Holocaust Timeline
January 30, 1933: President Hindenburg appoints Adolf Hitler Chancellor of Germany
March 20, 1933: SS opens the Dachau concentration camp outside of Munich
April 1, 1933: Boycott of Jewish-owned shops and businesses in Germany
April 7, 1933: Law for the Reestablishment of the Professional Civil Service removes Jewish from government service and Law on the Admission to the Legal Profession forbids the admission of Jews to the bar
May 11, 1933: Nazi book burnings
July 14, 1933: Law for the Prevention of Progeny with Hereditary Diseases, which called for the sterilization of all persons who suffered from diseases considered hereditary, including mental illness, learning disabilities, physical deformity, epilepsy, blindness, deafness, and severe alcoholism. With the law’s passage the Third Reich also stepped up its propaganda against the disabled, regularly labeling them “life unworthy of life” or “useless eaters” and highlighting their burden upon society.
August 2, 1934: President von Hindenburg dies
September 15, 1935: Nuremberg Race Laws established, defining a Jew as someone who has three or four Jewish grandparents
March 16, 1935: Germany introduces military conscription
March 7, 1936: German troops march unopposed into the French-occupied Rhineland March 11-13, 1938: Germany incorporates Austria in the Anschluss (Union)
September 29, 1938: Germany, Italy, Great Britain, and France sign the Munich agreement which forces the Czechoslovak Republic to cede the Sudetenland, including key Czechoslovak military defensive positions, to Nazi Germany.
November 9/10, 1938: Kristallnacht
January 30, 1939: In a speech to the Reichstag, Hitler threatens the extermination of Europe’s Jews in the event of war.
May 13, 1939: The St. Louis sets sail from Hamburg, Germany to Havana, Cuba
August 23, 1939: Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Agreement: Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union sign a nonaggression agreement and a secret codicil dividing Eastern Europe into spheres of influence.
September 1, 1939: Germany invades Poland, starting World War II in Europe
September 1, 1939: Aktion T4, the extermination of the handicapped begins
September 17, 1939: The Soviet Union occupies Poland from the east
September 21, 1939: Heydrich orders the deportation of Jews, Poles, and Gypsies from German- occupied Poland.
October 8, 1939: Germans establish a ghetto in Piotrków Trybunalski, Poland
November 23, 1939: Jews who are living in the General Government are required to wear a blue Star of David on a white armband.
January 4, 1940: The first gas chamber is used to killed handicapped patients at Brandenburg.
April 9, 1940: Germany invades Denmark and Norway
May 10, 1940: Germany attacks Belgium, France, Luxemburg, and the Netherlands
July 10, 1940: Battle of Britain begins
August 27, 1940: Himmler orders the creation of a concentration camp at Auschwitz.
October 12, 1940 Warsaw ghetto is established.
April 6, 1941: Germany invades Yugoslavia and Greece
June 17, 1941: Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing units) given orders to exterminate Jews during the Soviet invasion.
June 22, 1941: Germany invades the Soviet Union
July- August 15, 1941: The Germans establish the Kovno Ghetto in Lithuania
July 6, 1941: Einsatzgruppen shoot nearly 3,000 Jews at the Seventh Fort, one of the 19th-century fortifications surrounding Kovno
August 3, 1941: Cardinal August Count von Galen of Muenster denounces the “euthanasia” killing program in a public sermon
August 23, 1941: Himmler issues a decree halting all Jewish emigration from greater Germany.
September 28-29, 1941: Einsatzgruppen shoot about 34,000 Jews at Babi Yar, outside Kiev, Ukraine (USSR)
November 7, 1941: Einsatzgruppen round up 13,000 Jews from the Minsk ghetto and kill them in nearby Tuchinki (Tuchinka)
November 25/29, 1941: Five trainloads of German Jews are massacred after arriving in Kovno, Lithuania.
November 30, 1941: Einsatzgruppen shoot 10,000 Jews from the Riga ghetto in the Rumbula Forest
December 6, 1941: Soviet winter counteroffensive
December 7, 1941: Japan bombs Pearl Harbor, and the U.S. declares war the next day
December 8, 1941: The first killing operations begin at Chelmno in occupied Poland
December 11, 1941: Nazi Germany declares war on the United States
January 16, 1942: Germans begin the mass deportation of more than 65,000 Jews and 5,007 Gypsies from Lodz to the Chelmno killing center
January 20, 1942: Wannsee Conference held near Berlin, Germany for German officials to discuss the Final Solution of the Jewish Question
March 27, 1942: Germans begin the deportation of 64,759 Jews from Drancy, an internment camp outside Paris, to the east (primarily to Auschwitz)
June 28, 1942: Germany launches a new offensive towards the city of Stalingrad
July 15, 1942: Germans begin mass deportations of nearly 100,000 Jews from the occupied Netherlands to the east (primarily to Auschwitz)
July 22, 1942: Germans begin the mass deportation of over 300,000 Jews from the Warsaw ghetto to the Treblinka killing center
September 12, 1942: Germans complete the mass deportation of about 265,000 Jews from Warsaw to Treblinka
November 23, 1942: Soviet troops counterattack at Stalingrad, trapping the German Sixth Army in the city
April 19, 1943: Warsaw ghetto uprising begins
October 1, 1943: Rescue of Jews in Denmark
November 6, 1943: Soviet troops liberate Kiev
March 19, 1944: Germans forces occupy Hungary
May 15, 1944: Germans begin the mass deportation of about 440,000 Jews from Hungary
June 6, 1944: D-Day: Allied forces invade Normandy, France
June 22, 1944: The Soviets launch an offensive in eastern Belorussia (Belarus)
July 25, 1944: Anglo-American forces break out of Normandy
August 1, 1944: Polish Home Army uprising begins in Warsaw
August 15, 1944: Allied forces land in southern France
August 25, 1944: Liberation of Paris
December 16, 1944: Battle of the Bulge
January 12, 1945: Soviet winter offensive
January 18, 1945: Death March of nearly 60,000 prisoners from the Auschwitz camp system in southern Poland
January 25, 1945: Death March of nearly 50,000 prisoners from the Stutthof camp system in northern Poland
January 27, 1945: Soviet troops liberate the Auschwitz camp complex
March 7, 1945: U.S. troops cross the Rhine River at Remagen
April 16, 1945: The Soviets launch their final offensive, encircling Berlin
April 29, 1945: American forces liberate the Dachau concentration camp
April 30, 1945: Adolf Hitler commits suicide
May 7, 1945: Germany surrenders to the Western Allies
May 8, 1945: V-E Day (Victory in Europe)
May 9, 1945: Germany surrenders to the Soviets
Aug. 14, 1945: V-J Day (Victory in Japan)