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Adolf Hitler Appointed Chancellor
On the day of his appointment as German chancellor, Adolf Hitler greets a crowd of enthusiastic Germans from a window in the Chancellery building. Berlin, Germany -
Reichstag Fire Decree
Hitler used the event to convince President Hindenburg to declare a state of emergency, suspending important constitutional safeguards. -
Reichstag Speech
Adolf Hitler tells the German public and the world that the outbreak of war would mean the end of European Jewry. -
Auschwitz Camp Established
The Auschwitz concentration camp complex was the largest of its kind established by the Nazi regime. It included three main camps, all of which deployed incarcerated prisoners at forced labor. One of them also functioned for an extended period as a killing center. The camps were located approximately 37 miles west of Krakow, near the prewar German-Polish border in Upper Silesia, an area that Nazi Germany annexed in 1939 after invading and conquering Poland. -
Warsaw Ghetto Sealed
German authorities order the Warsaw ghetto in the to be sealed. It is the largest ghetto in both area and population, confining more than 350,000 Jews (about 30 percent of the city's population) in an area of about 1.3 square miles, or 2.4 percent of the city's total area -
Soviet Prisoners of War in Minsk
The Nazi-German state depicted the war against the Soviet Union as a racial war between German "Aryans" and subhuman Slavs and Jews. From the very beginning the war against the Soviet Union included the brutal treatment of Soviet prisoners of war (POWs) by the Germans, in violation of every standard of warfare, and the killing of POWs on a massive scale. During World War II, some 5.7 million Soviet army personnel fell into German hands. -
Stahlecker Report
SS-Brigadier General Walter Stahlecker submits a summary report on the killing of Jewish civilians in the northwestern region of the Soviet Union. The report documents the killing of more than 118,000 unarmed Jewish men, women, and children by men under Stahlecker’s command between June 22 and October 15, 1941. -
Killing Operations Begin at Chelmno
A synagogue in Kolo, a town near Chelmno, where Jews were kept until they could be loaded into gas vans, executed, and cremated at Chelmno.
