Historical Events

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.

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).

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 dramatic pageant "We Will Never Die" premieres before an audience of 40,000 at Madison Square Garden to raise public awareness of the mass 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.

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.