Holocaust remembrance

30 January 1933

Hitler appointed Chancellor

Following the Reichstag's premature dissolution, the Nazi party remained the largest group in the parliament after the November 1932 federal election. Although Hitler failed to win a majority, on 30 January 1933 President Hindenburg consented to Hitler forming a cabinet.

Photo credit: Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-H1216-0500-002 / CC-BY-SA, CC BY-SA 3.0 DE h, via Wikimedia Commons

23 March 1933

First concentration camp set up in Dachau

The camp was initially intended to hold only political prisoners. However, after its opening by Heinrich Himmler, it was enlarged to include forced labour. An estimated 41,500 people were killed in the camp during its operation, including Jews, German and Austrian criminals, and other nationals from occupied countries.

Photo credit: Accessed at United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of National Archives & Records Administration

7 April 1933

Laws barring Jews from holding civil service, university, and state positions

The Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service was one of the first anti-Semitic and racist laws passed in the Third Reich. After another parliamentary election in March 1933, in which Hitler again failed to win a majority, the Nazi Party created a coalition government with the German National People's Party. Consequently, Hitler passed an act that effectively gave him dictatorial powers, allowing him to target the country’s Jewish population.

15 September 1935

The Nuremberg Laws are passed, denying Jews German citizenship

New anti-Semitic and racist laws were passed, including the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour, which forbade marriages and extramarital intercourse between Jews and Germans. The Reich Citizenship Law declared that only those of German or related blood were eligible to be Reich citizens. The rest of the population remained without any citizenship rights.

13 March 1938

Anschluss - the German Army marches into Austria

The German army entered Austria, which was warmly welcomed by most of the population. One of the results of the unopposed annexation was the introduction of the anti-Semitic laws in Austria.

Photo credit: Heinrich Hoffmann, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

5 October 1938

German Jews had their passports marked with a red ‘J’

The Ministry of the Interior invalidated all German passports held by Jews. They had to give up their old passports, which would become valid only after the letter “J” had been stamped on them.

Photo credit: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration, College Park

9 November 1938

Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass.

The growing hostility against the Jewish population in Germany led to 7,000 Jewish-owned shops being destroyed and looted on the night of 9 November 1938. Hundreds of synagogues and houses belonging to Jews were burned. 92 Jews were murdered and 31,000 arrested and sent to concentration camps. The name of the pogrom comes from the broken glass of Jewish shop windows. In the weeks that followed, new laws led to the closure of all Jewish businesses, the expulsion of all Jewish children from public schools and restrictions of freedom of movement for Jewish people.

Photo credit: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration, College Park

30 January 1939

Reichstag speech

The Reichstag speech is mainly remembered for Hitler’s declaration that if there was another world war, the Jews of Europe would be annihilated. Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels helped write the speech, which was delivered on the sixth anniversary of Hitler’s seizure of power in 1933. It lasted for two-and-a-half hours and dealt with both foreign and domestic policy.

1 September

Germany invades Poland: World War II begins.

The German invasion began on 1 September 1939, one week after the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact between Germany and the Soviet Union. It was a non-aggression pact that allowed the parties to partition Poland and annex other Central European countries. The war that followed claimed around 73 million lives.

Photo credit: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration, College Park

27 September 1939

Germany sets up ghettos in occupied Poland

Following the annexation of German-occupied Poland, the Nazis established Jewish ghettos in hundreds of locations, to confine and segregate Poland's 3.5 million Jewish population in order to facilitate persecution, terror, and exploitation.

Photo credit: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration, College Park

23 November 1939

Polish Jews ordered to wear yellow stars

Jewish Poles were ordered to wear an identifying mark. Failure to comply with the order was punishable by death. Yellow stars were often referred to as a badge of shame.

Photo credit: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration, College Park

27 April 1940

Orders issued to set up a concentration camp at Auschwitz

As early as May 1940, the first prisoners arrived at the Auschwitz concentration camp. Of the 1.3 million people sent to Auschwitz, 1.1 million died. The death toll includes 960,000 Jews, 74,000 non-Jewish Poles, 21,000 Roma, 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war, and around 15,000 other Europeans. Many died from starvation, exhaustion, disease, individual executions, or beatings. Others were killed during medical experiments.

Photo credit: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration, College Park

1940/41

The Selection Process: “The Nazis arrived and started a selection.” - Jack Kagan

"Early morning, lorries arrived, the doors have opened, the Nazi arrived and started a selection. You came out, he asked you, the head of the family, your profession, how many children. To the left, it's to go out to the yard; to the right it's to stand in the corner of the entrance of the building. Came to our turn, my uncle went in front, he said, 'What is your profession?' He said a saddle maker. 'How many children?' Two children. To the left. Came to my father. 'Your profession?' Again, saddle maker, two children. To the right. That means it was no rhyme or reason whom to select to death and whom to life. Because he went in front, two children, saddle maker, the same profession. We were the lucky ones, he left us to remain alive, and them to death. So my uncle Moishke, Soshke, Berol, and Leizer went out to the yard. They sent out four and a half thousand, four thousand people on lorries, took them outside the town into graves, into prepared graves, and massacred them, they shot them. That was Einsatzkommando, that was Einsatzkommando. My mother was standing practically opposite the window, and suddenly out of nowhere police, SS, came, with the back of their rifles hitting everybody, and I knew that this is the end of the people which are standing on the yard. In this execution I lost my mother, I lost my sister Nachama, I lost my auntie, Surcharsky."

Jack Kagan
Born 1929, Novogrodek (Vilna), Lithuania. Novogrodek ghetto. Liberated by Russians, Displaced Persons camp, Poland 1945. Married, three children.

Audio credit:Interview with Jack Kagan, Testimony: Video Interviews With Holocaust Survivors, reference C533/009, © British Library

22 June 1941

German Army invades the Soviet Union.

The German invasion of the Soviet Union brought the mass murder of Soviet Jews by Einsatzgruppen – mobile killing squads – including the 28 September 1941 murder of 33,000 Jews and an unknown number of gypsies at Babi Yar. It is estimated that the Einsatzgruppen and related personnel killed more than two million people between 1941 and 1945.

20 January 1942

Wannsee Conference

At the Wannsee Conference in Berlin, leading Nazis developed the plan to murder all the Jews of Europe, the so-called ‘Final Solution.’ Heydrich explained how European Jews would be rounded up and sent to extermination camps in the occupied parts of Poland, where they would be killed.

March 1942

Gas chambers began to operate at Sobibor death camp

The first gas chambers were used at Sobibor death camp, soon followed by Belzec on 17 March 1942, and Treblinka on 1 June 1942. The genocide of all Jews in German-occupied Europe on a mass, highly-organised scale, had begun.

Photo credit: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration, College Park

9 April 1943

The Warsaw ghetto uprising

The revolt in the Warsaw ghetto was a final effort to resist the transport of the remaining ghetto population to death camps. It was the largest single revolt by Jews during World War II. Two months after the uprising, in which 13,000 Jews died, Himmler ordered all Polish and Russian Jewish ghettos to be closed. The remaining population was sent to death camps. In the following months, the Treblinka camp inmates rebelled (August 1943), and a revolt in the Sobibor death camp started on 14 October 1943. On 7 October 1944, the Sonderkommando who worked in the crematoria staged an uprising in Auschwitz.

Photo credit: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration, College Park

1944

The Camps: [Danish police] "They were unwilling to deport the Jews" - Eugene Heimler

"Then I was taken to this Block 23. Next to us, but approachable, were the Danish police in their military Danish uniform. They were deported because they were unwilling to deport the Jews to the Gestapo, so 'en bloc' they are giving themselves up, march into the Gestapo headquarters, and from there they were taken to Buchenwald. Proud, decent people. One policeman by the name of Niels Ahlmark was very friendly with me. By that time the winter was coming and he gave me his, one of the spare military uniforms, underwear, trousers, what you have, and military cap. And also he gave me from his rations, part of his rations. So that helped."

Eugene Heimler
Born 1922, Szombathely, Hungary.
Ghetto. Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Troglitz camps, then back to Buchenwald. Berger-Elster, death march to Czech border, escaped, taken to partisans. Arrived in England 1947. Three marriages, two children, one grandchild. Died December 1990.

Audio credit: Interview with Eugene Heimler by Jennifer Wingate, 1989, Living Memory of the Jewish Community, reference C410/056, © British Library

Photo credit: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration, College Park

1944

The Camps: “You could smell people being burnt" - Edith Birkin

"Auschwitz was very frightening in a certain extent, because it was full of Germans. Because until then we didn't see a lot of Germans in the ghetto, only occasionally. It was full of Germans and the Germans with dogs, and there were these barbed wires, with electricity in it you know. Discipline, very strict discipline. This feeling of death, all these people going in the gas chamber. It was a very weird place, very weird place. With this atmosphere of death all the time you know, and this unbelievable situation of people being… you could smell, you could smell these people being burnt. All the time you smelt this… it was a little bit like you know, when people used to boil glue, it was the bones that smelt like glue. You had volunteers who would go with the Germans you know, and get a bit of food, and they were what was called the kapo, and the block leader you know. Because every of these huts, it was a block, which was called a block, had a block leader who had a little cubicle all to herself, with the women a woman and with the men a man. Because there were only women in our block, we were separated then from the men, so the men had men and the women had women. And it was like a glass cubicle, so they could see us. And you could recognise them because they were not starved, you know, they looked normal in their faces, in their bodies, they weren't hungry, they had enough to eat, and they had reasonable clothes on, they had good clothes on. So, you knew who they were, and they were very sadistic and very cruel, and they treated us, the other prisoners, very very badly. They were prisoners like us, but they had privileged positions you see."

Edith Birkin
Born 1927, Prague, Czechoslovakia.
Lodz ghetto 1941. Auschwitz camp 1944. Sent to work camp and munitions factory. 1945 death march to Flossenburg camp, then to Belsen. Arrived in England 1946. Married, three adopted children.

Audio credit: Interview with Edith Birkin by Katherine Thompson, 1989, Living Memory of the Jewish Community, reference C410/030, © British Library

Photo credit: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration, College Park

17 January 1945

Death March from Auschwitz begins

In the face of Soviet troops advancing into the Germany-occupied territories, in January 1945 Himmler ordered all camps to be evacuated. Approximately 58,000 Auschwitz detainees were evacuated on foot under SS guard to concentration camps in Germany and Austria. Many of them were shot when unable to continue the so-called Death March.

January-April 1945

The liberation of camps

The Red Army arrived at Auschwitz on 27 January 1945; a day commemorated since 2005 as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. During March and April 1945, other death camps were liberated by the British, Americans, and Soviets troops.

Photo credit: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration, College Park

1945

Liberation: "When we are liberated we are going to be dancing and kissing" - Edith Birkin

"It was filth, and lice, and smell, and death around you, and you just waited for the end of the war really, that is what we were doing. One day we were standing, standing, and no Germans came, and then we found out that all the Germans had gone. A couple of days or so later the British came. The tanks started rolling down the… sort of like a main road, but I was so weak I couldn't even go to greet them; most of us couldn't go to greet them, because we were so weak and tired. I was so pleased I could just lie down and sleep. We were always imagining that when we are liberated we are going to be dancing, and kissing them - and I don't think they wanted to be kissed by us to be honest! We didn't think of it that way, we didn't think we were so dreadful you know, but to them we looked absolutely awful of course. And we're going to embrace them, and… be happy, and dance, and God knows what, but all we wanted to do was to lie down and be allowed to be ill.

Edith Birkin
Born 1927, Prague, Czechoslovakia.
Lodz ghetto 1941. Auschwitz camp 1944. Sent to work camp and munitions factory. 1945 death march to Flossenburg camp, then to Belsen. Arrived in England 1946. Married, three adopted children.

Audio credit: Interview with Edith Birkin by Katherine Thompson, 1989, Living Memory of the Jewish Community, reference C410/030, © British Library

30 April 1945

Hitler commits suicide

The inevitable military defeat and news that the Italian resistance movement had executed Mussolini increased Hitler’s determination to avoid capture. He shot himself in the head in his Berlin bunker rather than be taken prisoner by the encircling Soviet troops. On 8 May 1945, Germany surrendered.

22 November 1945

Nuremberg Trials of Nazi war criminals began

In November 1945 twenty two Nazi political and military leaders were tried for war crimes and crimes against humanity, including the Holocaust. The trial was held before an International Military Tribunal at the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg, Germany. The city was chosen for symbolic reasons, as it was considered to be the ceremonial birthplace of the Nazi party and the scene of many of its annual mass rallies. It lasted until 1 October 1946. Judges from Great Britain, France, the USSR, and the US presided over the hearing. At its conclusion they sentenced 12 of the accused to death and 3 to life imprisonment. Four others received jail terms of between 10 and 20 years, while the remaining 3 defendants were acquitted. 

Photo credit: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, Gift of Elizabeth Duddy1