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Holocaust started
The German government led by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party carried out the systematic persecution and murder of Europe's Jews. -
Nazi Race Laws
The laws issued in September 1935 restricted future German citizenship to those of "German or kindred blood", and excluded those deemed to be "racially" Jewish or Roma (Gypsy). -
Search for refuge
Jews in Vienna wait in line at a police station to obtain exit visas. Following the incorporation of Austria by Nazi Germany in March 1938, and the unleashing of a wave of humilation, terror, and confiscation, many Austrian Jews attempted to leave the country. -
Night of the Broken Glass"
Residents of Rostock, Germany, view a burning synagogue the morning after Kristallnacht. On the night of November 9-10,1938, the Nazi regime unleashed orchestrated anti-Jewish violence across greater Germany. -
American Responses
In May 1939 the passenger ship St. Louis - seen here before departing Hamburg - sailed from Germany to Cuba carrying 937 passengers, most of them Jews. Unknown to the passengers, the Cuban Goverment had revoked their landing certificates -
Warshaw Ghetto
Ghettos were city districts, often closed, in which the Germans concentrated the municipal and some-times regional Jewish population to control and segregate it from the non-Jewish population. In November 1940, German authorities sealed the Warshaw ghetto, severely restricting supplies for the more than 300,000 Jews living there. -
Mobile Killing Squads
About a quarter of all Jews who perished in the Holocaust were shot by SS mobile killing squads and police battalions following the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. These units carried out the mass murder of Jews, Roma,and Communist government
officials. This man was murdered in the presence of members of the German Army, the German Labor Service, and the Hitler Youth. -
Deportations
Between the 1942 and 1944, trains carrying Jews from German- controlled Europe rolled into one of the six killing centers located along rail lines in occupied Poland. Many died during the extreme conditions of the journey, and most survivors were murdered upon arrival at the killing centers.
