Getting your questions ready
Getting your questions ready
Beat the crowd
10 questions No timer
50 free Holocaust History trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 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 50 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 50 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
The Dominican Republic offered to accept up to 100,000 refugees on generous terms while the other delegations made no commitment at all. Dictator Rafael Trujillo later donated land near Sosúa for a settlement.
Q 02What sounds across Israel at 10 a.m. on 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. Places of entertainment close by law and flags fly at half mast.
Q 03The UN's Holocaust remembrance day, tied to the liberation of Auschwitz in 1945, falls on which date?
27 January
27 January was fixed by UN General Assembly resolution 60/7 in 2005, the date the Red Army reached Auschwitz in 1945. Britain's Holocaust Memorial Day shares the date, while Israel's Yom HaShoah follows the Hebrew calendar.
Q 04Danish boats carried some 7,500 of Denmark's Jews to safety in which country in October 1943?
Sweden
Sweden took in the Danish Jews after a German diplomat, Georg Ferdinand Duckwitz, leaked the date of the planned round-up. Fishing boats carried 7,500 Jews and 686 non-Jewish spouses across the water in a few weeks.
Q 05Which port refused to land the 937 refugees aboard the liner St. Louis in May 1939?
Havana
Havana refused to let the passengers land, the United States and Canada then also turned the ship away, and it sailed back to Europe. Daniel Libeskind's Wheel of Conscience memorial in Halifax recalls the refusal.
Q 06Which 1938–39 rescue brought nearly 10,000 unaccompanied Jewish children to Britain by train and ferry?
The Kindertransport
The Kindertransport ran for nine months until the outbreak of war; the first party of 196 children landed at Harwich on 2 December 1938, most of them from a Berlin orphanage burned on Kristallnacht.
Q 07Stolpersteine, brass plaques set in pavements outside victims' last homes, are German for what?
Stumbling stones
Stumbling stones is the literal meaning: each ten-centimetre cube makes a passer-by pause over one name. Artist Gunter Demnig's project has laid more than 100,000 of them, the world's largest decentralised memorial.
Q 08Peter Eisenman's Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin is a sloping grid of 2,711 what?
Concrete slabs
Concrete slabs, or stelae, of identical footprint but heights from 0.2 to 4.7 metres cover a 1.9-hectare site; an underground Place of Information beneath holds the names of about three million victims.
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 from smashed shop windows and synagogues that littered German streets the next morning. In Germany the term is now often replaced by Novemberpogrome, as 'Kristallnacht' was felt to trivialise the attacks.
Q 10Mossad agents seized Adolf Eichmann, organiser of the deportations, in which country in May 1960?
Argentina
Argentina had sheltered him since 1950, when he arrived under false papers obtained through a network run by a Catholic bishop. He had prepared the minutes of the Wannsee Conference and 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 was the chief commander of ŻOB; the kibbutz Yad Mordechai is named for him, and a bronze statue of him was unveiled there on Israel's first official remembrance day in 1951.
Q 13How did Irena Sendler preserve the lists of the Jewish children her network smuggled out of the Warsaw Ghetto?
Q 21Which camp on the Ettersberg hill above Weimar, Goethe's city, was liberated by the US Army in April 1945?
Buchenwald
Buchenwald, 'beech forest', got its name because the SS felt 'Ettersberg' carried too many associations with Goethe, who had lived in Weimar; it was one of the first and largest camps inside Germany's pre-war borders, with 139 subcamps.
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 during Operation Bagration that the SS could not destroy its evidence; the Soviets protected the site at once, and by that autumn it was already a museum, the first of its kind. It gained national designation in 1965.
Q 23After a mass prisoner escape on 14 October 1943, the SS razed which camp and planted a pine forest over it?
Buried in jars
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 memorial Yad Vashem, 'a memorial and a name', draws its title from which book of the Bible?
Isaiah
Isaiah 56:5 promises 'a memorial and a name ... that shall not be cut off', the idea behind a national depository of names for victims with no one left to remember them. The Knesset established the site 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 Soviet agents detained him during the city's siege; in 1981 a bill sponsored by Tom Lantos, one of those he saved, made him the second honorary US citizen after Winston Churchill.
Q 16Japan's vice-consul Chiune Sugihara issued thousands of life-saving transit visas in 1940 from which country?
Lithuania
Lithuania's temporary capital, Kaunas, was Sugihara's post; the visas let refugees from occupied Poland cross the Soviet Union to Japan, and descendants of those he saved are estimated at 40,000 to 100,000.
Q 17Portugal's consul Aristides de Sousa Mendes defied Salazar by issuing thousands of visas in 1940 from which French city?
Bordeaux
Bordeaux, with jurisdiction over the whole of south-western France, was his post as consul-general; Sousa Mendes was stripped of his career for disobeying Circular 14 and is now recognised as a national hero in Portugal.
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 in occupied Czechoslovakia, fooled the ICRC delegate Maurice Rossel, who reported that no one was being deported from it; the streets had been renamed and cleaned for the visit.
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 outside Munich, and was liberated by US forces on 29 April 1945; the site is now a memorial open to the public.
Sobibór
Sobibór's revolt was planned by Leon Feldhendler and Red Army lieutenant Alexander Pechersky, a prisoner of war; the SS then dismantled the camp, levelled the area and disguised the ground as a farm.
Q 24Which author of the memoir Night won the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize and helped found the US Holocaust museum?
Elie Wiesel
Elie Wiesel wrote 57 books, mostly in French and English, after surviving the camps as a teenager from Sighet in Romania; he went on to teach 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 later named each chapter of The Periodic Table, his collection of autobiographical stories, after a chemical element.
Q 26Which philosopher's New Yorker reports on the 1961 Jerusalem trial 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 insisted that aggressive war itself be prosecuted and, at his suggestion, a Soviet proposal for 'crimes against civilians' was renamed 'crimes against humanity', a term the tribunal's charter wrote into law.
Q 28The Nuremberg Code on voluntary consent in medical research 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 wrote Schindler's Ark after survivor Poldek Pfefferberg pressed the story on him in 1980; it was the first novel by an Australian to win the Booker and was later republished under the film's title.
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.