The Holocaust saw the genocide of at least 2 million Soviet Jews by Nazi Germany, Romania, and local collaborators during the German-Soviet War, part of the wider Second World War. It may also refer to the Holocaust in the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania), and Soviet Moldova, recently annexed by the Soviet Union before the start of Operation Barbarossa, in the Soviet republics Belarus, Ukraine, and parts of Russia, as well as other groups murdered in the invasion (such as Roma, Soviet POWs, and others).
The launch of Germany's "war of extermination" against the Soviet Union in June 1941 marked a turning point in the country's anti-Jewish policy from expulsion to mass murder; as a result, it is sometimes seen as marking the beginning of the Holocaust. At the start of the conflict, there were estimated to be approximately five million Jews in the Soviet Union of whom four million lived in the regions occupied by Nazi Germany in 1941 and 1942. The majority of Soviet Jews murdered in the Holocaust were killed in the first nine months of the occupation during the so-called Holocaust by Bullets. Approximately 1.5 million Jews succeeded in fleeing eastwards into Soviet territory; it is thought that 1.152 million Soviet Jews had been murdered by December 1942. In total, at least 2 million Soviet Jews were murdered.
