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Before 1933
World War I devastated Europe and created new countries. The years that followed saw the continent struggle to recover from the death or injury of tens of millions of soldiers and civilians, as well as catastrophic damage to property and industry. In 1933, over 9 million Jews lived in Europe (1.7% of the total population)—working and raising families in the harsh reality of the worldwide economic depression. German Jews numbered about 500,000 or less than 1% of the national population. -
1933
On January 30, 1933, the Nazi state quickly became a regime in which citizens had no guaranteed basic rights. The Nazi rise to power brought an end to the Weimar Republic, the German parliamentary democracy established after World War I. In 1933, the regime established the first concentration camps. Extensive propaganda was used to spread the Nazi Party’s racist goals and ideals. -
1938
Through hundreds of legal measures, the Nazi-led German government gradually excluded Jews from public life, the professions, and public education. On Kristallnacht—the Night of Broken Glass—Jewish businesses and synagogues were destroyed in the first act of state-sponsored violence against the Jewish community. Many Jews who had the means tried to leave Germany but encountered countless bureaucratic hurdles. Many Jews were put in concentration camps. -
1939
On September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland. Over the next year, Nazi Germany and its allies conquered much of Europe. German officials confiscated Jewish property, in many places required Jews to wear identifying armbands, and established ghettos and forced-labor camps. -
1941
In June 1941, Germany turned on its ally, the Soviet Union. Often drawing on local civilian and police support, Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing units) followed the German army and carried out mass shootings as it advanced into Soviet lands. Gas vans also appeared on the eastern front in late fall 1941. -
1942
In a period marked by intense fighting on both the eastern and western fronts of World War II, Nazi Germany also increased its pursuit of the “Final Solution.” These years saw systematic deportations of millions of Jews to increasingly efficient killing centers using poison gas. Until the winter of 1942, the German army was victorious in an almost unbroken chain of battlefield successes. After a successful German advance, the battle for the city of Stalingrad in late 1942 proved a turning point. -
1945
By the end of the war in spring 1945, as the Germans and their Axis partners were pushed back on both fronts, Allied troops uncovered the full extent of crimes committed during the Holocaust. -
After 1945
By May 1945, the Germans and their collaborators had murdered six million European Jews as part of a systematic plan of genocide—the Holocaust. When Allied troops entered the concentration camps, they discovered piles of corpses and bones—testimony to Nazi mass murder. Soldiers also found thousands of survivors Jews and non-Jews—suffering from starvation and disease. With few possibilities for emigration, tens of thousands of homeless Holocaust survivors were housed in displaced persons camps.
