The pop culture idea of how the Holocaust happened (at least in North America, I can't speak for Europe, where people here seem to take Holocaust history more seriously) is that some time in 1941 the Nazis decided to kill all of the Jews and promptly sent them off to Auschwitz where they were all killed in gas chambers. This just isn't accurate. A majority of those murdered in the Holocaust were killed in mass executions by the Gestapo and SS with the aid of local collaborators, and there were dozens of both death camps and work camps, of which Auschwitz was both. The reason we remember it so prominently is because, comparatively, many survived Auschwitz, unlike Treblinka or Belzec, for example, where there were almost no survivors. Also six million only refers to the Jews murdered in the Holocaust and not the five million others who were killed because they were socialists or communists or gay men or Soviet prisoners or religious dissidents or Slavs or disabled or Romani or any other of the out-groups that the Nazi regime discriminated against. (I know Holocaust scholars refer to the six million Jews as victims of the Holocaust itself and the five million others as victims of the Holocaust era, but I think that distinction would be lost on here.)