Timeline

1918:

  • World War I ends in German defeat
  • League of Nations established

 

1919:

  • Germany becomes a democratic republic
  • Laws restricting Gypsies enacted
  • Protocols of the Elders of Zion published in Germany
  • German Workers’ Party (DAP) founded
  • Pogroms in Poland and the Ukraine
  • New legal restrictions on Jews in Hungary

 

1920:

  • League of Nations meets for first time, Geneva
  • First mass meeting of National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP, or Nazis)
  • Adolf Hitler publishes first Nazi party program
  • The International Jew, an anti-Semitic book, published in the US by Henry Ford

 

1921:

  • Allies assess Germany $31 billion in war reparations
  • Hitler establishes Sturmabteilung (SA), the “Storm Troopers”
  • NSDAP begins publishing its newspaper, Völkischer Beobachter
  • Hitler named chairman of NSDAP
  • Mussolini establishes Fascist government in Italy
  • Protocols of the Elders of Zion published in Italy and France

 

1922:

  • Walther Rathenau, Jewish foreign minister of Germany, assassinated
  • Great Britain takes control of Palestine
  • First Nazi attacks on Jews in Germany

 

1923:

  • German economy collapses, Deutschemark worthless
  • France and Belgium occupy the Ruhr
  • Hitler establishes Schutzstaffel (SS)
  • Hitler’s failed “Beer Hall Putsch” in Munich

 

1923-1924:

  • Hitler serves nine months in prison, begins writing Mein Kampf

 

1924:

  • US limits immigration from eastern Europe
  • Nazis win 6.6% of vote in Reichstag elections

 

1925:

  • Fascist organizations founded in several European countries and in the US
  • Huge Nazi rally in Munich
  • Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg elected president
  • League of Nations outlaws chemical/biological warfare
  • Mein Kampf published
  • Austrian universities deny admission to Jews

 

1926:

  • Hitler Youth Organization founded
  • American Eugenics Society founded

 

1927:

  • Many Jewish cemeteries vandalized by Nazis
  • Rising anti-Semitism in Romania
  • German government lifts speaking ban on Hitler
  • Joseph Goebbels publishes Der Angriff (“The Attack”)

 

1928:

  • Nazi Party wins 12 seats in the Reichstag

 

1929:

  • Jewish settlers killed in Jerusalem
  • Hitler appoints Himmler head of the Schutzstaffel (SS)
  • Nazi party rally at Nuremberg draws over 100,000

 

1930:

  • Ustasha, Fascist organization, founded in Croatia
  • Hitler appoints himself leader of the Storm Troopers
  • Nazis win 108 seats in the Reichstag
  • Nazi Party of Denmark founded

 

1931:

  • “Führer” is Hitler’s new title
  • German banking system collapses
  • Nazi Party forms alliance with other right-wing parties
  • Nazi Party of the Netherlands founded

 

1932:

  • Hitler becomes a German citizen
  • Hitler receives 11.3 million votes in presidential election, but Hindenburg wins
  • Franz von Papen becomes Chancellor
  • German-American Bund founded in US
  • Nazis win 230 of 608 Reichstag seats, but later lose 34 of them
  • Hindenburg offers to make Hitler Chancellor; Hitler refuses

 

1933:

  • Albert Einstein speaks out against the Nazis
  • Hitler becomes Chancellor on January 30
  • Reichstag burns; Hitler blames Communists
  • Franklin D. Roosevelt becomes president of the United States
  • SA (Sturmabteilung) foments riots and attacks on Jews throughout Germany
  • Dachau, first concentration camp, established
  • Legal discrimination against Jews begins
  • Gestapo (Geheime Staatspolizei) established
  • First public book burnings
  • Nazis begin sterilizing “undesirables”
  • Germany withdraws from League of Nations

 

1934:

  • Himmler becomes head of all German police
  • Hitler announces intent to re-arm Germany, in violation of the Versailles treaty
  • Thousands attend pro-Nazi rallies in US
  • “Night of the Long Knives” – Hitler executes suspect Nazis
  • Hindenburg dies; Hitler takes all power

 

1935:

  • Germany introduces conscription, builds up armed forces
  • First “Nuremberg Laws” passed
  • Jews disqualified from German citizenship
  • New Polish government begins to persecute Jews

 

1936:

  • Germany defies Versailles Treaty, occupies Rhineland
  • “Death’s Head Units” formed to guard concentration camps
  • Reinhard Heydrich becomes head of SD (Sicherheitsdienst)
  • Spanish Civil War begins
  • Olympic Games in Berlin (August)
  • Hitler and Mussolini sign Axis pact
  • Germany signs treaty with Japan

 

1937:

  • Hitler declares Third Reich will last 1000 years
  • Buchenwald established
  • Hitler abrogates Versailles Treaty
  • SS begins “euthanasia” of “defectives” (physically and/or mentally handicapped)

 

1938:

  • About half of Germany’s Jews have now emigrated
  • Hitler names himself head of German military
  • Germany annexes Austria
  • Confiscations of property and discrimination against Jews stepped up
  • Evian Conference: many nations, including US, will not admit Jewish refugees
  • Mauthausen, a concentration camp, established in Austria
  • Munich conference, Sudetenland crisis (September)
  • Kristallnacht (November 9 & 10)
  • Jews forced to wear yellow badges
  • All Jewish students expelled from schools
  • Kindertransport begins

 

1939:

  • All Jewish economic assets seized
  • Hitler warns that war will mean extermination of Jews
  • Hungary authorizes forced labor for Jews
  • Spanish Civil War ends with Fascist victory
  • British limit Jewish immigration to Palestine
  • Refugee ship St Louis turned away from US
  • Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact between Germany and the USSR (August)
  • Invasion of Poland, World War II begins (September 1)
  • Thousands of Polish Jews interned

 

1940:

  • Six “euthanasia” centers established in Germany
  • “Blitzkrieg” invasion of western Europe begins
  • Lodz Ghetto in Poland sealed off
  • Auschwitz concentration camp established
  • France, Low Countries occupied
  • Battle of Britain
  • Wall built around Warsaw Ghetto
  • Deportation of French Jews begins

 

1941:

  • Population of Warsaw Ghetto reaches 400,000
  • Dutch workers strike to protest deportation of Jews
  • Krakow Ghetto established
  • Germany invades USSR (June)
  • Jews in Baltic states ordered to wear yellow badges
  • First Soviet prisoners at Auschwitz
  • Babi Yar massacre
  • Belzec death camp established
  • Odessa massacre
  • Japan attacks Pearl Harbor

 

1942:

  • Allies establish War Crimes Commission
  • Wannsee Conference calls for “Final Solution” (die Endlösung)
  • Gassing begins at Auschwitz, Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Majdanek, Treblinka concentration camps
  • Mass starvation in Polish ghettos
  • Lublin, Czestochowa ghettos liquidated
  • Medical experiments on Auschwitz victims
  • Switzerland expels Jewish refugees

 

1943:

  • Joint Rescue Committee begins work
  • Liquidation of Jewish slave laborers in Berlin begins
  • Bergen-Belsen concentration camp established
  • Katyn Forest massacre
  • Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (April-May)
  • Mengele begins “medical experiments” at Auschwitz
  • Himmler orders liquidation of all ghettos in occupied USSR
  • Allies invade and occupy most of Italy, Mussolini flees
  • Most of Denmark’s Jews are saved
  • Revolt of prisoners at Sobibor concentration camp

 

1944:

  • Oskar Schindler saves Jewish workers
  • Mengele’s “twin studies” (medical torture and death) at Auschwitz
  • Lodz Ghetto liquidated
  • Normandy invasion (June)
  • 290,000 Hungarian Jews exterminated in 23 days
  • Raoul Wallenberg saves thousands of Hungarian Jews
  • Paris liberated
  • Soviets begin to liberate concentration camps in East
  • Anne Frank sent to Auschwitz
  • First “death marches” from Auschwitz to German camps
  • Battle of the Bulge

 

1945:

  • Soviet army liberates Poland and Hungary
  • Anne Frank dies at Bergen-Belsen
  • Evacuation of Auschwitz
  • Death marches across Poland and Austria
  • Yalta Conference
  • US Army crosses the Rhine
  • Liberation of camps in Germany
  • Death of Franklin D. Roosevelt
  • Last death marches within Germany
  • Suicide of Adolf Hitler
  • Murder of Benito Mussolini
  • Liberation of Mauthausen
  • Surrender of Germany (May 8)
  • Gradual evacuation of camp survivors to Displaced Persons (DP) camps
  • Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombed
  • World War II ends (September 2)
  • Nazi officials imprisoned and interrogated

 

1945-1946:

  • Nuremberg War Crimes trials
  • 1.5 million Europeans in DP camps

 

after 1945:

  • Emigration of survivors to US, Israel and elsewhere

1946:

  • pogroms in Hungary and Poland

 

1948:

  • Establishment of the State of Israel

 

1951:

  • United Nations bans genocide

 

1961:

  • Trial of Adolf Eichmann in Israel

 

1966:

  • Albert Speer, Baldur von Schirach released from prison

 

1978:

  • Joseph Mengele dies in South America

 

1987:

  • Klaus Barbie tried in France

 

1993:

  • US Holocaust Memorial Museum opens

 

1996:

  • Misappropriation of Holocaust victims’ funds by Swiss bankers revealed (Eizenstat report)

 

1999:

  • Germany announces plans for Holocaust memorial in Berlin; opened in 2005

 

late 1990s:

  • Controversies over reparations for Holocaust survivors

 

2000 and after:

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