The Holocaust (1933–1945)

On January 30, 1933, German President Paul von Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler as chancellor, marking the beginning of Nazi rule. Within months, Hitler and the Nazi Party transformed Germany from a multi-party democracy into a one-party dictatorship. The Nazi regime immediately began implementing radical racial and political policies that systematically stripped Jewish citizens of their rights and laid the groundwork for the Holocaust.

The SS established the Dachau concentration camp near Munich on March 22, 1933, the first regular concentration camp of the Nazi regime. Initially designed to imprison political opponents of the Nazi Party, Dachau became the model for the vast network of camps that would follow. Over its twelve years of operation, Dachau held more than 200,000 prisoners, and tens of thousands died there from mistreatment, forced labor, starvation, and execution.

Location: Dachau, Germany

On September 15, 1935, at the annual Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg, Hitler announced two laws that became known as the Nuremberg Laws: the Reich Citizenship Law and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor. These laws declared that only people of 'German or kindred blood' could be citizens and prohibited marriage or sexual relations between Jews and non-Jewish Germans. The Nuremberg Laws provided the legal framework for the systematic persecution of Jews, stripping them of citizenship and basic rights based on racial criteria.

Location: Nuremberg, Germany

On November 9–10, 1938, the Nazi regime orchestrated a nationwide pogrom against Jews throughout Germany and Austria, known as Kristallnacht. Nazi paramilitary forces and civilians destroyed hundreds of synagogues, vandalized thousands of Jewish-owned businesses and homes, and killed at least 91 Jewish people. Approximately 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and sent to concentration camps. Kristallnacht marked a dramatic escalation from persecution to state-sponsored violence and signaled the Nazi regime's increasingly radical approach to the 'Jewish Question.'

Location: Throughout Germany and annexed Austria

Adolf Hitler authorized the T4 Euthanasia Program in the autumn of 1939, backdating the order to September 1, 1939, the start of World War II. Under this program, German physicians and SS staff systematically murdered institutionalized persons with physical and mental disabilities through gas chambers and lethal injection. The T4 program served as a precedent for the industrial-scale killing methods later used in the Holocaust, as many of the same personnel and technologies were transferred to the extermination camps in occupied Poland.

Location: Throughout the German Reich

German authorities established the Łódź Ghetto in February 1940, confining approximately 164,000 Jews within a small, overcrowded district of the Polish city. It was the second-largest ghetto in German-occupied Poland after Warsaw. The ghetto was severely isolated, with inhabitants subjected to forced labor, starvation, and disease. From 1942 onward, tens of thousands of Łódź ghetto residents were deported to the Chełmno killing center and Auschwitz-Birkenau as part of the systematic extermination of European Jews.

Location: Łódź, German-occupied Poland

The SS established the Auschwitz concentration camp in the spring of 1940 in the suburban town of Oświęcim in German-occupied Poland, originally to imprison Polish political prisoners. The camp complex would later expand to include Auschwitz II-Birkenau (a killing center with gas chambers) and Auschwitz III-Monowitz (a forced labor camp for the I.G. Farben industrial complex). Auschwitz ultimately became the largest Nazi camp complex and the site where approximately one million Jews, along with tens of thousands of Poles, Roma, and Soviet prisoners of war, were murdered.

Location: Auschwitz (Oświęcim), German-occupied Poland

On November 15, 1940, German authorities sealed the Warsaw Ghetto, confining approximately 400,000 Jews — the largest Jewish population in Europe — within a walled area of less than 1.5 square miles. Overcrowding, minimal food rations, and lack of sanitation led to widespread starvation and disease, with tens of thousands dying within the ghetto walls. The Warsaw Ghetto became a central site of Jewish suffering and resistance, culminating in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943.

Location: Warsaw, German-occupied Poland

Following the German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, four mobile killing units known as Einsatzgruppen followed the advancing German army, systematically massacring Jewish civilians. Initially targeting Jewish men of military age, the units quickly expanded to murder entire Jewish communities, including women and children. Over the course of the invasion, the Einsatzgruppen and their collaborators killed approximately 1.5 to 2 million Jews through mass shootings at sites such as Babi Yar, Ponary, and Fort IX in Kovno.

Location: Occupied Soviet Union (modern-day Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Russia)

On January 20, 1942, senior Nazi officials gathered at a villa in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee for a conference convened by SS General Reinhard Heydrich. The meeting was held to coordinate implementation of the 'Final Solution to the Jewish Question' — the systematic, deliberate annihilation of approximately 11 million European Jews. The participants, representing key government ministries and SS agencies, discussed logistics including deportation, forced labor, and extermination methods. No one present objected to the policy, and the conference marked the formal inter-agency coordination of the genocide.

Location: Wannsee, Berlin, Germany

In March 1942, the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp (Auschwitz II) began functioning as both a concentration camp and a killing center. The SS adapted farmhouses into provisional gas chambers using Zyklon B pesticide, later constructing four large crematoria complexes with gas chambers capable of killing thousands of people daily. Mass transports of Jews from across Europe began arriving, selected for forced labor or immediate death. Auschwitz-Birkenau became the largest and most notorious of the Nazi killing centers, where approximately one million Jews were murdered.

Location: Auschwitz-Birkenau, German-occupied Poland

Operation Reinhard, named after Reinhard Heydrich, was the Nazi plan to murder all Jews in the General Government (German-occupied Poland). Under this operation, the SS established three dedicated extermination camps — Belzec (operational March 1942), Sobibor (May 1942), and Treblinka (July 1942) — whose sole purpose was the mass murder of Jews in stationary gas chambers using carbon monoxide. Together, these three camps claimed the lives of approximately 1.7 million Jews, making Operation Reinhard one of the deadliest phases of the Holocaust.

Location: Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, German-occupied Poland

On April 19, 1943, when German SS and police forces entered the Warsaw Ghetto to begin its final liquidation and mass deportation of surviving inhabitants, they were met with armed resistance from Jewish fighters. Vastly outnumbered and outgunned, several hundred Jewish insurgents held out against heavily armed German forces for nearly a month. The uprising was crushed by May 16, with the Germans burning the ghetto building by building and deporting or killing the remaining tens of thousands of Jews. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was the largest single act of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust.

Location: Warsaw, German-occupied Poland

As Allied forces advanced into German-occupied territory in the final months of the war, the SS forcibly evacuated prisoners from concentration camps and killing centers on forced marches across Europe. The largest death marches began from Auschwitz on January 17, 1945, with tens of thousands of prisoners forced to march westward in brutal winter conditions. SS guards shot anyone who fell behind or could not continue, and thousands died from cold, starvation, and exhaustion. The death marches continued until the final days of the war, claiming tens of thousands of additional victims.

Location: Throughout German-occupied Europe (originating at Auschwitz, Stutthof, Gross-Rosen, and other camps)

Soviet forces liberated the Majdanek camp in July 1944 and Auschwitz on January 27, 1945, where they found approximately 6,000 emaciated prisoners and overwhelming evidence of mass murder. In April 1945, American forces liberated Buchenwald, Dachau, and Dora-Mittelbau, while British forces liberated Bergen-Belsen, where they encountered 55,000 prisoners suffering from typhus. The liberating soldiers confronted unspeakable conditions with piles of unburied corpses. The full scope of Nazi atrocities was exposed to the world, and the images from the liberated camps became powerful evidence in the subsequent war crimes trials.

Location: Across Germany and Poland (Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, Majdanek, and others)

On November 20, 1945, the International Military Tribunal opened in Nuremberg, Germany, bringing 22 leading Nazi officials to trial before judges from the United States, United Kingdom, France, and the Soviet Union. The defendants were charged with crimes against peace, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and conspiracy. The prosecution presented overwhelming documentary evidence and testimony, including footage from liberated camps and detailed records kept by the Nazis themselves. Twelve defendants were sentenced to death, and the trials established the precedent that individuals could be held criminally responsible for violations of international law, shaping the foundation of modern international criminal justice.

Location: Nuremberg, Germany