Historical Events

On February 27, 1933, the German parliament (Reichstag) building burned down. Nazi leadership and Nationalist coalition partners exploited the fire to pass emergency legislation, paving the way for Nazi dictatorship.

Dachau was the first regular Nazi concentration camp.

Facing persecution and violence for his anti-Nazi stance and as a Jew, Albert Einstein renounced his German citizenship.

In the first nationwide, planned action against Jews, Nazis boycotted Jewish businesses and professionals throughout Germany.

University students in towns throughout Germany burned tens of thousands of “un-German” books as part of the Nazi push for state censorship and control of culture.

On July 14, 1933, Germany declared a new law that authorized forced sterilization of certain people with mental or physical disabilities or illnesses.

Roland Velz was one of several American citizens assaulted by Nazi storm troopers or German mobs in 1933.

On June 30, 1934, Hitler ordered a violent purge of the top leadership of the Nazi Party paramilitary formation, the SA (Sturmabteilungen) or Storm Troopers. This event later became known as “the Röhm Affair” or the “the Night of the Long Knives.”

She was the first American journalist ousted for criticism of the Nazi regime.

At their annual party rally, Nazi leaders announced new laws that defined Jews as a “race” and stripped them of basic citizenship rights.

The Anschluss expanded the German Reich and set into motion a Jewish refugee crisis.

Delegates from 32 countries meet in Evian, France, seeking solution to refugee crisis. They express sympathy for refugees, followed by excuses and inaction.

In an organized act of nationwide violence, Nazis and collaborators burned synagogues, looted Jewish businesses, and killed dozens of Jewish people.

The St. Louis was forced to leave Havana harbor. As the ship traveled up the Florida coast, passengers anxiously plead for refuge in the United States.

The United States Committee for the Care of European Children organized one of the largest American efforts to aid refugee children during World War II.

On August 3, 1941, the Bishop of Münster, Clemens August Count von Galen, delivered a sermon protesting the Nazi program to kill people with mental and physical disabilities.

Germany decreed that Jews over the age of six were required to wear a yellow Star of David on their outer clothing in public at all times.

In late September 1941, SS and German police units and their auxiliaries perpetrated one of the largest massacres of World War II. It took place at a ravine called Babyn Yar (Babi Yar) just outside the Ukrainian capital city of Kyiv (Kiev).

On the night of June 9-10, 1942, German police and SS officials shot or deported the inhabitants of Lidice, razing the town to the ground.

French police round up thousands of Jewish men, women, and children throughout Paris and detain them under appalling conditions in the Vélodrome d'Hiver (Winter Cycling Track).

Rabbi Stephen Wise’s press conference was the first time the Nazi plan to kill all Jews was publicized.

Allied governments issued a declaration promising retribution for the murder of European Jews.

The Warsaw ghetto uprising began after German troops and police entered the ghetto to deport its surviving inhabitants. It took the Germans a month to crush the resistance.

From September 20 into October 1943, over 7,000 Danish Jews escaped to Sweden with help from fellow Danes.

In less than two months, nearly 440,000 Jews were deported from Hungary in more than 145 trains. Most were deported to Auschwitz.

The War Refugee Board released a detailed report about mass murder by gassing at Auschwitz and Birkenau.

In his book, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, Raphael Lemkin invents a new word, “genocide,” to describe the coordinated, planned destruction of a national group.

General Eisenhower invited members of Congress and journalists to see the newly liberated camps so that they could bring the horrible truth about Nazi atrocities to the American public.

On July 4, 1946, civilians, soldiers, and police killed 42 Polish Jews and injured 40 others in the southeastern town of Kielce.

These are noteworthy articles about Holocaust-era events that fall outside the parameters of the listed events.