Detailed History and Timeline of the Holocaust
Detailed History and Timeline of the Holocaust
From the time Adolf Hitler became the dictator of Germany in January 1933, until the surrender of his Third Reich at the end of World War II in May 1945, Hitler's Nazi led government engaged in two wars. One was a declared war of military expansion against the nations of Europe, which began with the 1939 invasion of Poland and reached its peak in mid-1942, when German armies occupied much of the continent and had penetrated deep into the Soviet Union. The other was a war against the Jews of Europe, the persecution and mass murder, hidden at first from the rest of the world that came to be known as the Holocaust.
Even when the tide of war turned against Germany in 1943, and became clearly hopeless with the mid-1944 Allied invasion of Europe, the mass killing of Jews continued with increased ferocity, eventually claiming six million lives. In addition, the Nazis also put to death an estimated five million Gypsies (or Roma), Slav peoples, homosexuals, mentally retarded people, and people with handicaps, all of whom were considered "inferior" to the pure "Aryan" race. The term "holocaust," however, which means "destruction by fire," refers specifically to the Nazis' systematic destruction of Jews. As Elie Wiesel puts it, "Not all victims were Jews, but all Jews were victims."
Hitler's horrifying scheme was foreshadowed by his denunciation of "the Jewish conspiracy" in his 1923 book Mein Kampf and fueled by German economic hardships that tapped deep currents of anti-Semitism, but to carry it out required the active, deliberate involvement of hundreds of thousands of people, both within Germany and in the occupied countries. It also required the silent acquiescence of millions of people throughout Europe, people who saw what was happening and either did nothing to stand in the way or else took part by turning in neighbors or joining the rush to take over Jewish homes and possessions.
The first Nazi concentration camps were established early in Hitler's regime, at the German towns of Dachau (1933) and Buchenwald (1937), and used primarily as prisons and a source of forced labor. But the conquest of Poland in 1939 brought a new development, as that country's Jews were herded into ghettos at such cities as Krakow, Warsaw, and Lodz in a first step toward transporting them all to concentrations camps. By 1940, mass murder and "euthanasia" in special "gas...