|
|
|
|
Holocaust Chronology A Partial
Chronology of the Holocaust. All entries are either direct quotes or close
paraphrases found in Judah Bribetz with Edward L. Greenstein and Regina S.
Stein, The Timetables of Jewish History:
A Chronology of the Most Important People and Events in Jewish History. (New
York: A Touchstone Book Published
by Simon & Schuster, 1993). 1933 On the eve of Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, it is
estimated that approximately 503,000 Jews lived in Germany.
They comprised less than 1% of the total German population of 65 million.
About 99,000 (19.8%) of Germany’s Jewish population
were eastern
European nationals. The rate of
intermarriage reached 60% by 1932.
The Jewish population of Berlin was 160,564. January. Adolf
Hitler, 1889 – 1945, legally becomes Chancellor of Germany. February 3
Hitler issues decree giving his government the power to ban political
meetings and to suppress publications considered harmful to the public interest Feb. 27. Reichstag
fire alleged by Hitler to have been a Communist plot to take power.
Hitler demands new laws to allow the arrest and imprisonment without
trial. Paul von Hindenburg signs emergency decrees. Communist members of Reichstag are arrested. March. Reichstag
elections. Nazis have 44% of the
vote. Not a majority. But together
with other parties, they form a coalition government, which alters the Weimar
Constitution and initiates the Third Reich. March 10. First
Concentration Camp established at Dachau near Munich. Until captured by the Allies on April 29, 1945, 40,000 are
killed of which 80 to 90% are Jews. April 1. Nazis
stage a one-day boycott of all Jewish businesses in Germany. April 26. Nazis
take over German State Secret Police. Gestapo. New German civil service law, the first anti-Semitic
ordinance, is passed. It prohibits
anyone who is not of Aryan descent from public employment.
This act gives “legal status to the concept of racial difference
between German Jews and all other Germans.” Nazi government passes a law against the excessive
number of students of foreign race in German schools and universities.
German Jews are considered “of foreign race.” May 10. Nazis
arrange the public burning of books by Jewish and non-Nazi authors in great
bonfires throughout Germany. October. Germany
withdraws from the League of Nations. November. National
plebiscite approved by over 90%, Hitler’s decision to withdraw from the
League. 1934. January. Germany
and Poland enter a 10-year non-aggression pact. Poland becomes first country to enter into friendly relations
with Nazi Germany. June. Storm
Troop leader Ernst Roem is murdered on Hitler’s orders. The Night of the Long Knives. July. Austrian
Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss is assassinated as a Nazi coup to take over
Austria fails. August. Hitler
becomes President of Germany upon the death of Paul von Hindenburg.
88% of voters approve in a plebiscite. October. Hitler
secretly orders expansion of German army and creation of an air force. 1935 January. Plebiscite
held in Saar region under the auspices of the League of Nations.
Saar returned to Germany. Almost
all of the 5,000 Jews in the Saar opt to assume French or Belgian citizenship. March. Hitler
denounces disarmament clauses of the Versailles Treaty.
Introduces compulsory military service training and enlarges the army.
Jews are excluded from military service. May. France
and Soviet Union agree on a five-year mutual assistance pact. September. Nuremberg
Laws are adopted. German Jews are
stripped of their German citizenship rights.
It differentiates between Reich citizens and State subjects. October. Heinrich
Himmler, chief of the SS and Gestapo, gains absolute control over German
internal security. 1936 March. Hitler
sends troops into demilitarized Rhineland in violation of Versailles Treaty.
He gets away with it. June. Leon
Blum, a Jew and a Socialist, becomes Premier of France. July. Civil
War breaks out in Spain. Loyalists
are anti-clerical and anti-monarchical leftists.
Nationalists are conservatives led by General Francisco Franco.
Germany and Italy back Franco. Soviet
Union supports Loyalists. Germans
try out some of their weapons systems. Dry
run for World War II. October. Germany
and Italy form alliance. 1937 John Gunther (1901 – 1970), U.S. foreign
correspondent, writes a best seller, Inside Europe, in which he reports
of the depth and breadth of Nazi Germany’s anti-Semitism. The Nazis order all works by Marc Chagall in German
museums taken down. The Nazis hold exhibition Degenerate Art in Munich,
which includes works of famous 20th-century Jewish artists. March. Pope
Pius XI (1857 – 1939) issues an encyclical “With Burning Anxiety,” which
rejects the race-conscious myths of “race” and “blood” as contrary to
Christian truth but does not mention nor directly criticize anti-Semitism. April. German
aircraft, assisting the nationalists in the Spanish civil war, destroy the city
of Guernica. Guernica becomes an
anti-Fascist symbol. It is
memorialized by Pablo Picasso’s famous painting. May. Neville
Chamberlain succeeds Stanley Baldwin as prime minister of Great Britain.
July. Japan
attacks China, triggering a full-scale Sino-Japanese war that lasts until 1945. July. The
Nazis open the Buchenwald concentration camp.
It first houses professional criminals.
Jewish political prisoners begin to arrive in June 1938. 1938 April. German
Jews are required to inform authorities of their property worth over 5,000
Marks. The Nazi party newspaper, Volkischer Beobachter,
begins a new anti-Semitic campaign. “Jews,
abandon all hope. Our net is so
fine that there is not a hole through which you can slip.” Within one month of the Nazi occupation, more than 500
Jews commit suicide in Austria. June. Nazis
require the registration and marking of German Jewish-owned businesses. July. Munich’s
main synagogue is demolished on Adolf Hitler’s express orders. Licenses of German Jewish physicians and in September
licenses of German Jewish lawyers are withdrawn. September. Munich
Conference. Leaders of Germany
(Hitler), Italy (Mussolini), France (Daladier), and Great Britain (Chamberlain)
meet at the Munich Conference and agree to the annexation of part of
Czechoslovakia, the Sudetenland, to Germany. The Italian Government passes “racial” legislation
against the Jews, barring them from studying or teaching in a school of higher
learning and revoking the citizenship of all foreign Jews obtained after January
1919 and decreeing their expulsion within six months.
In November, further discriminatory legislation is added, including
prohibition of marriages between Jews and Aryans and the exclusion of Jews from
military and civil administrative positions. Pope Pius XI, in an address to a group of Belgian
pilgrims, declares, “It is not possible for Christians to take part in
anti-Semitism. Spiritually we are
Semites” This statement is
omitted from all Italian newspaper accounts of the address. October. German
troops occupy the Sudetenland, annexing 10,000 square miles of Czech territory
with a population of 3.5 million. More
than 20,000 Jews live in the Sudetenland. Most
flee to the Czechoslovakian provinces of Bohemia and Moravia. November. Kristallnacht
(Night of Broken Glass) riots occur in Germany and Austria.
The Nazis set fire to 191 synagogues.
Ninety-one Jews are killed. More
than 30,000, or more than one in ten of Germany’s remaining Jews, are arrested
and sent to concentration camps. The
Nazis break into and loot thousands of homes and shops.
A fine of 1 billion marks is imposed upon all German Jewry. The Nazis require the Aryanization and/or liquidation of
German Jewish-owned retail businesses. In
December this rule is extended to Jewish-owned industrial enterprises. Jewish children are prohibited from attending German
public schools. 1939 Cardinal Pacelli (1876 – 1958) is elected Pope Pius
XII. March. The
Spanish civil war ends as Madrid is formally surrendered to the nationalist
leader, General Francisco Franco. It is estimated that between 20,000 and 50,000
foreigners fought on the Loyalist side during the Spanish civil war.
Of these, it is estimated that Jews numbered between 6,000 and 7,000 and
40% of the Americans in the Lincoln Brigade. August. Albert
Einstein writes to U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt advising of the military
potential of atomic energy. His
letter leads to the Manhattan Project and the development of the atomic bomb. V.M. Molotov and Joachim von Ribbentrop, foreign
ministers of the Soviet Union and Germany sign a German-Russian nonaggression
pact in Moscow. They secretly carve
out spheres of influence in eastern and central Europe, with Russia getting
eastern Poland, Bessarabia, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Germany and the Soviet Union sign a friendship and
boundary treaty outlining the Polish territory each will occupy. September. Germany
invades Poland. Great Britain and
France order total mobilization and on September 3 declare war on Germany.
It is the beginning of World War II. Adolf Hitler personally orders the first Nazi program of
murder, a “euthanasia program.” Known
as T4, over 70,000 mentally ill or otherwise “hopelessly” ill Germans—none
Jewish—are killed between September 1939 and the late summer of 1941 under
this operation. The victims are
gassed. Reinhard Heydrich (1904 – 1942) holds a conference in
Berlin of his Einsatzgruppen chiefs and directs them, as the first prerequisite
of the “ultimate aim,” which is to be kept a “total secret,” to clear
Jews out of western Poland, concentrate them in ghettoes in larger cities, and
near railway junctions or along a railway “so that future measures may be
accomplished more easily.” The Soviet Union invades Poland from the east.
Ten days later, Warsaw surrenders to the Nazi invaders. After the commencement of World War II, the Nazis
maintain a policy of permitting mass emigration of Jews from the Greater Reich
until the end of 1941. During the
period, 71,500 Jews manage to flee. In the six-week period between the end of September
to
the middle of November, more than 250,000 Polish Jews flee eastward to the
Soviet zone of Poland and to the Soviet Union. By September, 109,000 Jews have succeeded in emigrating
from Nazi-held Austria, leaving 66,000 remaining at the outbreak of World War
II. October. Germany
begins deporting Austrian and Czech Jews to Poland. Hans Frank (1900 – 1946) is named governor-general of
the German-occupied Polish territories under the general government.
He becomes responsible for the persecution and plundering of the Polish
population and the extermination of the Jews.
Frank announces that all Jews between the ages of 14 and 60 will be
required to work and will be organized in forced labor teams in labor camps. The Nazis establish the first Polish ghetto, in Piotrkow,
to confine the Jews. As October ends, 5,000 Polish Jews are murdered by
Germans in the first 55 days of the German conquest of Polish territory. November. The
Soviet Union invades Finland Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland are required to wear Star
of David identification badges. December 19. Hans
Frank writes: “We have now
approximately 2,500,000 of them in the General Government and counting
half-Jews, perhaps 3,500,000. We
cannot shoot 2,500,000 Jews, neither can we poison them. We shall have to take steps, however, designed to extirpate
them in some way—and this will be done.” The Germans establish a second ghetto in Poland, at
Radomsko. 1940 January. The
Nazis officially found the Lodz ghetto. October. The
Nazis establish the Warsaw ghetto, requiring all Jews to move into the ghetto
within six weeks. The General Government of Poland orders the cessation of
granting exist visas to Polish Jews, explaining that Jewish emigration to the
U.S. would assist American Jewry in its battle against Germany. 1941 During 1941, the Nazis murdered 1.1 million Jews. March. Adolf
Eichmann is appointed head of the Gestapo’s section (IV B 4) for Jewish
affairs and the expulsion of Jewish populations. Adolf Hitler personally orders the destruction of the
grave of Heinrich Heine, 19th century German Jewish poet, in the
Montmatre section of Paris. May. All
German consulates are informed that Hermann Goering, Nazi leader, has banned the
emigration of Jews from all occupied territories, including France, in view of
the “doubtless imminent final solution.”
This is the first mention of any “final solution.” July. Within
five weeks of the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the German Einsatzgruppen
kill more Jews than the total number killed by the Nazis in the previous eight
years of their rule. They work
behind an advancing army and are assisted by many local collaborators. Hermann Goering issues a memorandum to Reinhard Heydrich,
instructing him to “carry out all the necessary preparations with regard to
organizational and financial matters for bringing about a complete solution of
the Jewish question in the German sphere of influence in Europe.” Reinhard Heydrich advises Adolf Eichmann that Adolf
Hitler had ordered the physical extermination of the Jews.
Eichmann confirms this event during his pretrial interrogation in Israel
by Captain Avner Less in 1960. August. Reinhard
Heydrich writes Heinrich Himmler, “It may be safely assumed that in the future
there will be no more Jews in the annexed Eastern Territories.” September. German
posters throughout Kiev order the assembly of Jews for resettlement.
The Jews are brought to the Babi Yar ravine, outside the city, and 34,000
are machine gunned to death by the SS. The
SS reports that “the Jews still believed to the very last moment before being
executed that indeed all that was happening was that they were being
resettled.” October. The
Germans destroy seven Paris synagogues. Hans Frank tells the ministers of the General Government
of Poland, “As far as the Jews are concerned, I want to tell you quite frankly
that they must be done away with one way or another.” 1942 During 1942, the Nazis murdered 2.7 million Jews.
It is the year of the greatest coordination of the “final solution.” January. The
Nazis begin the final destruction of the Jewish community of Odessa with the
deportation from its Slobodka suburb of over 19,000 Jews to labor camps where,
within a year and a half, almost all die. A conference of Nazi officials is held at Wannsee, a
suburb of Berlin. Reinhard Heydrich
tells assembled Nazi “Jewish experts” from across Europe that Hermann
Goering has placed him in charge of preparations for “the final solution of
the Jewish Question” and that implementation is to be carried out in
coordination with his own “department head,” Adolf Eichmann.
He explains that the “final solution” concerns not only Jews already
under German rule, but “some eleven million Jews” throughout Europe. In a Berlin speech marking the ninth anniversary of Nazi
rule in Germany, Adolf Hitler speaks of the Jews: “They are our old enemy as it is, they have experienced at
our hands an upsetting of their ideas, and they rightfully hate us, just as much
as we hate them. . . . The war will not end as the Jews imagine it will, namely
with the uprooting of the Aryans, but the result of this war will be the
complete annihilation of the Jews. Between January 1941 to January 1942, 48,662 Jews of
Warsaw died of starvation. March. The
gassing of Jews begins at the Auschwitz II (Birkenau) extermination camp. May. An
Einsatzkommando unit, killing inside the Soviet Union, reports that the whole of
Crimea has been “purged of Jews.” The
unit had killed 91,678 Jews in four and a half months. May. The
Sobibor extermination camp begins operation.
It functions until October 1943. The peak period of extermination is from
May to October 1942. In May, 36,000
Jews, mainly from eastern Poland and occupied areas of the Soviet Union, but
also from Holland, Austria, Belgium, France, and Czechoslovakia, are gassed
there. The total number of victims
in 18 months is estimated at 250,000. The Nazis open a death camp at Maly Trostenets, the site
of a collective farm on the outskirts of Minsk. In addition to Jews from Minsk, Jews from Germany, Austria,
and Czechoslovakia are brought there for extermination in mobile gas vans.
About 20 survivors are liberated by the Russians in July 1944. On the site of an existing slave labor camp,
construction of the Treblinka extermination camp begins.
It utilizes technology developed in the already operational Belzec and
Sobibor camps. Killings begin on
July 23. Polish authorities in London confirm the Jewish
Socialist Bund report of the mass murder by the Nazis of over 700,000 Jews in
Poland. July. Twenty
thousand attend a rally at New York’s Madison Square Garden to protest Nazi
atrocities. For the first time,
President Franklin D. Roosevelt, in his message, makes specific mention of
atrocities against Jews and declares the American people “will hold the
perpetrators of these crimes to strict accountability in a day of reckoning
which will surely come.” Deportations to Belzec resume. From mid-July to mid-December, 414,000 Polish Jews and more
than 100,000 Jews from Germany Austria, Czechoslovakia and other countries are
exterminated. When added to the
93,000 killed between March and June, the total number of Jews exterminated at
Belzec comes to over 600,000. Murder
at Belzec ceases in December 1942. Between July 23 and August 28, the first five weeks of
operations at Treblinka, 312,500 Jews, including 245,000 from Warsaw, are
deported to the camp. Chaotic
conditions cause a temporary cessation of deportations; . . . deportations from
Warsaw resume on September 3, and by September 21 nearly 254,000 Jews from
Warsaw are murdered there. August. During
August, more than 400,000 Jews are murdered in German-occupied Europe. September. An
instruction of the Swiss police explains that “refugees on the grounds of race
alone are not political refugees,” and Swiss frontier police refuse entry to
more than 9,000 Jews from France. November. The
selection and gas chambers begin operation at Majdanek, near Lublin, which was
established in July 1941 as a slave labor camp. Altogether, 13,000 Jews are sent to Majdanek in 1942-1943, of
whom about 60% are either shot or gassed upon arrival.
An estimated 125,000 Jews will be exterminated at Majdanek before its
liberation by the Russians on July 24, 1944. December. Paul
Josef Goebbels notes in his diary that “the Italians are extremely lax in the
treatment of the Jews. They protect
the Italian Jews both in Tunis and in occupied France. . . . The Jewish question
is causing us a lot of trouble. Everywhere,
even among our allies, the Jews have friends to help them.” 1943 During 1943, the Nazis murdered 500,000 Jews. January. The
Italians refuse to cooperate with the Nazis in rounding up the Jews living in
the zone of France under their control. In
March, they prevent the Nazis from deporting Jews living in their zone.
Beginning early in the year, as the Russian army begins
advancing on the eastern front, the
Nazis decide to destroy the evidence of mass murder by digging up the mass
graves of murdered Jews and burning the remains. SS Colonel Paul Blobel commands the personnel, which includes
Jews and Russian prisoners of war, assigned to this task.
They are known as the Blobel Commando, or Special Commando 1005. February. Eight
Jews from Finland are deported to Auschwitz.
Thereafter, Finland refuses to agree to the Nazi request for the
deportation of any of its more than 2,000 Jews. Bulgaria agrees to allow the Nazis to deport 11,000 Jews
from the former Yugoslav region of Macedonia and the former Greek region of
Thrace, two areas occupied by Bulgaria in 1941. Italian military authorities in Lyons, France, force the
French to rescind an order for the deportation of several hundred French Jews to
Auschwitz. Joachim von Ribbentrop
complains to Benito Mussolini that “Italian military circles . . . lack a
proper understanding of the Jewish question.” The Hungarian government refuses to comply with the Nazi
request for 10,000 Hungarian Jews to be forced laborers in the copper mines at
Bor, in Yugoslavia. Several months
later, it will yield to the Nazi request. March. In
what will become known as the miracle of the Jewish people, Bulgaria releases
all of its Jews taken into custody for deportation.
At Nazi insistence, the Bulgarian government had ordered the deportation
of its 48,000 Jews. A public outcry
forced the government to rescind the deportation order. The first of four new gas chambers and crematoria begins
operation at Auschwitz II. In three
months, all four will be operating. One
million five hundred thousand Jews are murdered at Auschwitz II. The U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives pass a
resolution condemning Nazi atrocities and urging punishment of those
responsible. The resolution is
silent on advocating rescue efforts. Rabbi Stephen S. Wise and Joseph Proskauer, president of
the American Jewish Committee, meet with British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden
in Washington, D. C. Eden rejects
their plea for the Allies to ask Germany to receive food for Europe’s Jews, to
let them leave occupied Europe, and to assist in the removal of 60,000-70,000
Bulgarian Jews to Turkey. According
to Harry Hopkins, Eden said: “Hitler
might well take us up on any such offer and there simply are not enough ships. .
. in the world to handle them.” April. Germany
reports the uncovering of a mass grave of thousands of Polish army soldiers
killed by the Russians at Katyn, near Smolensk. On the day of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, the Allies
convene an international conference in Bermuda to study the refugee question.
No government expresses a willingness to accept Jewish victims of Nazism. Palestine is excluded from consideration.
Israel Goldstein of the Synagogue Council of America declares, “Victims
are not being rescued because the democracies do not want them.” Adolf Hitler personally urges the leader of Hungary,
Admiral Miklos Horthy, to permit the “resettlement” of Hungary’s Jews.
Horthy refuses and insists that “the Jews cannot be exterminated or
beaten to death.” The Nazis begin the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto
using SS troops led by General Juergen Stroop.
Twelve hundred Jewish fighters led by Mordecai Anielewicz resist and hold
off the Nazis for five weeks. By the end of April, the Germans finish the cremation of
more than 600,000 Jews exterminated at Belzec, and all signs of the camp are
liquidated. There were only two
Jewish survivors from Belzec, Rudolf Reder and Chaim Hirszman.
Hirszman is killed by Polish antisemites in March 1946. May. General
Juergen Stroop reports that “there is no more Jewish quarter in Warsaw,” the
action ending that evening “by blowing up the Warsaw synagogue” (the Great
Synagogue on Tlomackie Street). According
to Stroop’s calculations, 7,000 Jews had been killed in the fighting, 30,000
had been deported to Treblinka, and 631 bunkers had been destroyed.
The uprising is the first significant urban revolt against the Nazis. Josef Mengele, an SS doctor, arrives at Auschwitz.
He begins to conduct medical experiments on Jews.
June. Heinrich
Himmler orders the liquidation of the ghettoes in Nazi-occupied Poland and
Nazi-occupied Soviet Union. The
Nazis begin dismantling the remnant of the Lvov ghetto. July. The
Nazis establish a concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen, near Hanover, Germany.
It is intended as a prisoner-of-war camp as well as a place for Jews whom
they wish to exchange for Germans in Allied custody.
Fewer than 400 Jews will be exchanged and 37,000 inmates will die before
liberation. After four months of activity beginning in April, over
700,000 corpses are unearthed and cremated at Treblinka, while the camp
continues to receive new transports of Jews for extermination. August. During
an address at Cracow, Hans Frank, head of the General Government of Poland,
states: “We started here with
three and a half million Jews, and what remains of them—a few working
companies only. Seven hundred Jewish prisoners at Treblinka stage a
revolt, set fire to several camp buildings, explode the arsenal, and kill about
20 German and Ukrainian guards. More
than 150 succeed in escaping, and the rest are killed in the camp.
No more than 70 remain alive at the end of the war. On August 3, Jews resisting the Nazis during the
liquidation of the Bedzin ghetto are all killed. The Nazis begin the final action to destroy the
Bialystok ghetto, rounding up 40,000 Jews for deportation to Treblinka.
The Jewish underground resists, but the revolt . . . is crushed. Jews from Bialystok are the last of 840,000 Jews to be
killed at Treblinka. In September,
the gas chambers are destroyed, the barbed wire fencing is removed, the killing
site is ploughed up, and the guards are transferred to other camps. September. Beginning
at the end of September, and over a three-week period, Danish sea captains and
fishermen ferry about 7,000 Danish Jews and about 700 Christians married to Jews
to safety in neutral Sweden. October. In
an address to SS generals in Poznan, Heinrich Himmler says:
“Among ourselves it should be mentioned quite frankly, and yet we will
never speak of it publicly . . . The extermination of the Jewish race . . . is a
page of glory in our history which has never been written and is never to be
written.” The Germans deport to Auschwitz 1,015 Italian Jews
seized in Rome. Pope Pius XII
orders assistance to be given to the remaining Jews of Rome, and 4,715 are given
sanctuary in the Vatican and in monasteries and convents. November. Fearing
that the uprising at Sobibor might influence prisoners in other camps, the Nazis
round up Jews from the labor camps in the Lublin region, transport them to the
ditches behind the Majdanek concentration camp gas chambers, and shoot 50,000.
The operation is codenamed Harvest Festival.
Following this massacre, only 612 Jews remain at Majdanek.
1944 During 1944, the Nazis murdered 600,000 Jews.
Hungarian Jews made up a substantial number of those murdered. January. The
Soviet Army drives across prewar Polish borders Allied forces land at Anzio, 35 miles south of Rome. March. German
troops occupy Hungary, fearing that its ally will defect to the Allies.
A pro-German government, led by General Dome Sztojay, is installed and,
in May, the “final solution” of Hungarian Jewry is quickly implemented. Emanuel Ringelblum, historian of the Warsaw ghetto, and
his family are among a group of 38 in hiding in “Aryan” Warsaw who are
betrayed to the Nazis. He is
executed several days later. While
in hiding he wrote a history of Polish-Jewish relations during the war: “The blind folly of Poland’s anti-Semites . . . has been
responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Jews who could have been
saved despite the Germans. . . . Poland has given asylum at the most to one
percent of the Jewish victims of Hitler’s persecutions.” Adolf Eichmann and his assistants meet at Mauthausen
concentration camp and plan a deportation program for Hungary’s 750,000 Jews. April. The
German Propaganda Ministry urges the German press to reiterate, “In the case
of the Jews there are not merely a few criminals, but all of Jewry rose from
criminal roots. The annihilation of
Jewry is no loss to humanity.” Klaus Barbie, a middle ranking Gestapo officer, deports
44 Jewish children and 7 adults to Auschwitz from the village of Izieu, 50 miles
east of Lyons. One adult survives.
Barbie will become known as “the butcher of Lyons.” May. Mass
deportations of Hungarian Jews commence and by May 31, 204,312 have been
deported to Auschwitz. Joel Brand (1906 – 1964), a Hungarian Jew, is flown by
the Nazis to Istanbul, Turkey, to advise the Jewish Agency of an offer from
Adolf Eichmann to release 1 million Jews in return for 10,000 trucks to be used
only on the eastern front. Brand is
arrested by the British, and held in Cairo, where it is believed he meets Lord
Moyne, the British minister of state in the Middle East, who advises him,
“What shall I do with those million Jews?
Where shall I put them?” The
deal never goes through. June. The
U.S. Army liberates Rome. On June 6, the Allies invade Normandy, on the French
coast. It is the greatest
amphibious operation in history. Within
24 hours, 176,000 troops are landed from 4,000 ships. The Nazis take 260 Jews living on the island of Crete to
Candia and board them on a ship together with 400 Greek hostages and 300 Italian
soldiers. The ship is taken
out to sea and scuttled. All are
drowned. The day the Allies land in Normandy, the Nazis round up
1,795 Jews on the island of Corfu, in the Adriatic. All are sent directly to Auschwitz, where 1,500 are
immediately gassed. By June 17, 340,142
Hungarian Jews have been deported to Auschwitz. July. Britain’s
Prime Minister Winston Churchill tells Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden to have
Britain’s air force bomb Auschwitz. Officials
at the Foreign Office subvert Churchill’s request.
Between July 7 and November 20, the Allied air forces
bomb an oil refining complex 47 miles from the Auschwitz death camps 10 times.
On August 20, the U.S. air force bombs the Auschwitz factory area within
five miles of the death camps. August. U.S.
Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy writes to the World Jewish Congress
denying their request to bomb Auschwitz gas chambers and rail lines. Soviet army crosses the Danube River into Romania. Allies liberate Paris.
It had been occupied by the Germans since June 14, 1940. The family of Anne Frank is discovered during a search
for hidden Jews in Amsterdam. One
month later they are deported to Auschwitz. About 67,000 Jews of the Lodz ghetto, where the largest
number of Jews still live and who survive by doing forced labor for the Nazis,
are deported to Auschwitz shortly before the Soviet army liberates the city.
More than 60,000 . . . are exterminated. Germany withdraws troops from Bulgaria. October. The
Warsaw uprising of the Polish underground army is crushed by the Germans.
About 250,000 Poles are killed. The
anti-Communist underground army accuses the Soviets of intentionally delaying
their advance into Warsaw. The Soviet army liberates Riga, Latvia.
It had been occupied by the Germans since July 1, 1941. German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel commits suicide.
He was facing a trial for his suspected involvement in an anti-Hitler
plot. British troops liberate Athens, Greece. The Arrow Cross Hungarian Fascist organization seizes
power and sets up a pro-Nazi government in Hungary. The Germans return to Budapest.
Deportation of Jews to death camps are resumed.
The Nazis evacuate the Plaszow camp near Cracow,
including Oscar Schindler’s factory, where 1,200 Jews work under his
protection. Schindler, a German
Catholic, sets up a new factory in the Sudentenland and arranges for the
relocation of all his Jewish laborers, thus saving them from extermination. Adolf Eichmann returns to Budapest.
He demands that 50,000 able-bodied Jews be marched to Germany.
Deportations resume. At Auschwitz, the Nazis burn documentary evidence of
their mass killings. During the
last 10 days of human killing, thousands of Jews are marched away from Auschwitz
to other camps and factories in central and western Germany. Hungary exempts from deportation Jews with foreign
passports or foreign nationality. Swiss
Consul Charles Lutz begins issuing protective documents.
Within a few weeks he has 76 buildings in Budapest under Swiss diplomatic
protection in which 25,000 Jews find shelter and are saved.
Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish representative, also continues to issue
protective documents—about 4,500. The gas chambers at Auschwitz stop operating. November. The
destruction of crematoria and gas chambers at Auschwitz begins.
On November 26, the last 204 members of the Sonderkommando are killed.
Heinrich Himmler ordered the destruction of the gas chambers and
crematoria to remove evidence of extermination from advancing Allied forces. By November, more than 1,500 Jewish twins had been
experimented on by Josef Mengele since his arrival at Auschwitz in May 1943.
Less than 200 survive. Mengele
was seeking to become an expert on the medical and genetic problems of twins. 1945 By the end of the year, and more than seven months after
the end of the war, Polish anti-Semites have murdered 350 Jews in Poland. During 1945, the Nazis murdered more than 100,000 Jews.
Although Allied victories disrupted the Nazi extermination machinery,
death marches and chaos in the camps accounted for many Jewish deaths. January. The
Soviet army liberates Warsaw. It
had been occupied by the Germans since September 27, 1939.
No more than 200 Jews, who were in hiding, survive. The Soviet army liberates Lodz, Poland. The Battle of the Bulge ends in the defeat of the
Germans as the Allies regain ground lost in December 1944. Heinrich Himmler orders the evacuation of concentration
camps in Eastern Europe and forces a westward march of all inmates able to move
to avoid the advancing Soviet army. This
massive transfer of about 700,000 Jews and non-Jews in the dead of winter
results in the death of about one-third of them.
About half of the victims are Jews. As the Russians approach Auschwitz, the Nazis evacuate
about 50,000 remaining slave laborers in the Auschwitz region by train or foot
to a hundred different camps in western Germany. The Soviet army liberates Auschwitz, but unlike the
worldwide publicity given by the western Allies to the discovery of death camp
horrors, the Soviets impose secrecy, and for several weeks the West hears
nothing. When a report is released
in May, the broadcast version does not mention the word Jew. February. Twelve
hundred Jews held at Theresienstadt reach Switzerland as a result of ransom
negotiations between Isaac Sternbuch, Union of Orthodox Rabbis representative,
and Jean-Marie Musy, pro-Nazi Swiss with contacts to Heinrich Himmler.
When Adolf Hitler becomes aware of the transfer, he orders no further
releases. March. Anne
Frank and her sister, Margot, die of sickness and starvation at Bergen-Belsen. April. The
Soviet army clears Hungary of all German troops. U.S. troops liberate a concentration camp outside the
German town of Ohrdruf. Hundreds of
Jews, as well as Polish and Russian prisoners of war, were shot by the Nazis on
the eve of the liberation. Almost all the Jews at the Buchenwald concentration
camp, many of whom had recently arrived from other camps, are marched out to the
concentration camp at Flossenberg, leaving the non-Jewish prisoners to await the
arrival of U.S. troops. The Buchenwald concentration camp is liberated by Allied
forces. Percy Knauth, Time magazine
correspondent, witnesses the liberation and writes, “Buchenwald is beyond all
comprehension. You just can’t
understand it, even when you’ve seen it. Adolf Eichmann, on his last visit to Theresienstadt, is
heard to say: “I shall gladly jump into the pit, knowing that in the same pit
there are five million enemies of the state.” Soviet troops capture Vienna, Austria. British troops liberate the Bergen-Belsen concentration
camp. They find 10,000 unburied
bodies. In the ensuing days,
photographs, films, and articles about the camp receive wide circulation in
Britain. The Nordhausen labor camp is liberated by the U.S. army.
They find 700 barely surviving slave laborers and 3,000 corpses.
Al Newman, Newsweek magazine correspondent who witnessed the liberation,
described it as “a hell factory worked by the living dead.” Attempting to flee Italy, Benito Mussolini is caught and
killed by Italian partisans. The U.S. army liberates the Dachau concentration camp. April 12, President Franklin D. Roosevelt dies.
Harry S. Truman becomes President. The Soviet army enters the Ravensbruck concentration
camp and liberates 23,000 women, Jews and non-Jews.
They also overtake “death marchers” from Ravensbruck, saving several
thousand other inmates. President Harry S. Truman appoints U.S. Supreme Court
Justice Robert H. Jackson the American chief counsel for the prosecution of Nazi
war crimes. On April 30, Adolf
Hitler commits suicide in the Reich Chancellery in Berlin. May. The
U.S. army liberates Mathausen concentration camp.
There are 110,000 survivers, including 28,000 Jews.
The Americans find nearly 10,000 bodies in a huge communal grave. May 8. V-E
Day. War in Europe ends. June. The
United Nations Charter is signed at the
San Francisco UN Conference. July. Joseph
Stalin, President Harry S. Truman, and Winston Churchill (later replaced by
Clement Attlee) begin the final conference of the war at Potsdam, Germany.
Plans for Japan’s surrender are drawn. The U.S. explodes the first atomic bomb at its New
Mexico test facility. The British Labour party wins the parliamentary
elections. Winston Churchill is
replaced as prime minister by Clement Attlee (1883-1967). August. A
US B-29, the Enola Gay, drops an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. The US drops a second atomic bomb on Nagasaki, Japan.
On August 14, Japan surrenders unconditionally.
V-J Day is proclaimed on August 15. At the time of the Japanese surrender, there are 14,874
European Jewish refugees in Shanghai, China. During World War II, approximately 100 million soldiers
fought on both sides, of whom 15 million were killed. It is estimated that there were between 26 and 34 million
civilian deaths. October. The
United Nations is created as its charter comes into force. The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg begins
a 10-months trial of major Nazi figures for war crimes. The 22 defendants are Herman Goering, Rudolf Hess, Joachim
von Ribbentrop, Wilhelm Keitel, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Alfred Rosenberg, Hans
Frank, Wilhelm Frick, Julius Streicher, Walther Funk, Hjalmar Schacht, Karl
Doenitz, Erich Raeder, Baldur von Schirach, Fritz Sauckel, Alfred Jodl, Franz
Papen, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, Albert Speer, Konstantin von Neurath, Hans
Fritzsche, and Martin Bormann in absentia.
Robert Ley commits suicide before the trial. December. By the end of the year, and more than seven months after the end of the war, Polish anti-Semites have murdered 350 Jews in Poland.
prepared March 1, 2001 |