robert Rozett, for example, put Jewish losses between 5,596,000 and 5,860,000. German scholar Wolfgang Benz lists the figure at 6.1 million. The estimates of deaths vary widely for several reasons: the years and geographical boundaries used to determine prewar census data, the margins of error in death reports from German and Jewish sources, the difficulties of comparing prewar and postwar populations, and the fact that the Germans and their collaborators did not record the death of every victim.

Every reliable judgment finds that nearly two-thirds of the European Jews--and one-third of the Jews in the world--were killed in the Holocaust. Hitler intended to obliterate all Jewish life--root and branch. The staggering number of those who indeed met their deaths demonstrates how close he came.