Holocaust facts

Holocaust and WWII Timeline

  • Adolf Hitler appointed as German Chancellor.

  • First Nazi concentration camp is formed at Dachau

  • Gestapo, Nazi secret police, were formed

  • 25,000 "un-German" books were burned

  • Germany withdraws from the League of Nations

  • Nuremberg laws were established and relationships between Jews and Aryans were banned

  • Hitler Youth membership made compulsory for all boys

  • Adolf Hitler orders the release of imprisoned Austrian Nazis

  • Nazis destroy the synagogue in Nuremberg

  • Hitler and Chamberlain sign the Munich Agreement

  • "Crystal Night" - Jewish shops and synagogues were destroyed

  • Nazi-Soviet Pact, agreement made to divide Poland

  • Anglo-Polish Common defense pact

  • Hitler invaded Poland and defeated it

  • Britain and France declared war on Germany

  • Daylight and night bombings on Britain

  • 356 ghettos in Poland. Ghettos were overcrowded and filthy

  • Mass murder of Jews start. Einsatzgruppen kill 1,500,000 Jews by shooting them but death camps would start to be used.

  • Nazis began using gassing vans

  • Japanese attacks US at Pearl Harbor

  • Hitler declares war on the US

  • Auschwitz, Treblinka, Belzec, and Sobibór began as concentration camps. 2.7 million Jews were killed in these camps.

  • At the end of 1942, 5.4 million Jews were killed

  • American's free 33,000 inmates from concentration camps.