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The Holocaust
The Holocaust was a genocide in which Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany and its collaborators killed about six million Jews. The victims included 1.5 million children and represented about two-thirds of the nine million Jews who had resided in Europe. Some definitions of the Holocaust include the additional five million non-Jewish victims of Nazi mass murders, bringing the total to about 11 million. Killings took place throughout Nazi Germany and German-occupied territories. -
Adolf Hitler is appointed Chancellor of Germany
On the night of January 30, 1933, the Nazis organized a massive torchlight parade in Berlin to celebrate the appointment of Hitler as Chancellor of Germany. Above: Adolf Hitler and Hermann Göring greet the participants in the parade as they pass beneath the window of Hitler's new office. Below: A view of the parade passing German President Paul von Hindenburg who gazes out the window at the sight. http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/holocaust/h-chancl.htm -
First Concentration Camp
Nazis open Dachau concentration camp near Munich, to be followed by Buchenwald near Weimar in central Germany, Sachsenhausen near Berlin in northern Germany, and Ravensbrück for women. -
Nazis stage boycott of Jewish shops and businesses.
Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels incites the crowd in the Berlin Lustgarten to boycott Jewish-owned businesses as a response to the anti-German "atrocity propaganda" being spread abroad by "international Jewry." e of the main commercial streets in central Leipzig, http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/holocaust/h-boycott.htm -
Nazi troops enter Austria
March 13, 1938 - Adolf Hitler, Führer of Germany, accepts salutes and cheers from the Nazi controlled Reichstag after announcing the Anschluss (union) with Austria. Immediately after the Anschluss, Nazis began a brutal crackdown on Austrian Jews, arresting them and publicly humiliating them. http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/holocaust/h-austria.htm -
Kristallnacht
A massive, coordinated attack on Jews throughout the German Reich on the night of November 9, 1938, into the next day, has come to be known as Kristallnacht or The Night of Broken Glass. http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/holocaust/h-knacht.htm -
The Krakow Ghetto is sealed off containing 70,000 Jews.
Forced by the Nazis to relocate to the Krakow Ghetto, Jews move their belongings in horse-drawn wagons. Jews at forced labor constructing the wall around the Krakow Ghetto that will seal them in. http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/holocaust/h-krak-beg.htm -
German Jews ordered to wear yellow stars.
Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Reich Main Security Office, first recommended that Jews should wear identifying badges following the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 9 and 10, 1938. -
Wannsee Conference to coordinate the "Final Solution."
On January, 20, 1942, Reinhard Heydrich, Himmler's second in command of the SS, convened the Wannsee Conference in Berlin with 15 top Nazi bureaucrats to coordinate the Final Solution (Endlösung) in which the Nazis would attempt to exterminate the entire Jewish population of Europe, an estimated 11 million persons. http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/holocaust/h-wannsee.htm -
Nazis liquidate Lidice in retaliation for Heydrich's death.
On May 27, 1942, SS Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, Deputy Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, had been attacked in Prague by Free Czech agents who were trained in England and brought to Czechoslovakia to assassinate him. They shot at Heydrich as his car slowed to round a sharp turn, then threw a bomb which exploded, mortally wounding him. Heydrich managed to get out of the car, draw his pistol and shoot back at the assassins before collapsing in the street. -
The Death of Hitler
In April of 1945, Hitler moved into the Führerbunker, located 50 feet below the Chancellery buildings in Berlin. In this underground complex containing nearly thirty rooms on two separate floors, Hitler held daily briefings with his generals amid reports of the unstoppable Soviet advance into Berlin. He issued frantic orders to defend Berlin with armies that were already wiped out or were making a hasty retreat westward to surrender to the Americans. http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/holoca -
SS doctors
23 former SS doctors and scientists go on trial before a U.S. Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. Sixteen are found guilty, with 7 hanged.
