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In a speech during a campaign rally in Waldenburg, Hitler attacks the Weimar Republic and pledges to dissolve the parliamentary system. -
the Nazi Party, assumes control of the German state when German President Paul von Hindenburg appoints Nazi Party leader Adolf Hitler as Chancellor at the head of a coalition government. -
The Law against Overcrowding in Schools and Universities limits the number of Jewish students in public schools. -
Germany invades Poland, initiating World War II in Europe. -
Honoring their guarantee of Poland’s borders, Great Britain and France declared war on Germany on September 3, 1939. Two days earlier, Germany had invaded Poland. -
The Inspectorate of Concentration Camps opens a second camp at Auschwitz, called Auschwitz-Birkenau or Auschwitz II.
The first prisoners were 945 Soviet prisoners of war and a few Polish prisoners from Auschwitz I. Auschwitz-Birkenau was originally designated for imprisoning large numbers of Soviet prisoners of war. Although it continued to serve as a concentration camp, it also functioned as a killing center from March 1942 until November 1944. -
Adolf Hitler personally ordered the destruction of Lidice in retaliation for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in Prague. In May 1942, Czech agents had assassinated Heydrich, the highest-ranking Nazi official in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. After the attack, the Germans unleashed a wave of terror against the Czechs. The village of Lidice was set on fire and the remains of the buildings destroyed. -
German authorities begin the deportation of Dutch Jews from the Westerbork, Amersfoort, and Vught camps in the Netherlands to killing centers and concentration camps in Germany and German-occupied Poland. By September 3, 1944, around 100 trains have carried more than 100,000 people to Auschwitz, Sobibor, Theresienstadt, and Bergen-Belsen, including about 60,000 Jews to Auschwitz and about 34,000 Jews to Sobibor.