Holocaust History Trivia
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100 free Holocaust History trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
The Holocaust is taught through dates, places and names: the laws that stripped German Jews of citizenship, the pogrom of November 1938, the ghettos of occupied Poland, the camps, and the winter day in 1945 that the world now keeps as a day of remembrance. Behind each of those headings are people who hid, resisted, rescued, recorded and testified. These 100 questions stay at that remembrance level. They cover the conferences that failed the refugees and the ports that turned them away; the diplomats and villagers who issued visas or opened doors; the uprisings in the Warsaw Ghetto and the camps; the diaries, memoirs and archives that survived; liberation, the postwar trials and the code of medical ethics they produced; and the institutions, monuments and remembrance days that keep the record. The tone is that of a museum placard rather than a game show. Each answer carries a one-line explanation and a citation, so the set works for a Holocaust Memorial Day lesson, a history classroom or anyone who wants to check what they remember.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which country offered to accept up to 100,000 Jewish refugees at the 1938 Évian Conference?
Dominican Republic
Dominican Republic dictator Rafael Trujillo made the offer, alone among the 32 nations at Évian, yet fewer than a thousand refugees ever settled in the colony at Sosúa.
Q 02What sounds across Israel on the morning of Yom HaShoah, halting traffic for two minutes of silence?
An air-raid siren
An air-raid siren sounds for two minutes and Israelis stop whatever they are doing, with motorists stepping out of their cars to stand in silence. Theatres, cinemas and other places of entertainment stay shut for the day.
Q 03The UN's Holocaust remembrance day, 27 January, marks the 1945 liberation of which camp?
Auschwitz
Auschwitz was reached by the Red Army on 27 January 1945, but only about 7,000 prisoners were left: the SS had marched tens of thousands west days earlier.
Q 04Danish boats carried more than 7,000 of Denmark's Jews to safety in which country in October 1943?
Sweden
Sweden took them in after a German diplomat, Georg Ferdinand Duckwitz, leaked word of the planned round-up. Fishing boats ferried the refugees across the narrow strait over about three weeks.
Q 05The liner St. Louis left Hamburg in May 1939 with 937 passengers bound for which port, which refused to let them land?
Havana
Havana let almost none of them land, the United States and Canada also turned the ship away, and it sailed back to Europe. About a quarter of the passengers were later killed in the Holocaust.
Q 06Which rescue effort, begun in December 1938, brought nearly 10,000 unaccompanied, mostly Jewish children to Britain by train and ferry?
The Kindertransport
The Kindertransport began after Kristallnacht, when Britain agreed to admit unaccompanied refugees under 17; parents had to stay behind, and the first 200 or so children landed at Harwich on 2 December 1938.
Q 07Stolpersteine, brass plaques set in pavements outside victims' last homes, are German for what?
Stumbling stones
Stumbling stones is the literal meaning, and artist Gunter Demnig wants passers-by to stumble with the head and the heart. More than 100,000 of the ten-centimetre cubes lie in pavements across Europe.
Q 08Peter Eisenman's Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin is a sloping grid of some 2,700 what?
Concrete slabs
Concrete slabs, or stelae, share one footprint but range from 0.2 to 4.7 metres high. Eisenman meant the orderly grid to feel uneasy and unstable as visitors walk deeper into it.
Q 09Kristallnacht, the pogrom of 9–10 November 1938, is known in English as the Night of what?
Broken Glass
Broken Glass refers to the shards of shop windows and synagogues that littered German streets the next morning. In Germany the night is now more often called the Novemberpogrom or Reichspogromnacht.
Q 10Mossad agents seized Adolf Eichmann, organiser of the deportations, in which country in May 1960?
Argentina
Argentina sheltered him under the alias Ricardo Klement after Catholic Church officials helped him flee Europe. The agents smuggled him to Israel, where he was tried in Jerusalem in 1961.
Q 11The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising began on 19 April 1943, on the eve of which Jewish festival?
Passover
Passover eve was when the SS moved in to deport the ghetto's remaining residents, and the fighters held out until 16 May. It was the largest single revolt by Jews during the war.
Q 12Who led the Jewish Combat Organisation (ŻOB) from the bunker at 18 Miła Street in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising?
Mordechai Anielewicz
Mordechai Anielewicz, just 24, commanded the ŻOB fighters who held off German troops for nearly a month. He is thought to have died in the bunker when it fell on 8 May 1943.
Q 13How did Irena Sendler preserve the lists of the Jewish children her network smuggled out of the Warsaw Ghetto?
Buried in jars
Q 21Which camp on the Ettersberg hill above Weimar, Goethe's city, was liberated by the US Army in April 1945?
Buchenwald
Buchenwald prisoners had already taken control of the camp from its last guards when American troops arrived on 11 April 1945. It was one of the largest camps inside Germany's pre-war borders.
Q 22Which camp outside Lublin was captured nearly intact by the Red Army in July 1944, the first major camp liberated?
Majdanek
Majdanek fell so fast that the SS fled before they could destroy it, leaving gas chambers, crematorium ovens and warehouses piled with victims' shoes for the Soviet troops to find.
Q 23After a mass prisoner escape on 14 October 1943, the SS razed which camp and planted a pine forest over it?
Sobibór
Buried in jars, the lists recorded each child's original and new identity so that families could be reunited after the war. Sendler was arrested by the Gestapo in October 1943 and was later honoured as Righteous Among the Nations.
Q 14Israel's Yad Vashem, 'a memorial and a name', is named from which prophet's book, also the source of 'swords into ploughshares'?
Isaiah
Isaiah 56:5 is a promise to the childless, 'a memorial and a name, better than sons and daughters ... that shall not be cut off'; Israel's Knesset founded the memorial by law in 1953.
Q 15Where did Swedish envoy Raoul Wallenberg shelter Jews in 1944 with protective passports and 'Swedish' buildings?
Budapest
Budapest was Wallenberg's post from July 1944 until 17 January 1945, when Soviet agents detained him as a suspected spy during the siege. He vanished into Soviet custody and his fate has never been settled.
Q 16Japan's vice-consul Chiune Sugihara issued more than 2,000 life-saving transit visas in 1940 from which country?
Lithuania
Lithuania's temporary capital, Kaunas, was Sugihara's post. Refugees from occupied Poland came with bogus end-visas for Curaçao, and he kept stamping transit visas even after Tokyo cabled a warning.
Q 17Portugal's consul Aristides de Sousa Mendes defied Salazar by issuing thousands of visas in 1940 from which French city?
Bordeaux
Bordeaux was his post as consul-general. Recalled home, Sousa Mendes was forced out of the service and died penniless in 1954; Portugal cleared his name only in 1988.
Q 18Which British stockbroker's 1939 rescue of 669 children from Czechoslovakia stayed unknown until a 1988 TV reunion?
Nicholas Winton
Nicholas Winton's story surfaced when the BBC's That's Life! seated him, unawares, among the grown-up children he had saved; he was knighted in 2003 and died aged 106 in 2015.
Q 19Which ghetto did the SS 'beautify' with sham shops and a school for a Red Cross inspection in June 1944?
Theresienstadt
Theresienstadt, in the garrison town of Terezín, won a glowing report from Red Cross delegate Maurice Rossel. To thin the crowds beforehand, the SS had deported about 7,500 inmates that May.
Q 20Which camp, opened in March 1933 for political prisoners, ran longer than any other in the Nazi system?
Dachau
Dachau opened on 22 March 1933, weeks after Hitler took power, in a disused munitions factory near Munich. It became the model for every later camp and ran until US troops arrived on 29 April 1945.
Sobibór's revolt was planned by Leon Feldhendler and Red Army lieutenant Alexander Pechersky, a prisoner of war. About 300 prisoners broke out, but only a few dozen lived to see the war end.
Q 24Which author of the memoir Night won the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize and helped found the US Holocaust museum?
Elie Wiesel
Elie Wiesel, deported from Sighet at 15, was honoured by the Nobel committee as a 'messenger to mankind'. He taught humanities at Boston University for decades.
Q 25Primo Levi, the Italian survivor who wrote If This Is a Man, worked in which profession before and after the war?
A chemist
A chemist trained at the University of Turin, Levi told his life through the elements in The Periodic Table. A Royal Institution vote in 2006 named it the best science book ever written.
Q 26Which philosopher covered the 1961 Jerusalem trial for The New Yorker and coined the phrase 'the banality of evil'?
Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt, herself a refugee from Germany, turned the articles into Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), arguing that the defendant was a thoughtless bureaucrat rather than a monster; the book remains fiercely debated.
Q 27Which US Supreme Court justice took leave to serve as chief American prosecutor at the 1945–46 Nuremberg trial?
Robert H. Jackson
Robert H. Jackson took leave from the Court, helped negotiate the charter that set up the tribunal, then opened the American case himself in November 1945.
Q 28The Nuremberg Code, ten principles built on voluntary consent, emerged from which of the later Nuremberg trials?
The Doctors' Trial
The Doctors' Trial (USA v. Brandt) delivered its verdict against Karl Brandt and 22 others on 20 August 1947, setting out the principles that became the Code, with explicit voluntary consent first among them.
Q 29Schindler's List was adapted from a Booker Prize-winning 1982 novel by which Australian author?
Thomas Keneally
Thomas Keneally walked into a Beverly Hills leather goods shop in 1980 to buy a briefcase; its owner Poldek Pfefferberg, one of the Jews Schindler saved, talked him into writing the book, first called Schindler's Ark.
Q 30Which director founded the Shoah Foundation in 1994 to film survivor testimony, a year after his Schindler's List?
Steven Spielberg
Steven Spielberg set out to record 50,000 testimonies 'before it was too late'; the archive, now at the University of Southern California, holds more than 55,000 interviews and has since added survivors of other genocides.