Annihilation refers to the extermination of a racial or ethnic group, most often through purposeful and deliberate action. In recent years it has also been referred to as genocide, a word coined to describe the crimes committed by the Nazis during World War II—crimes that induced the United Nations to draw up a convention on genocide.Sometimes annihilation occurs as an unintended result of new contact between two groups. For example, when the Europeans arrived in the Americas, they brought smallpox with them. Native American groups, the Black feet, the Aztecs, and the Incas, among many others, who had no immunity against this disease, were nearly wiped out. In most cases, however, the extermination of one group by another has been the result of deliberate action. The native population of Tasmania, a large island off the coast of Australia, was exterminated by Europeans in the 250 years after the country was discovered in 1642.The largest, most systematic program of ethnic extermination was the murder of 11 million people —close to six million of whom were Jews--by the Nazis before and during World War Ⅱ. In each country occupied by the Germans, the majority of the Jewish population was killed. Thus, in the mid-1930s,before the war, there was about 3.3 million Jews in Poland, but at. the end of the war in 1945 there were only 73,955 Polish Jews left. Among them, not a single known family remained intact.Although there have been recent attempts to portray the holocaust as a secret undertaking of the Nazi elite that was not widely supported by the German people, historical evidence suggests otherwise. For example, during a wave of anti-Semitism anti-Jewish prejudice, accompanied by violence and repression in Germany in 1880s--long before the Nazi regime—only 75 German scholars and other distinguished citizens protested publicly. During the 1930s the majority of German Protestant churches endorsed the so-called racial principles that were used by the Nazis to justify first the disenfranchisement of Jews, then their forced deportation, and finally their extermination Jews were blamed for a bewildering combination of crimes, including polluting the purity of the Aryan race, and causing the rise of communism while at the same time manipulating capitalist economies through their" secret control" of banks. Although there have been recent attempts to portray the holocaust as a secret undertaking of the Nazi elite that was not widely supported by the German people, historical evidence suggests otherwise.