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Adolf Hitler was born on April 20th, 1889 in Braunau am Inn, Austria. -
Hitler went to Vienna in 1907 where he applied to the Viennese Academy of Fine Arts but was twice turned down. -
Hitler organized Bavarian nationalists under a figurehead of General Ludendorff into a coup (or "putsch"). They declared their new government in a beer hall in Munich; a group of 3,000 marched through the streets. -
The first Nazi concentration camp was Dachau, established in March 1933, near Munich. -
Hitler moved with great speed to isolate and expel opponents from power, shutting trade unions and removing communists, conservatives, and Jews. Hitler soon took over the role of president when Hindenburg died and merged the role with that of chancellor to become führer ("leader") of Germany. -
College students crowded the streets of Berlin and burned books that were considered to be against the Germanic ideology. Most of the books being burnt to ash are Jewish novels and religious text. -
The Nuremberg Race Laws of 1935 deprived German Jews of their rights of citizenship, giving them the status of "subjects" in Hitler's Reich. -
On October 27, over 15,000 other Jews, originally from Poland, had been expelled from Germany without any warning. They were forcibly transported by train in boxcars then dumped at the Polish border.
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On November 9, mob violence broke out as the regular German police stood by and crowds of spectators watched. Nazi storm troopers along with members of the SS and Hitler Youth beat and murdered Jews, broke into and wrecked Jewish homes, and brutalized Jewish women and children.
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German occupation authorities established the first ghetto in occupied Poland in Piotrków Trybunalski in October 1939. -
Following the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, the Nazis opened forced-labor camps where thousands of prisoners died from exhaustion, starvation, and exposure. SS units guarded the camps. During World War II, the Nazi camp system expanded rapidly. In some camps, Nazi doctors performed medical experiments on prisoners. -
With the implementation of the "Final Solution" (the plan to murder all European Jews) beginning in late 1941, the Germans systematically destroyed the ghettos. The Germans and their auxiliaries either shot ghetto residents in mass graves located nearby or deported them. Jews were deported to killing centers. -
Opened in December 1941, was Chelmno, where Jews and Roma View This Term in the Glossary were gassed in mobile gas vans. -
In August 1944, German SS and police completed the destruction of the last major ghetto, in Lodz. -
Hitler shot himself in the head due to Russians closing in on Berlin from multiple directions.
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German forces in Berlin surrender: The Battle of Berlin ended on 2 May. On that date, General der Artillerie Helmuth Weidling, the commander of the Berlin Defense Area, unconditionally surrendered the city to General Vasily Chuikov of the Red Army.