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Before 1933
World war 1 devastated Europe and created new countries. Following the war, the continent struggled with theloss of millions, and damage to property and industry. In 1933, over 9 million jews lived in Europe,struggling through the depression just as every other resident of the continent. -
Adolf Hitler rises to power in Germany
1933, The nazi power brings an end to Weimar republic. The new regime establlished the first concentration camp imprisoning Jehovahs witnesses, political opponents, homosexuals and others classified as "dangerous". German Jews began being regulated, restricted from most things, and stripped of all rights. -
Jews rapidly become "inferior."
May 31: Jews barred from serving in the German armed forces
September 15: "Nuremberg Laws": first anti-Jewish racial laws enacted; Jews no longer considered German citizens; Jews could not marry Aryans; nor could they fly the German flag.
November 15: Germany defines a "Jew": anyone with three Jewish grandparents; someone with two Jewish grandparents who identifies as a Jew. -
Holocaust begins
Buchenwald concentration camp opens. The holocaust begins, German officials confiscate Jewish property, in many places require Jews to wear identifying armbands, and establish ghettos and forced-labor camps. -
Germany Invades Poland
September 1: Beginning of World War II: Germany invades Poland. In the following weeks, 16.336 civilians are murdered by the Nazies in 714 localities. At least 5,000 victims were Jews -
Germans invade Soviet lands
1941, Germany turnes on its ally, the Soviet Union. bringing on local civilian and police support, Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing units) follow the German army and carry out mass shootings as its advanced into Soviet lands. Gas vans also appear on the eastern front in fall 1941. -
Jewish population decreases drastically
In a period marked by intense fighting on both the eastern and western fronts of World War II, Nazi Germany also intensified its pursuit of the “Final Solution.” These years saw systematic deportations of millions of Jews to increasingly efficient killing centers using poison gas. -
"The final Solution."
The vast majority of ghetto inhabitants died from disease or starvation, were shot, died from exhaustion as a result of being over worked, or were deported to killing centers where they were poisioned, burned, or attacked and beaten. By the end of the war in spring 1945, as the Germans and their Axis partners were pushed back on both fronts, Allied troops uncovered the full extent of crimes committed during the Holocaust. -
The war comes to an end.
By May 1945, the Germans and their collaborators had murdered six million European Jews as part of a systematic plan of genocide—the Holocaust. When Allied troops entered the concentration camps, they discovered piles of corpses, bones, and human ashes—testimony to Nazi mass murder. Soldiers also found thousands of survivors—Jews and non-Jews—suffering from starvation and disease. -
The result of the war
With few possibilities for the survivors, tens of thousands of homeless Holocaust survivors were housed in displaced persons camps.In the following years, many international and domestic courts conducted trials of accused war criminals.
