Timeline of the shoah/holocaust/NS-Judenvernichtung/Judenverfolgung - ending in a the genocid in the WW2
- From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - timeline of the Holocaust (june 2019, first copy)
A timeline of the Holocaust is detailed in the events listed below. Also referred to as the Shoah (in Hebrew), Judenverfolgung (in german). The shoah was a genocide in which some six million European Jews were killed by Nazi Germany and its World War II collaborators (Achsenmächte).
About 1.5 million of the victims were children. Two-thirds of the nine million Jews who had resided in Europe before 1939 were murdered.
The following timeline has been compiled from a variety of sources including the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
1932/33[]
| Date | Major Events |
|---|---|
| July 1932 | Nazis became the largest party in the Reichstag, capturing 230 of the 608 seats in the German federal election of July, 1932. |
| 30 January 1933 | Adolf Hitler appointed Chancellor of Germany by president Hindenburg |
| 27 February 1933 | The Reichstag fire. The subsequent Reichstag Fire Decree suspends the German Constitution and most civil liberties. (Reichstagsbrand) |
1933 - the nazi-government[]
| Date | Major Events |
|---|---|
| 9 March 1933 | Dachau concentration camp, the first concentration camp in Germany, opens 10 miles northwest of Munich at an abandoned munitions factory. |
| 21 March 1933 | Oranienburg concentration camp is opened at a former brewery in Oranienburg by an SA brigade near Berlin. |
| 23 March 1933 | Enabling Act of 1933 enacted; lets Hitler rule by decree. |
| 1 April 1933 | Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses begins. |
| 7 April 1933 | Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, banning most Jews and Communists from government employment, is passed. Shortly after, a similar law affects lawyers, doctors, tax consultants, musicians, and notaries. |
| 25 April 1933 | The Law for Preventing Overcrowding in German Schools and Schools of Higher Education severely limits Jewish enrollment in German public schools. |
| 29 April 1933 | Gestapo (German Secret Police) established by Hermann Göring. |
| 2 May 1933 | German trade unions banned and replaced by the German Labor Front under the leadership of Robert Ley. |
| 10 May 1933 | Nazi book burnings begin. Books deemed "un-German," including all works by Jewish authors, are consumed in ceremonial bonfires, including a large one on the Unter den Linden adjacent to the University of Berlin. |
| 1 June 1933 | The Law for the Prevention of Unemployment provides marriage loans to genetically "fit" Germans. |
| 22 June 1933 | Inmates from Düsseldorf begin arriving at Emslandlager. |
| 14 July 1933 | The Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring, calling for compulsory sterilization of the "inferior." On the same day German citizenship is revoked from Roma and Sinti in Germany, and the Nazi Party is made the only legal political party in Germany. |
| 20 July 1933 | The Reichskonkordat is concluded after negotiations between Franz von Papen and Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, ensuring Nazi Germany legitimacy with the international community and allowing the government to gain the loyalty of German Catholics. |
| 20 August 1933 | The American Jewish Congress begins the Anti-Nazi boycott of 1933. |
| 17 September 1933 | The Reichsvertretung der Deutschen Juden is established as the legal representative body of German Jews under the leadership of Leo Baeck and Otto Hirsch. |
| 21 September 1933 Vorlage:Nobreak | Leipzig trial acquits 3 of 4 men accused of Reichstag fire. Furious, Hitler establishes a People's Court to try political crimes. |
| 22 September 1933 | The Reich Chamber of Culture is established, effectively barring Jews from the arts. |
| 29 September 1933 | German Jews and Germans with any Jewish ancestry dating to 1800 are banned from farmingunder the Reichserbhofgesetz, and their land is redistributed to ethnic Germans. |
| 4 October 1933 | Jews are prohibited from journalism under the Editor Law. |
| 24 October-24 November 1933 | The government passes a law allowing "dangerous and habitual criminals" - including vagrants, alcoholics, the unemployed, and the homeless - to be interned in concentration camps. The law is later amended to allow for their compulsory sterilization. |
1934[]
| Date | Major Events |
|---|---|
| 1 January 1934 | Hitler removes all Jewish holidays from the German calendar. |
| 24 January 1934 | All Jews are expelled from the German Labor Front. |
| April 1934 | Heinrich Himmler, who had become the leader of the entire German police force outside of Prussia the previous year, is appointed Reichsführer-SS. The Volksgericht is established to prosecute political dissidents. |
| 1 May 1934 | The Office of Racial Policy is established within the Nazi Party. |
| 17 May 1934 | Jews lose access to statutory health insurance. The German American Bund holds a rally in Madison Square Garden. |
| 9 June 1934 | The SD is established as the Nazi Party's intelligence agency. |
| 14 June 1934 | Hitler begins a purge of the SA and the non-Nazi conservative revolutionary movement through the SSunder pressure from the Reichswehr. Hitler's colleague Ernst Röhm, the former Chancellor Kurt von Schleicher, and Gustav Ritter von Kahr are killed. The move guarantees Hitler military support, quashes his opposition, and enhances the power of the SS. It also begins an increase in the persecution of homosexuals in Nazi Germany. |
| 4 July 1934 | The Concentration Camps Inspectorate (IKL) is established under Theodor Eicke. |
| 2 August-19 August 1934 | Hitler becomes President of Germany upon the death of Paul von Hindenburg, and becomes an absolute dictator by merging the office with the Chancellor to become the Führer. All Reichswehr members swear the Hitler oath. |
| 7 October 1934 | Jehovah's Witnesses in Germany issue letters protesting the persecution of their religion and affirming their political neutrality. |
| December 1934 | Himmler gains control of the Gestapo through his subordinate Reinhard Heydrich. |
| 1 April 1935 | Anti-Semitic legislation is expanded to the Saarland after the 1935 Saar status referendum. |
| May 1935 | Jews are excluded from the Wehrmacht, military members are banned from marrying "non-Aryans". |
| 26 June 1935 | The Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring is amended to institute compulsory abortion. |
| 28 June 1935 | Paragraph 175 is expanded to prohibit all homosexual acts. |
| 15 September 1935 | Nuremberg Laws are unanimously passed by the Reichstag. Jews are no longer citizens of Germany and cannot marry Germans. |
| December 1935 | The SS Race and Settlement Main Office establishes the Lebensborn program. |
| 10 February 1936 | The Gestapo is given extrajudicial authority. |
| 3 March 1936 | German Jewish doctors are banned from practicing on German patients. |
| 29 March 1936 | The SS-Totenkopfverbände is established. |
| 6 June 1936 | Minister of the Interior Wilhelm Frick authorizes the deportation of the Romani people to concentration camps such as Marzahn. |
| June 1936 | Himmler becomes Chief of German Police, and establishes the Orpo, the Sipo, and the Kripo under SS control. |
| 12 July 1936 | Concentration camp inmates are transferred to Oranienburg to begin construction on Sachsenhausen concentration camp. |
| 1 August 1936 | The 1936 Summer Olympics open in Berlin, leading to a temporary abatement in open anti-Semitism. |
| 28 August 1936 | Mass arrests of Jehovah's Witnesses begin. |
| 7 October 1936 | A 25 percent tax is imposed on Jewish assets. |
| 1937 | Beginning of the Nazis' policy of seizure of Jewish property through "Aryanization". |
| 27 February 1937 | The Kripo begins the first mass roundup of political opponents. |
| 14 March 1937 | Pope Pius XI publishes an encyclical, Mit brennender Sorge, condemning the Nazis and accusing them of violating the Reichkonkordat. |
| 15 July 1937 | Buchenwald concentration camp opens in Ettersburg five miles from Weimar. |
| 8 November 1937 | Der ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew) exhibition opens in Munich. |
| 14 December 1937 | Himmler issues a decree that the German Criminal Police (Kripo) does not have to have evidence of a specific criminal act in order to detain persons suspected of asocial or criminal behavior indefinitely. |
| 12 March 1938 | Austria annexed by Nazi Germany (the Anschluss). All German anti-Jewish laws now apply in Austria. |
| 24 March 1938 | Flossenbürg concentration camp is opened in Flossenbürg, Bavaria, ten miles from the border with Czechoslovakia. |
| 26 April 1938 | Jews are required to register all property over ℛℳ5,000 under the Four Year Plan. |
| 29 May 1938 | Hungary, under Miklós Horthy, passes the first of a series of anti-Jewish measures emulating Germany's Nuremberg Laws. |
| 13-18 June 1938 | The first mass arrests of Jews begin through Aktion Arbeitsscheu Reich. |
| 6-15 July 1938 | U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt convenes the Évian Conference in Évian-les-Bains, France, to settle the issue of Jewish refugees, but only Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic allow more refugees. |
| 14 July 1938 | Manifesto of Race published in Fascist Italy, led to stripping the Jews of Italian citizenship and governmental and professional positions |
| 8 August 1938 | The SS opens the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp complex near Linz, and establishes DEST to operate a stone quarry. |
| 31 September 1938 | The United Kingdom and France agree to allow Hitler to seize control of the Sudetenland under the Munich Agreement. |
| 9–10 November 1938 | Kristallnacht |
| 12 November 1938 | Jews are banned from buying and selling goods under Decree on the Elimination of the Jews from Economic Life, and are fined $400 million to repair damage from Kristallnacht. |
| 15 November 1938 | All Jewish children are expelled from German public schools. |
1939[]
| December 1938-August 1939 | German Jewish child refugees are allowed to emigrate to the United Kingdom and France through the Kindertransport program. |
| 24 January 1939 | Hitler directs Heydrich to establish the Central Office for Jewish Emigration. |
| 14-16 March 1939 | Czechoslovakia is dissolved as Slovakia declares independence as a satellite state, and the Nazis occupy the remainder as the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. |
| 21 March 1939 | The Klaipėda Region is annexed by Germany. |
| 13 May 1939 | MS St. Louis sails from Hamburg to Cuba with 937 refugees, mostly Jews. Only 29 are allowed in. The rest, refused by Cuba, the United States and Canada are returned to Europe. |
| June 1939 | The Wagner–Rogers Bill, which would have increased immigration quotas for German Jewish children, dies in committee despite endorsement from the Roosevelt administration. |
| 18 October 1939 | first shipment of Jews to Lublin Reservation |
| 1 September 1939 | The German invasion of Poland starts World War II in Europe. Thousands of Polish Jews are killed by the SS-Einsatzgruppen during Operation Tannenberg. |
| 2 September 1939 | Stutthof concentration camp is established near Danzig. |
| 21 September 1939 | Heydrich orders all German Jews to be shipped to Poland and for all Polish Jews to be concentrated in major cities. |
| October 1939 | Thousands of Jews are shipped from Vienna, Ostrava, and Katowice to the Lublin Reservation in Zarzecze, Nisko County. |
| October 1939 | The Netherlands establishes a refugee camp for Central European Jewish refugees at Westerbork, Drenthe. After the German invasion the camp is converted into a transit camp to transport Jews to death camps. |
| 26 October 1939 | All territory not directly annexed by Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union is placed under the Generalgouvernment. |
1940[]
| 1940 | Bergen-Belsen is opened near Celle as a prisoner-of-war camp. |
| April 1940 | Rudolf Höss visits Oświęcim to inspect its suitability as a concentration camp for Polish political prisoners and as a colony for German settlers in Lower Silesia. Himmler approves construction of Auschwitz concentration camp. |
| 9 April 1940 | The German invasion of Denmark and the Norwegian Campaign begin. |
| 30 April 1940 | The Łódź Ghetto, the first Nazi ghetto, is sealed. |
| 10 May 1940 | The Battle of France begins, and Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg quickly fall under German control. |
| 15 May 1940 | The Netherlands capitulates to the Germans, and Arthur Seyss-Inquart is appointed to lead the Reichskommissariat Niederlande. |
| 28 May 1940 | Belgium capitulates to the Germans |
| May 1940 | Auschwitz I opens |
| June 1940 | The National Assembly votes to surrender with the Armistice of 22 June 1940. Vichy France is established as a collaborationist state under Philippe Pétain and Pierre Laval. |
| 4 June 1940 | The IKL designates Neuengamme concentration camp in the outskirts of Hamburg as an independent concentration camp. |
| June 1940 | The Soviet Union annexes the Baltic States, Northern Bukovina, and Bessarabia with German support. |
| July 1940 | Germany directly annexes Alsace and Lorraine, and 3,000 Alsatian Jews are deported to the zone libreof southern France. |
| September 1940 | The Vichy government converts refugee camps established for Spanish Republican and German Jewish refugees, such as Gurs and Rivesaltes, into transit camps. |
| 6 September 1940 | King Carol II abdicates after the Second Vienna Award forces Romania to surrender Transylvania to Hungary. The National Legionary State, a coalition between the Romanian Army under Ion Antonescuand the fascist Iron Guard under Horia Simia, comes to power. |
| 20 September 1940 | Breendonk internment camp, a former National Redoubt fortress in Antwerp, is opened for prisoners in Nazi-occupied Belgium. |
| 24 September 1940 | Veit Harlan's anti-Semitic propaganda film Jud Süß premieres in Germany. |
| 27 September-24 November 1940 | Germany, Italy, and Japan conclude the Tripartite Pact establishing the Axis Powers. Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania accede to the Pact as well. |
| 15 November 1940 | The Warsaw Ghetto, the largest ghetto in the General Government, is sealed. |
| 28 November 1940 | Fritz Hippler'
s anti-Semitic pseudo-documentary The Eternal Jew premieres. |
| 18 December 1940 | Hitler approves Operation Barbarossa, the plan for the German invasion of the Soviet Union |
1941[]
| 21-23 January 1941 | The Iron Guard attempts a coup d'etat against Antonescu in the Legionnaires' rebellion. The Army suppresses the coup with aid from the Wehrmacht and the German Foreign Office, and executes a pogrom in Bucharest. |
| March 1941 | The Kraków Ghetto is established. |
| 21 May 1941 | The Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp is established near Strasbourg. |
| 22 June 1941 | Operation Barbarossa commences and the Wehrmacht enters Soviet territory |
| August 1941 | The Drancy internment camp is established by the Sipo near Paris, and is staffed by French gendarmes. |
| 3 September 1941 | First gassings at Auschwitz using Zyklon B |
| 29–30 September 1941 | Babi Yar massacre of 33,771 Jews |
| 10 October 1941 | Field Marshal Walter von Reichenau of the German Sixth Army issues a secret memorandum ordering the Wehrmacht to approve violations of international law in the invasion of the Soviet Union. |
| 11-12 December 1941 | Jews are rounded up in Lublin and interned in Majdanek concentration camp |
| 20 January 1942 | Wannsee Conference plans "final solution" |
| 27 March 1942 | first of at least 75,721 French Jews deported from France, to Auschwitz |
| 6 July 1942 | Anne Frank and her family go into hiding |
| 22 July 1942 | first deportation from Warsaw Ghetto to Treblinka during Grossaktion Warsaw |
| 23 July 1942 Vorlage:Nobreak | Treblinka death camp operates, 700-900 thousand Jews murdered |
| 4 August 1942 | Jewish internees at Breendonk are sent to the Mechelen transit camp in preparation for deportation to Auschwitz. |
| 19 November 1942 | first shipment of Jews from Norway |
| 19 April 1943 Vorlage:Nobreak | Warsaw Ghetto Uprising |
| 1943 | Bergen-Belsen is converted into a concentration camp. |
| 2 August 1943 | Treblinka revolt |
| 14 October 1943 | Sobibor revolt and escape |
| 9 November 1943 | The 43-nation United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration is founded by the Allied Powers at the White House, and is placed under the authority of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force |
1944[]
| 1944 | Raphael Lemkin, a former law lecturer at Duke University and U.S. War Department analyst, coins the term genocide in his book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe |
| 19 March 1944 | German troops occupy Hungary |
| early May 1944 | first transport of Hungarian Jews, to Auschwitz, began |
| 23 June 1944 | Red Cross representatives see elaborately staged Nazi propaganda ruse at Theresienstadt designed to portray camps as benign |
| 20 July 1944 | Attempt to assassinate Hitler fails |
| 23 July 1944 | Majdanek, first major death camp liberated, by the advancing Soviet Red Army |
| 1 August 1944 | Warsaw Uprising begins |
| 4 August 1944 | Anne Frank and her family arrested and eventually deported to Auschwitz |
| 16 August 1944 | Nazi authorities flee the Drancy camp, and it is taken by the French Red Cross. |
| October 1944 | Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp, created the previous summer when Buchenwald inmates were sent to Nordhausen to construct underground aircraft factories to produce V-2 rockets, is made an independent concentration camp. |
| 7 October 1944 | Crematorium IV at Auschwitz destroyed in Sonderkommando uprising |
| 25 November 1944 | Heinrich Himmler orders the gas chambers of Auschwitz destroyed as incriminating evidence of genocide |
1945[]
| 27 January 1945 | Auschwitz death camp liberated by the 60th Army of the First Ukrainian Front. Anniversary is observed as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. |
| Vorlage:CircaFebruary or March 1945 | Anne Frank and her sister Margot die in Bergen-Belsen |
| 4 April 1945 | Ohrdruf subcamp of Buchenwald is liberated by the 4th Armored Division, and is the first German concentration camp to be reached by American military forces |
| 11 April 1945 | Buchenwald death camp liberated by the 6th Armored Division of the U.S. Third Army. Dora-Mittelbau is liberated by the U.S. 104th Infantry Division |
| 12 April 1945 | Westerbork transit camp is liberated by the 2nd Canadian Infantry Division |
| 15 April 1945 | Bergen-Belsen death camp is liberated by the 11th Armoured Division of the British Army |
| 19 April 1945 | 9,000 prisoners of Neuengamme are evacuated to Lübeck due to the advancing British Army, while 3,000 prisoners are murdered and 700 German prisoners remain behind to destroy files and are conscripted into the SS. |
| 29 April 1945 | Dachau liberated by the Americans and Ravensbrück by the Soviets |
| 30 April 1945 | Adolf Hitler suicide |
| 3-4 May 1945 | The British liberate Neuengamme. The SS attempts to evacuate the remaining prisoners on ocean liners, resulting in the deaths of thousands of prisoners after a Royal Air Force raid sinks the Cap Ancona and the Thielbek. |
| 5 May 1945 | Mauthausen liberated by the Americans |
| 8 May 1945 | Theresienstadt liberated by the Soviets |
| 8 May 1945 | VE day — Germany surrenders unconditionally |
| 23 May 1945 | Heinrich Himmler suicide |
1945 - post-WWII Europe[]
| June 1945 | The U.S. State Department commissions a report on UNRRA displaced persons camps by Earl G. Harrison, who protests poor conditions in the camps. The Harrison Report is read by U.S. President Harry S Truman and British Prime Minister Clement Attlee and published in The New York Times |
| 20 November 1945 Vorlage:Nobreak | first Nuremberg trials, of 24 top Nazi officials |
| 22 December 1945 | President Truman issues an executive order mandating that displaced persons from the Holocaust be given preference in the U.S. immigration system. |
1946 etc - post-WWII Europe[]
| 2 July 1946 | Orson Welles' The Stranger, first feature film with concentration camp footage, released. Hundreds more feature films and documentaries about the Holocaust would be made. |
| 1947 | UNRRA is superseded by the International Refugee Organization |
| 25 June 1947 | The Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank's diary, is published in the Netherlands |
| 11 July 1947 | SS Exodus departs France for the British Mandate of Palestine. Her 4,515 passengers, mostly Holocaust survivors, are intercepted by the British Navy and shipped back to camps in Germany. |
| 1948 | The 80th United States Congress passes the Displaced Persons Act allowing 200,000 displaced persons to enter the United States |
| 14 May 1948 | State of Israel declares independence |
| 9 December 1948 | The United Nations ratifies the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide |
| 1949 | Separate postwar civilian governments in East and West Germany are formed due to the beginning of the Cold War |
| 1950 | The Displaced Persons Act is amended to remove restrictions to Jewish displaced persons. |
| 1951 | West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion begin negotiations for an agreement on reparations. |
| 1952 | The last displaced persons camps in Europe are closed, with most of its inhabitants having been successfully resettled |
| 10 September 1952 | Israel and West Germany ratify the Reparations Agreement in Luxembourg allowing for reparations payments between the two countries between 1953 and 1965. |
| 11 May 1960 | Adolf Eichmann, one of the major organizers of the Holocaust, is captured in Argentina, and brought to Israel where he is tried, convicted. |
| 31 May 1962 | Adolf Eichmann executed |
| 20 December 1963-19 August 1965 | The Frankfurt Auschwitz trials occur, the first trial of German Holocaust perpetrators by the West German civilian judicial system |
| 1986 | Elie Wiesel, a Romanian-born Holocaust survivor and the author of the 1958 semi-autobiographical book Night, is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his human rights activism. |
| 1998 | Maurice Papon, a former civil servant who facilitated the deportation of Jews from Bordeaux, is convicted for crimes the Holocaust. |