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Germany was defeated and the Nazis blamed the Jews for their defeat -
Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party came to power in Germany. -
Outside the town of Dachau, Germany, the SS (Schutzstaffel, Protection Squads) establishes its first concentration camp to incarcerate political opponents. -
Germany annexed neighboring Austria and the Sudetenland View This Term in the Glossary and occupied the Czech lands. -
Nazi Party officials, members of the SA and the Hitler Youth carry out a wave of violent anti-Jewish pogroms throughout Greater Germany. Kristallnacht was an important turning point for Germany’s Jews. Afterwards, many Jews concluded that there was no future for them in Nazi Germany. -
Prewar and wartime territorial expansion eventually brought millions more Jewish people under German control. Nazi Germany started it. -
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. -
German authorities order the Warsaw ghetto to be sealed. It is the largest ghetto in both area and population, confining more than 350,000 Jews (about 30 percent of the city's population) in an area of about 1.3 square miles, or 2.4 percent of the city's total area. -
the organized and systematic mass murder of European Jews. -
Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), convenes the Wannsee Conference in a villa outside Berlin. At this conference, he presents plans to coordinate a European-wide “Final Solution of the Jewish Question” to key officials from the German State and the Nazi Party. -
Allied Powers defeated Nazi Germany in World War II.