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Adolf Hitler was elected Chancellor of Germany.
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The first concentration camp was opened at Dachau in Germany.
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German Parliament passes Enabling Act giving Hitler dictatorial powers.
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Germans were told not to buy from Jewish shops or businesses.
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The Night of Long Knives occurs as Hitler, Göring and Himmler conduct a purge of the SA (Sturmabteilung) leadership.
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Hitler becomes Führer of the German Nation.
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During the Third Reich, Hitler was worshipped as a deity and was surrounded by Nazi rituals such as the German salute (Heil Hitler!). This salute was one of the most potent forms of totalitarian conditioning. His position as Führer demanded unconditional obedience from every German; hence his rapid movement to establish a totalitarian state after 1933.
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Heinrich Himmler is appointed chief of the Schutzstaffel.
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The Nuremberg Laws were introduced. These laws were designed to take away Jewish rights of citizenship and included orders that:
Jews are no longer allowed to be German citizens.
Jews cannot marry non-Jews.
Jews cannot have sexual relations with non-Jews. -
Olympic games begin in Berlin. Hitler and top Nazis seek to gain legitimacy through favorable public opinion from foreign visitors and thus temporarily refrain from actions against Jews.
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Nazi troops enter Austria, which has a population of 200,000 Jews, mainly living in Vienna. Hitler announces Anschluss (union) with Austria.
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A night of extreme violence. Approximately 100 Jews were murdered. 20,000 German and Austrian Jews arrested and sent to camps. Hundreds of synagogues burned, and the
Windows of Jewish shops all over Germany and Austria smashed. -
The Second World War (World War 2) lasted from 1939 to 1945. It was fought in Europe, in Russia, North Africa and in Asia. 60 million people died in World War 2, about 40 million being civilians.
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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.
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The Warsaw Ghetto, containing over 400,000 Jews, is sealed off.
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Jews were forced to sew a yellow star onto their clothes so that they could be easily identified.
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In occupied Poland, near Lodz, Chelmno extermination camp becomes operational. Jews taken there are placed in mobile gas vans and driven to a burial place while carbon monoxide from the engine exhaust is fed into the sealed rear compartment, killing them. The first gassing victims include 5,000 Gypsies who had been deported from the Reich to Lodz.
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Mass killings of Jews using Zyklon-B begin at Auschwitz-Birkenau in Bunker I (the red farmhouse) in Birkenau with the bodies being buried in mass graves in a nearby meadow.
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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.
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Under the Nazi rule, millions of people were subjected to involuntary sterilization in the name of racial hygiene, an effort to purify the German bloodline and establish internationally their superiority as a nation.
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An order was issued to empty the Warsaw Ghetto and deport the inmates to Treblinka. Following the deportation of some Warsaw Jews, news leaked back to those remaining in the Ghetto of mass killings. A group of about 750 mainly young people decided that they had nothing to lose by resisting deportation. Using weapons smuggled into the Ghetto they fired on German troops who tried to round up inmates for deportation. They held out for nearly a month before they were taken by the Nazis and shot o
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Faced with impending defeat, Hitler committed suicide.
