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The first official Nazi concentration camp opens in Dachau, a small village located near Munich
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Law excluding East European Jewish immigrants of German citizenship.
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Hitler proclaims himself Führer und Reichskanzler (Leader and Reich Chancellor). Armed forces must now swear allegiance to him.
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"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.
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Germany defines a "Jew": anyone with three Jewish grandparents; someone with two Jewish grandparents who identifies as a Jew.
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Jewish doctors barred from practicing medicine in German institutions.
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Germans march into the Rhineland, previously demilitarized by the Versailles Treaty.
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Buchenwald concentration camp opens.
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17,000 Polish Jews living in Germany expelled; Poles refused to admit them; 8,000 are stranded in the frontier village of Zbaszyn.
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Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass): anti-Jewish pogrom in Germany, Austria, and the Sudetenland; 200 synagogues destroyed; 7,500 Jewish shops looted; 30,000 male Jews sent to concentration camps (Dachau, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen).
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All Jewish pupils expelled from German schools
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The Germans take Czechoslovakia.
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Ravensbruck concentration camp opens.
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First Polish ghetto established in Piotrkow.
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Jews in German-occupied Poland forced to wear an arm band or yellow star.
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Battle of Britain begins
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Heydrich appointed by Göring to implement the "Final Solution"
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Japanese attack Pearl Harbor and US declares war on Japan and Germany
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Extermination begins in Belzec; by end of 1942 600,000 Jews murdered
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Armed revolt in Sobibor extermination camp
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D-Day: Allied invasion at Normandy
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Evacuation of Auschwitz; beginning of death march
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V-J Day: Victory over Japan proclaimed
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Japan surrenders; end of World War II