The early years of the Nazi regime, the National Socialist government established concentration camps to detain real and imagined political and ideological opponents. Increasingly in the years before the outbreak of war SS and police officials incarcerated Jews and other victims of ethnic and racial hatred in these camps. The Holocaust was the systematic bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of approximately 6 mil Jews by the Nazi regime and its Holocaust is a word of Greek origin meaning sacrifice by fire.
The importance of the councils in facilitating the persecution and murder of ghetto inhabitants was not lost on the Nazis; one official was emphatic that "the authority of the Jewish council be upheld and strengthened under all circumstances. When such cooperation crumbled, as happened in the Warsaw ghetto after the Jewish Combat Organisation displaced the council's authority, the Germans lost control.