Holocaust

The Holocaust was the systematic genocide of six million Jews by Nazi Germany and its collaborators, alongside the persecution and murder of Roma, disabled people, Polish civilians, Soviet prisoners, gay men and other targeted groups. It involved ghettos, shootings, deportations, forced labour and extermination camps. The genocide was central to Nazi ideology and wartime occupation.

Its historical significance is profound and cannot be reduced to background setting. It requires careful treatment because it represents state-organised murder, bureaucracy, complicity, survival and loss on an enormous scale. Fiction connected to the Holocaust includes work by Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, Markus Zusak, Anthony Doerr, Heather Morris and many others, but the strongest pages should distinguish testimony, literary fiction and commercial historical novels clearly.

World War II fiction has a very large reading audience, from Anthony Doerr's All the Light We Cannot See and Kate Atkinson's Life After Life to Robert Harris, Alan Furst, Herman Wouk, Kristin Hannah and Ken Follett. Series and thrillers often use occupied Europe, intelligence work, resistance networks, codebreaking, naval war and family survival as their core material. These entries should therefore support both literary novels and high-conversion series pages for wartime, espionage, Holocaust, home-front and military fiction.