TIMEBASE1935-39

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1935 January 1 The Soviet Union discontinues food rationing cards.

1935 January 2 The Zurich city council requests the Swiss government to prohibit anti-Jewish demonstrations and publication of antisemitic literature.

1935 January 3 Abyssinia (Ethiopia) requests the assistance of the League of Nations in its conflict with Italy.

1935 January 4 The German bishops rule that since the main purpose of marriage is procreation, sterilized people may not partake of the sacrament of matrimony (see January 15, 1936).

1935 January 6 The American Jewish committee reports that the Jewish situation in Austria has worsened since Kurt von Schuschnigg took over the Chancellorship.

1935 January 7 An agreement is signed between France and Italy.

1935 January 8 Columbia Haus prison in Berlin becomes a concentration camp under direct control of the Gestapo.

1935 January 13 The League of Nations supervises the plebiscite (referendum) in the Saar. Ninety percent of the electors vote for a union with Germany. Only ten percent vote for union with France.

1935 January 17 The League of Nations formally awards the Saar region to Germany.

1935 January 20-21 The National Conference on Palestine is held in Washington, D.C.

1935 January 24 Hitler again meets with Josef Lipski, the Polish ambassador. Hitler tells Lipski that "the moment will come when Poland and Germany will be forced to defend themselves from Soviet aggression."

1935 January 30 The SS-Hauptamt (Main Office) is established.

1935 January-February During the 17th Party Congress, disaffection with Stalin is demonstrated when former Leningrad party leader Sergei Kirov (assassinated December 1, 1934) receives an ovation equal to Stalin's. Nevertheless, Stalin crushes the peasant resistance and collectivization proves a success in terms of facilitating rapid industrial growth.

1935 February Wewelsburg castle, which began its SS service as an SS museum and officer's college for ideological education, is placed under the direct control of Himmler's personal staff. Himmler's decision to transform the castle into an SS order-castle, comparable to Marienburg of the medieval Teutonic Knights, almost certainly came from K.M. Weisthor (Wiligut). (Roots; Mund)

1935 February 1 The Anglo-German Conference begins in London. Its main topic is German rearmament.

1935 February 1 Italy sends troops to East Africa.

1935 February 6 Eva Braun celebrates her 23rd birthday and begins a new diary. Twenty-two hastily written pages were found after the war. (Eva's Diary)

1935 February 9 Unity Mitford, dining alone at the Osteria Bavaria restaurant in Munich, is invited by Hitler to join him and his party for lunch. This is their first meeting, but according to her diaries, they will meet or talk 140 times during the next five years. (Guiness)

1935 February 10 Jean Szembeck, Polish Undersecretary for Foreign Affairs, tells Josef Beck, Poland's Foreign Minister, that Lipski told him Goering and his generals are "developing great plans for the future, suggesting almost a German-Polish alliance against Soviet Russia."

1935 February 15 Germany publishes a decree creating the Reichsstelle fuer Raumordnung (Agency for Space Arrangement).

1935 February 17 A workers congress organized by the Polish Socialist Party and the Polish Communist Party, attended by numerous Jews, meets in Warsaw.

1935 February 27 Austrian Chancellor Schuschnigg denies that his government intends to expel eastern-European Jews or reduce the number of professional Jews. (Edelheit)

1935 February 28 The Swiss Supreme Court prohibits formation of uniformed, Nazi-like stormtroopers.

1935 March 1 The Saar is reunited with Germany and becomes an integral part of the Third Reich. The Nazis quickly apply their anti-Jewish legislation to the region.

1935 March 3 Britain publishes the Defence White Paper, detailin its plans for rearmament.

1935 March 9 Germany begins to secretly rearm (See March 3). (Edelheit)

1935 March 11 Hitler announces the existence of the new German air force (Luftwaffe).

1935 March 11 A meeting takes place of Workgroup II of the Expert Advisory Council for Population and Race Policy. Professors Fischer, Günther, and Lenz discuss with civil servants from the Ministry of the Interior the illegal sterilization of German coloured children. Professor Rüdin calls for the sterilization of psychopaths. (Science)

1935 March 13 German Jews are prohibited from reorienting their lives as artisans with the intent of remaining in the country. (Edelheit)

1935 March 14 The New York Times quotes President Roosevelt as saying, " In the distant past my ancestors may have been Jews. All I know about the origin of the Roosevelt family is that they are apparently the descendents of Claes Martenszen van Roosevelt who came from Holland. (See March 7, 1934)

1935 March 15 The Soviet Union announces creation of a fifth Jewish autonomous region at Larindorf in the Crimea.

1935 March 15 France extends compulsory military service for two more years.

1935 March 16 Germany reintroduces compulsory military service and repudiates the disarmament clauses of the Versailles Treaty. The democracies do not react, and Britain will soon conclude a naval agreement with Germany that permits greater German naval strength than allowed by Versailles. (See June 18)

1935 March 22 The German Ministry of Education reports that not a single Jewish student was admitted to German universities in the academic year 1933-34. (Edelheit)

1935 March 24 The Anglo-Jewish Council of Trades and Industries, the World Alliance for Combatting Antisemitism and the British Anti-War Council proclaim an anti-Nazi boycott.

1935 March 25-26 Britain and Germany hold bilateral talks.

1935 March 28 Greece orders all anti-Jewish organization within its borders closed.

1935 March 31 An antisemitic manifesto published in Romania calls for racial restrictions in all areas of national life.

1935 April Sir Oswald Mosley meets with Hitler in Munich. (Guiness)

1935 Wewelsburg Castle becomes home to the Ahnenerbe, the ancestral heritage branch of the S.S. (It was called by some the Nazi Occult Bureau. (Pauwels;Roots)

1935 Spring Karl Maria Weisthor (K.M. Wiligut) is transferred from Munich to Berlin where he continues his work in the Chief Adjutant's office of Himmler's personal staff. Weisthor's villa is in exclusive Grunewald at Kaspar Theyss Strasse 33. Frequent social visitors included Himmler, Otto Rahn, Joachim von Leers, Edmund Kiss, Richard Anders and Friedrich Schiller. (Mund)

1935 April 1 Austria violates the Treaty of St. Germain by reinstituting compulsory military service.

1935 April 8 Adolph S. Ochs dies in Chattanooga, Tennesee. Ochs is soon succeeded as publisher of The New York Times by his son-in-law, Arthur Hayes Sulzberger, husband of Och's daughter, Iphigene, his only child. (Today, the newspaper remains largely the family business of the Sulzberger family.)

1935 April 11-14 The prime ministers of Britain, France and Italy meet at Stresa, Italy, to discuss Austrian independence and discuss establishing a common front against its unification with Germany.

1935 April 17 The League of Nations censures Germany's rearmament policy.

1935 April 23 The Nazi Race Bureau declares that Jewish children will be excluded from German public schools.

1935 April 23 A new Polish constituion is adopted that severely limits minority rights, especially for Jews.

1935 April 24 The American Union for Social Justice, Father Couglin's organization, holds its first meeting in Detroit.

1935 April 24 A Nazi decree orders that publishers and newspaer editors must prove their "Aryan" descent to 1800, or lose their jobs.

1935 April 30 A Nazi decree prohibits Jews from displaying the German flag.

1935 May The silver jubilee of King George V's reign is celebrated in England and throughout the empire.

1935 May Otto Rahn joins Weisthor (Wiligut's) department as a civilian employee.

1935 May 1 University students in Bucharest are required to fill out special forms describing their ethnic origins.

1935 May 2 Prussia's Administrative Court rules that the Gestapo is no longer subject to judicial control.

1935 May 2 France and the Soviet Union sign the Pact of Mutual Assistance. Hitler says it is obviously directed at Germany.

1935 May 12 Marshal Josef Pilsudski dies in Warsaw and buried in Krakow Cathedral. He is succeeded by Marshal Edward Smigly-Rydz.

1935 May 14 A Swiss court, after almost two years of testimony and deliberations, rules that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion are a forgery and demoralizing literature. (See June 26, 1933 and November 1, 1937)

1935 May 16 The Czecho-Soviet Pact of Mutual Assistance is signed.

1935 May 20 The Sudeten German Party in Czechoslovakia, led by Konrad Heiden, an ally of the outlawed Nazi Party, wins 45 out of 300 seats in the national parliament, receiving more tham 250,000 votes.

1935 May 21 The "Army Law" is passed and "Aryan descent" becomes a prerequisite for active service in the German army. (Days)

1935 May 21 Hitler once again declares himself a man of peace and disavows any imperialist designs during a speech to the Reichstag.

1935 May 25 The SA stirs up anti-Jewish riots in Munich.

1935 May 27 The U.S. Supreme Court rules that Roosevelt's National Recovery Act (NRA) is unconstitutional.

1935 May 27 The International Congress of Sephardic Jewry is established.

1935 May 29 Chancellor Schuschnigg rejects Austrian union with Germany.

1935 May 31 All Jews are excluded from conscription in the German army.

1935 June Stalin extends his purges to the leadership of the Red Army.

1935 June 4 Pierre Laval forms a new French cabinet.

1935 June 7 German representatives assure the International Olympic committee that "Aryans" and "non-Aryans" will be treated equally during the upcoming Olympic games.

1935 June 7 Stanley Baldwin becomes prime minister of Britain.

1935 June 9 Sixty Jews are injured in anti-Jewish riots at Grodno in Poland.

1935 June 10 Albania announces that only Jews with capital to invest are welcome.

1935 June 12 Germany withdraws from the International League of Nations Society in protest of the League's anti-Nazi resolution.

1935 June 15 Chinese Communists Mao Tse-tung calls for a united front against Japan, but excludes Chiang Kai-shek.

1935 June 18 The German-British Naval Treaty is signed. It permits much greater German naval strength than allowed by the Versailles Treaty.

1935 June 19 The German consulate in Palestine warns Jews not to return to Germany, even for a short visit, because the Gestapo will arrest them and put them in concentration camps for "special education."

1935 June 19 Abyssinia (Ethiopia) asks the League of Nations to send observers into disputed areas of East Africa.

1935 June 20 The Soviet Union recognises the right of Jews to own private property in Birobidjan.

1935 June 21 The German state of Franconia cancels the citizenship of all Jews naturalized between 1922 and 1929. (Edelheit)

1935 June 23 Polish officials close the Anti-Nazi Boycott Committee of Poland claiming its funds are being mismanaged.

1935 June 23 Mussolini rejects British concessions concerning Abyssinia.

1935 June 24 More than 10,000 members of the Hitler Youth take a formal oath "to eternally hate the Jews."

1935 June 26 The German Labor Service (Arbeitdienst) is established and excludes all "non-Aryans" from national labor service.

1935 June 30 The Swiss state of Zurich prohibits the sale of Julius Streicher's Der Stuermer.

1935 July 1 The Gestapo arrests protestant pastor, Martin Niemoeller.

1935 July 1 Himmler officially founds the Society for Research into the Spiritual Roots of Germany's Ancestral Heritage (Ahnenerbe) in Berlin. He soon turns the Ahnenerbe into an official organization attached to the SS. Its declared aims are: "To make researches into the localization, general characteristics, achievements and inheritance of the Indo-Germanic race, and to communicate to the people the results of this research. This mission must be accomplished through the use of strictly scientific methods." (Pauwels)

1935 July 2 Switzerland officially bans three German anti-Jewish publications: Der Stuermer, Reichsdeutsche and Allemane.

1935 July 7 In Belgium, the Catholic daily newspaper, La Libre Belge, states that Catholics in Germany are treated worse than Jews.

1935 July 12 Alfred Dreyfus dies in France.

1935 July 15 The Wehrmacht chief of staff issues orders banning all German soldiers from shopping in "non-Aryan" shops and stores.

1935 July 16 Violent anti-Jewish demonstrations break out on Berlin's Kurfuerstendam.

1935 July 19 Alfred Rosenberg's latest book An die Dunkelmanner unserer Zeit, written as an answer his critics in the Catholic Church, is also put on the Church's Index of Forbidden Books. (Lewy)

1935 July 20 The Gestapo closes down Jewish-owned shop on the Kurfuerstendam in Berlin.

1935 July 23 Lithuanian police in Kovno suppress the Jewish anti-Nazi boycott.

1935 July 27 Nazi leaders forbid individual anti-Jewish actions. All anti-Jewish measures must emanate from the Fuehrer's chancellery. (Edelheit)

1935 July 31 The Berlin city council bars provincial Jews from entering the city.

1935 August 6 The Reich Association of Jewish Cultural Unions, established by the Reich Chamber of Culture, are placed under the control of Goebbel's propaganda ministry.

1935 August 9 Huey P. Long, U.S. Senator from Louisiana and Roosevelt's number one rival in the upcoming presidential elections, makes a speech in the Senate, telling his colleagues that the "Black Hand," led by Jews, has ordered his assassination at a meeting in a New Orleans hotel. (Congressional Record)

1935 August 15 Julius Streicher organizes an anti-Jewish rally at the Berlin Sportspalast.

1935 August 15 The U.S. Congress passes the Social Security Act.

1935 August 18 President Roosevelt implores Mussolini to preserve the peace in East Africa.

1935 August 20 The Catholic bishops send a lengthy memorandum to Hitler complaining that because of the support and publicity given by the party to Rosenberg's books, the public could only conclude that neopaganism and National Socialism were identical. (Lewy)

1935 August 20 The Nineteenth World Zionist Congress opens in Lucerne, Switzerland. It will close on September 14.

1935 August 20 The Seventh World Congress of the Communist International (Comintern) calls for a popular front to combat Fascism and support the struggles and wars of national liberation around the world.

1935 August 26 Half-Jewish Berlin psychiatrist, Dr. Kallmann, is allowed to speak for the last time at a meeting inGermany. At the International Congress of Population Problems, he claims: "...it is desirable to extend prevention of reproduction to relatives of schizophrenics who stand out because of minor anomalies, and, above all, to define each of them as being undesirable from the eugenic point of view at the beginning of their reproductive years." (Science)

1935 August 31 Italy increases the size of its army to more than one million men.

1935 September 1 Chaim Weizmann becomes president of the World Zionist Organization at the Nineteenth World Zionist Congress in Lucerne.

1935 September 4 The League of Nations meets to discuss Mussolini's agression against Abyssinia (Ethiopia).

1935 September 6 Street sales of Jewish newspapers is prohibited in Germany. (Persecution)

1935 September 7-12 The New Zionist Organization (HA-ZACH) is officially founded at its first congress in Vienna. Jabotinsky presents a 10-year plan to settle 1.5 million Jews on both sides of the Jordan River. The Revisionist constitution is adopted.

1935 September 8 Huey P. Long is shot in the State Capitol at Baton Rouge by Dr. Carl Austin Weiss, a doctor of Jewish descent, less than a month after his speech in the Senate. More than 10,000 people attend Weiss' funeral in Baton Rouge. (See August 9)

1935 September 10 Huey P. Long dies from his wounds in Baton Rouge.

1935 September 11 Hitler, at the Seventh Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg, announces that German scientists have solved the problem of synthetic rubber (buna) production.

1935 September 11 Britain urges the League of Nations to resist agressive actions. (Edelheit)

1935 September 14 Italy rejects a League of Nations compromise on the Abyssinian (Ethiopian) crisis.

1935 September 15 At the Nazi Party Rally in Nuremberg, Hitler officially proclaims the antisemitic "Nuremberg Laws." These repressive laws are designed to biologically isolate the Jewish people legally, politically, and socially. One law restricts German citizenship to those of "German or related blood," thus stripping the Jews of their few remaining rights as German citizens. Another prohibits marriage and extramarital intercourse between Jews and Germans, making it a crime punishable by imprisonment.

1935 September 15 The swastika becomes part of the official flag of the Third Reich. (Edelheit)

1935 September 16 The central office of the German episcopate in Berlin reports that previously Catholic couples of racially mixed descent had travelled to England to get married, but now even those marriages have become illegal. (Lewy)

1935 September 20 Nazi party ideologists give their official interpretation of the Nuremberg Laws. (Edelheit)

1935 September 20 Himmler issues an order forbidding members of the S.S. to take any leading role in religious organizations, including the German Faith movement, and strictly forbidding all manifestations of religious intolerance or scorn of religious symbols. (Lewy)

1935 September 27 Otto Rahn writes a letter to Weisthor (Wiligut) excitedly describing the places he has been visiting in his hunt for grail traditions in Germany. Rahn asks for complete confidence in the matter with the exception of Himmler. (Bundesarchiv, Koblenz)

1935 September 27 Waldemar Gurian, a German Catholic writer in exile, writes that the Nuremberg ordinances are "only a stage on the way toward the complete physical destruction of the Jews." (Lewy)

1935 September 30 All Jewish civil servants in Germanymare placed on leave. (Persecution)

1935 October 1 Goebbel's Propaganda Ministry explains that Nazism is anti-Jewish rather than antisemitic -- probably to avoid offending their Arab allies.

1935 October 2 German banks are prohibited from issuing loans and giving credit to Jews.

1935 October 3 - 4 Mussolini's Italian troops invade the African nation of Abyssinia (Ethiopia), sending in forces from Italian Eritrea and Somaliland. Italy had unsuccessfully attempted to conquer Ethiopia in 1896, and that defeat still rankled many Italians.

1935 October 5 The U.S. places an embargo on all arms shipments to Italy and Abyssinia (Ethiopia).

1935 October 5 Columbia Haus concentration camp in Berlin is closed.

1935 October 6 Nazis stage anti-Jewish actions throughout Germany. (Edelheit)

1935 October 10 The monarchy is restored in Greece under King George II.

1935 October 15 The Reich War Academy (Kriegsakademie) is reopened in Berlin.

1935 October 18 Germany promulgates the Marriage Protection Law, forbidding person with hereditary diseases to marry.

1935 October 19 The Institute for the History of the New Germany opens.

1935 October 19 The League of Nations imposes sanctions on Italy for invading Abyssinia (Ethiopia).

1935 October 24 Catholic and Protestant leaders urge America not to participate in the Berlin Olumpics.

1935 October 27 An anti-Nazi rally in Hyde Park, London, draws 18,000 people.

1935 October The Order of the New Templars (ONT) presbytery at Hertesburg, near Prerow on the Baltic Sea coast is compulsorily expropriated by Hermann Goering's Reich Forestry Commission as part of the Darrs National Park. Hauerstein then establishes a new presbytery of Petena at the Püttenhof near Waging in Bavaria. (Roots)

1935 November 1 The German citizenship of Jews is officially revoked. The Nazi government announces that the Nuremberg Laws apply to all Jews, German or foreign, without exception.

1935 November 3 Leon Blum, a Jew, forms the French Popular Front government.

1935 November 11 David Ben-Gurion is named chairman of the Jewish Agency Executive.

1935 November 14 A supplement to the Nuremberg Laws is published to clarify and define who is now considered a Jew. It decrees that anyone with at least three Jewish grandparents is deemed to be a Jew. Half-Jews, those with two Jewish grandparents are to be counted as Jews only if they belong to the Jewish religion or are married to a Jew. Half-Jews and one-fourth Jews -- those descended from one Jewish grandparent -- who do not practice the Jewish faith are lumped together into a new "non-Aryan" racial category: the Mischlinge (mixed race). (Apparatus)

1935 November 15 Germany publishes regulations to execute the Nuremberg Laws.

1935 November 15 The U.S. grants commonwealth status to the Philippines.

1935 November 18 A League of Nations embargo goes into effect against Italy.

1935 November 20 The Church of England unanimously condemns Nazi persecution of Jews in Germany.

1935 November 26 Clement Atlee becomes leader of the British Labour Party.

1935 November 26 The Nazi racial office rules that the prohibition of racially mixed marriages incorporated in the "Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor," applies equally to Gypsies. (Edelheit)

1935 November 28 Advocates for Jewish refugees reject a proposed liquidation bank for German Jewry. (Edelheit)

1935 December 1 Chiang Kai-shek is elected president of the Kuo Min Tang, the Chinese Nationalist government.

1935 December 2 An order is issued by the Bavarian Gestapo forbidding all public meetings and lectures of Ludendorff's "heathen" movement. The edict is later extended to cover Professor Jakob Wilhelm Hauer's German Faith movement as well. (NA; Lewy)

1935 December 2 A number of American colleges and universities urge U.S. athletes to boycott the Berlin Olympics.

1935 December 7 A resolution by the National Amateur Athletic Union demands that American teams refuse to participate in the Berlin Olympics.

1935 December 13 Germany publishes additional restrictions for German Jews in the legal and medical professions.

1935 December 23 The Italian air force begins using mustard gas against Abyssinia (Ethiopia).

1935 December 24 Congress passes the United States Neutrality Act.

1935 December 26 Germany revokes the licenses of Jewish traveling salespeople throughout Germany. (Edelheit)

1935 December 31 James G. McDonald resigns as League of Nations High Commissioner for the Relief of Refugees.

1935 Eva Braun, Hitler's mistress, attempts suicide.

1935 Edouard Benes succeeds Tomas Masaryk as president of Czechoslovakia.

1935 Leni Riefenstahl directs the Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will.

1935 The writings of Jorg Lanz von Liebenfels begin to be published by a firm in Vienna, which will continue to be involved until late 1937. No more of his writings will appear until after 1945 in Switzerland. (Roots)

1935 Scottish physicist Robert Watson-Watt patents the first practical radar system.

1935 Michael Prawdin (Michael Charol) publishes The Legacy of Genghis Khan, a sequel to his 1934 book on the same subject. Both are avidly read by Heinrich Himmler, who strongly recommends them to all those around him, including Hitler. (Architect)

1935 The Moscow subway (named for Kaganovich) is opened with great publicity.

1935 Between 1935 and 1937, 75 Polish Jews are killed and more than 500 injured in widespread attacks. Many are attacked in the streets and their homes and schools broken up and looted. (Atlas)

1936 The Duke of Kent, King Edward VIII's brother and closest family supporter, dies; some historians say under mysterious circumstances.

1936 January The German government begins a series of trials of members of the religious orders accused of violating the foreign currency laws. Press coverage is hostile to the accused in almost all cases. (Lewy)

1936 January An article in the Catholic Klerusblatt justifies the Nuremberg Laws as indispensable safeguards for the qualitative makeup of the German people.

1936 January 1 The United Palestine Appeal is founded.

1936 January 4 Ambassador Bergen in Rome writes to German foreign minister von Neurath that the Pope is protesting the violations of the Concordat by the Hitler government, and has several times threatened to bring his complaints into the open. It has taken the moderation of Secretary of State Pacelli to prevent a rupture of relations. (Lewy)

1936 January 11 An attempt is made on the life of Romanian Chief Rabbi Jacob Isaac Niemirower.

1936 January 15 Vicar General Riemer of Passau issues instructions allowing sterilized Catholics to receive the sacraments of matrimony, reversing the decision of January 4, 1935. (Lewy)

1936 January 15 Japan withdraws from the London Naval Conference.

1936 January 20 Edward VIII is crowned king of Great Britain.

1936 January 21 British King George V dies.

1936 January 23 Utah Senator William H. King urges the U.S. to open its doors as a haven for Jews fleeing Germany.

1936 January 25 The Catholic Agency of Poland officially condemns antisemitic acts. (Edelheit)

1936 January 29 The funeral of King George V.

1936 January - February Moderate Republicans and leftist parties in Spain form a "Popular Front" in opposition to the conservatives.

1936 February 4 Swiss Nazi Party leader Wilhelm Gustloff is assassinated by David Frankfurter, a Jew.

1936 February 6 The German Ministry of the Interior decrees that a system of records be set up to cover hereditary biological data on all patients in mental hospitals and institutions. (Science)

1936 February 6-16 The Winter Olympics are held in the German resort town of Garmisch-Partenkirchen.

1936 February 16 The "Popular Front" of moderate Republicans and leftists in Spain drives the conservatives out of office in national elections.

1936 February 18 Goebbels issues a decree muzzling the religious press.

1936 February 18 British Major General Sir Neill Malcolm is appointed League of Nations High Commissioner for Refugees from Germany.

1936 February 18 Switzerland bans NSDAP propaganda activities nationwide.

1936 February 26 A military dictatorship is established in Japan.

1936 February 27 The French Parliament ratifies the Franco-Soviet military alliance.

1936 February 27 Mussolini protests the Five-Power Mediterranean Pact.

1936 February 28 London police are ordered to arrest all antisemitic agitators.

1936 February 29 Cardinal Hlond declares in a public letter that "It is true that the Jews are committing frauds, practicing usury, and dealing in white slavery. It is true that in schools, the influence of Jewish youth upon Catholic youth is generally evil, from a religious and ethical point of view. But let us be just. Not all Jews are like that. One does well to prefer his own kind in commercial dealings and to avoid Jewish stores and Jewish stalls in the markets, but it is not permissable to demolish Jewish businesses, break windows, torpedo their houses..." (Lewy)

1936 March Writer and researcher Otto Rahn officially joins the SS. (Roots)

1936 March 3 Italy abolishes private banking.

1936 March 7 German troops re-enter the de-militarized Rhineland in defiance of the Treaty of Locarno.

1936 March 7 German Foreign Minister Konstantin von Neurath informs the other signatories to the Locarno Treaties that Germany now considers those Treaties to have been broken by France. The French military alliance with Russia, von Neurath says, is obviously directed at Germany and consequently Germany will reoccupy the Rhineland. Germany offers to sign a pact of nonaggression with Belgium and France, to sign an Air Force agreement with all Western Powers, and to reenter the League of Nations if its Charter is independent of the Versailles Treaty. None of these proposals are acted upon by the Western Powers.

1936 March Britain, Italy and Belgium at the League of Nations 12-18 Council in London make it clear to France that even if Germany's reoccupation of the Rhineland is a violation of Versailles, it is not cause enough for war.

1936 March 7 Jews in Germany lose their right to vote in elections for the Reichstag. (Persecution)

1936 March 9 Three Jews are murdered at Przytyk in Poland, and a few days later, five more are killed in the village of Stawy. (Atlas)

1936 March 13 Jewish labor groups call for a one day general strike to protest Polish antisemitism.

1936 March 14 Socialists, Communists and Syndicalists burn churches in the center of Madrid.

1936 March 15 The Council for German Jewry is established in London.

1936 March 18 Catholic leaders in Austria demand a numerus clausus against Jews.

1936 March 22 Sir Oswald Mosley makes an antisemitic speech that almost causes a riot in London's Albert Hall.

1936 March 22 Italy, Austria amd Hungary sign an anti-Nazi mutual defense treaty in Rome.

1936 March 23 British troops evacuate Jews from Hebron in Palestine.

1936 March 25 The U.S., Britain and France sign the London Naval Convention.

1936 March 25 Nazis confiscate property belonging to German and Jewish writers who voluntarily went into exile.

1936 March 29 Hitler receives 99% of the votes in a referendum, receiving 44.5 million votes out of 45.5 million registered voters.

1936 March 29 SS guard formations are renamed SS-Totenkopfverbande and their number increases to 3,500. (Edelheit)

1936 March 30 Britain announces that it will build 38 new warships.

1936 April Otto Rahn is promoted to SS-Unterscharfuehrer, a noncommissioned officer (NCO).

1936 April 7 Abyssinia again appeals to the League of Nations for aid against Italy.

1936 April 7 A Socialist vote in the Spanish parliament outs President Alcala Zamora.

1937 April 17 The Polish parliament passes a bill outlawing Jewish ritual slaughter (Shechita).

1936 April 17 Leftist unions stage a general strike in Madrid.

1936 April 22 The Lithuianian government announces that all Jewish teachers institutes will be closed.

1936 April 24-27 Anti-Jewish demonstrations break out in Czechoslovakia after screenings of the film Golem.

1936 April 28 King Farouk is coronated in Egypt.

1936 May The German government steps up its drive against the religious orders, instituting a number of trials for sexual perversity. The proceedings are given detailed and lurid coverage by the German press. Catholic monasteries are described as breeding places of filth and vice. (Lewy)

1936 May 2 Haile Selassie flees Abyssinia (Ethiopia). Addis Ababa is looted and set afire by mobs.

1936 May 3 Italian troops capture Addis Ababa.

1936 May 3 A fundraiser for Jewish refugees at Madison Square Garden draws 16,000 people.

1936 May 5 Mussolini announces total victory over Abyssinia (Ethiopia). Although the League of Nations had imposed an embargo against Italy, it failed to include a vital item, oil, thereby discrediting itself once again.)

1936 May 7 Britain proposes a plan for regulating worldwide arms traffic.

1936 May 8 Haile Selassie arrives in Palestine.

1936 May 8 Oswald Spengler, renowned German historian and philosopher best known for his pessimistic philosophy of history, dies in Munich.

1936 May 9 Abyssinia (Ethiopia) is annexed into the Italian empire under King Victor Emanuel II.

1936 May 10 The League of Nations votes to leave its sanctions against Italy in place.

1936 May 10 Manuel Azana is elected president of the Spanish Republic.

1936 May 11 Pope Pius XI describes Communism as the "greatest evil to men."

1936 May 13 Britain accuses Italy of encouraging the Arab revolt in Palestine.

1936 May 16 General Felicjan Skladkowski becomes prime minister of Poland.

1936 May 18 The British Colonial Office announces formation of the Peel Commission to investigate the disturbances in Palestine.

1936 May 18 Haile Selassie thanks Jews for their support in defending Abyssinia (Ethiopia).

1936 May 21 Britain warns Italy not to meddle in the affairs of Palestine and Egypt.

1936 May 21 Kurt von Schuschnigg is elected leader of the Austrian Fatherland Front.

1936 May 23 Catholic bishops in Holland demand a ban on the Dutch Nazi party. (Edelheit)

1936 May 24 The Belgian Fascist party, the Rexists, win 21 seats in parliament.

1936 May 26 Austria announces its intention not to attend the Geneva conference on German refugees.

1936 June A Swiss Catholic reportedly asks children to pray for the death of Hitler. The German press quickly accuses all Catholics of being in sympathy with sedition. (Lewy)

1936 June 1 Chancellor Schuschnigg meets with Mussolini, who persuades him to agree to a German-Austrian pact.

1936 June 2 One hundred nineteen Nazis are indicted in Warsaw for conspiring to overthrow the Polish government.

1936 June 4 Leon Blum becomes the first socialist and the first Jew to serve as premier of France. Presiding over the Popular Front coalition of Socialists, Communists, and liberals, he responds to worker unrest with reforms such as paid vacations, collective bargaining, and the 40-hour work week.

1936 June 6 Xavier Vallat, a member of the French Chamber of Delegates, attacks Leon Blum for his Jewish origin.

1936 June 7 Cardinal Faulhaber, in a sermon, declares "A lunatic abroad has had an attack of madness -- does this justify wholesale suspicion of German Catholics? We feel offended on account of this questioning of our loyalty to the state. We will today give an answer, a Christian answer: Catholic men, we will now pray together, a paternoster for the life of the Fuehrer. This our answer." (AB Munich; Lewy) (See June 1936 above)

1936 June 9 Mussolini appoints Count Galeazzo Ciano Italian foreign minister.

1936 June 12 The first Arab attack is made on British troops in Palestine. (Edelheit)

1936 June 13 Britain is forced to declare martial law in Palestine.

1936 June 17 Himmler is appointed chief of the German police, both uniformed and civilian.

1936 June 20 The Bavarian Political Police issue orders to take into custody all priests who dare to criticize an order dismissing all nuns teaching in the public schools, which is scheduled to be announced the following day. Vicar General Buchwieser of Munich (in charge of the diocese in the absence of Cardinal Faulhaber) instructs the clergy to read a joint pastoral letter of the Bavarian bishops criticizing this order.That same evening the government gives in and instructs the police to merely record the names of priests who read the pastoral letter. (Lewy)

1936 June 20 Austria bans all political meetings and street demonstrations.

1936 June 21 The Bavarian government publicly reads the order dismissing all Catholic nuns teaching in the public schools.

1936 June 21 Anti-Jewish riots break out in Bucharest, Romania.

1936 June 27 Germany declares its support for Danzig's independence.

1936 June 30 A Jewish general strike is held to protest Polish antisemitism

1936 June 30 France outlaws the French Fascist Party.

1936 June 30 Haile Selassie addresses the League of Nations.

1936 July 8 The Polish government declares that the German-sponsored movement for Danzig independence is belligerent act (causa belli) that could lead to war.

1936 July 8 Arabs send a memorandum to the British government demanding an end to Jewish immigration to Palestine.

1936 July 8 Hitler guarantees Austrian independence.

1936 July 9 Goebbels orders a halt to anti-Jewish propaganda until after the Berlin Olympics.

1936 July 10 The British House of Commons debates the activities of Sir Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists.

1936 July 11 A German-Austrian friendship treaty is signed.

1936 July 12 Sachsenhausen concentration camp is opened.

1936 July 15 The League of Nations and Western Powers lift economic sanctions against Italy.

1936 July 15 Professor Mollison, an anthropologist at the University of Munich, recommends to the Ministry of the Interior that the costs of expert reports on "Aryan" or Jewish origins should be recovered from the applicants. "It is not advisable to provide such a time-consuming investigation free for those who claim Aryan origins when they know they are not entitled to do so." (Science)

1936 July 17 The Spanish Civil War begins. A number of generals led by General Francisco Franco provoke revolts against the Republican (Socialist) governments in Spain and Spanish Morocco. Franco is strongly supported by the Catholic Church, the nobility, the military and the Fascists. Hitler and Mussolini immediately sent arms and men to help Franco. Several months later Stalin begins shipping arms to the "loyalists." The U.S. adheres to a policy of strict neutrality, but thousands of Communists and anti-Fascists volunteers from the United States and Britain go to Spain to serve with the republicans and are organized with the aid of the Soviet Comintern.

1936 July 17 France nationalizes its munitions industry.

1936 July 18 The Nazi-controlled Danzig Senate nullifies the Free City's constitution, prohibits Jewish ritual slaughter and prevents Jews from renewing leases and business licenses.

1936 July 21 Members of the Peel Committee (British Royal Committee on Palestine) are named.

1936 July 23 Representatives of Britain, France and Belgium meet in London to discuss German violation of the Locarno Pact in the Rhineland.

1936 July 26 Italy and Germany begin assisting General Franco's forces in Spain.

1936 July 26 Father Charles Coughlin, in an address to 5,000 American farmers claims that the Roosevelt administration is a tool of the Rothschild banking dynasty.

1936 July 26 The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) announces that during 1935 it contributed $300,000 to Jewish welfare in Germany.

1936 Summer Hitler finds a strange rock he calls Wotan's Hand and mounts it in a special glass case, displaying it as though it were a holy relic.

1936 August A gathering organized by the American Forward Movement in Asheville, N.C., collapses when a rabbi attempts to attend the conference.

1936 August 1 The 1936 Olympic Games begin in Berlin. A Black American, Jesse Owens, wins 4 gold medals. For propaganda reasons, most anti-Jewish measures are avoided for the duration of the games, and slogans are removed from the streets.

1936 August The Messerschmitt ME-109, a highly successful single-seat fighter, is first publically displayed at the 1936 Olympic games in Berlin. It was subsequently tested and proven during the Spanish Civil War.

1936 August 1 France declares a policy of non-intervention in the Spanish civil war.

1936 August 6 The U.S. declares its strict neutrality in the Spanish civil war.

1936 August 14 Arthur S. Leese, publisher of the Fascist, a periodical of the Imperial Fascist League, is tried in London on charges of seditious libel against British Jews.

1936 August 14 Count Jean Szembeck reports that during a recent conversation with Joachim von Ribbentrop that the German Foreign Minister "insisted upon the necessity of Polish-German collaboration." Both Poland and Germany," Ribbentrop said, "are under the threat of a very great danger. Bolshevism plans to destroy all of the fruits of Western civilization"

1936 August 15 Arab groups in Palestine attack 38 Jewish settlements.

1936 August 19 The first Stalinist trials of "counterrevolutionaries" opens. All defendents will be sentenced to death.

1936 August 23 The German Evangelical Church publishes its manifesto.

1936 August 24 Two-year mandatory military service becomes compulsory in Germany.

1936 August 24 Lev Kamenev is executed after being found guilty of treason in the first Stalinist "show trial" of the Great Purge.

1936 August 25 Grigory Zinoviev is executed after being arrested and falsely charged with having organized a "terrorist counterrevolutionary group allied with the Gestapo."

1936 August 26 Britain and Egypt sign a twenty-year alliance in Cairo, ending the British military occupation of Egypt, except for the Canal Zone (Suez).

1936 September Karl Maria Weisthor (Wiligut) is promoted to SS-Brigadefuehrer (Brigadier) on Himmler's personal staff. An undated typescript in the Bundesarchiv in Koblenz is a blueprint for the reestablishment of the Irminist religion in Germany, with detailed provisions for restrictions on the priesthood, the nationalization of all ecclesiastical property, and the restoration and conservation of ancient monuments. (Roots)

1936 September 4 The Berlin Labor Court rules that German employees who marry Jews or other "non-Aryans" may be dismissed from their jobs.

1936 September 8 France places an embargo on all military exports to Spain.

1936 September 9 Goebbels accuses Czechoslovakia of providing secret bases for Soviet aircraft.

1936 September 14 After a majority of the Spanish Catholic hierarchy has sided with General Franco and called for a crusade against Communism, Pope Pius XI gives his blessing to "those who have assumed the difficult and dangerous task of defending and restoring the rights and honor of Church and religion." (Lewy)

1936 September 18 David Lloyd George publicly expresses enthusiam for Hitler and his regime after visiting the Fuehrer in Germany.

1936 September 20 The Gestapo arrests a number of well-known rabbis and Zionist leaders without charging them with any crimes.

1936 September 21 Arthur Leese and two other British Fascists are found guilty of libeling and slandering British Jews.

1936 September 24 Jewish-owned employment agencies in Germany are ordered to cease operation.

1936 September 27 The Gestapo closes the Association of Independent Artisans of the Jewish Faith, a German Jewish mutual aid society.

1936 October 1 General Franco is declared Spanish head of state at Burgos.

1936 October 4 Hans Frank draws up a program to remove all Jewish influence from German jurisprudence. (Edelheit)

1936 October 4 The Reich Chamber of Culture orders all Jewish art dealers in Berlin to close their galleries by the end of the year.

1936 October 13 Special courts are set up by the German Ministry of Justice to try cases covered by the Nuremberg Laws

1936 October 15 Jewish teachers in Germany are forbidden to tutor "Aryan" children.

1936 October 20 Polish officials close the Warsaw Trade School after anti-Jewish riots.

1936 October 21 Julius Streicher initiates a new anti-Jewish campaign with an exhibition entitled "World Enemy Number One: Jewish Bolshevism."

1936 October 22 Belgium declares martial law to combat Rexist violence.

1936 October 22-25 Spanish Republicans (Socialists) transfer Spain's gold reserves to the Soviet Union. (Edelheit)

1936 October 25 The Rome-Berlin Axis is established. Cooperation between Germany and Italy in Spain has helped cement a vague understanding, which is now formally concluded.

1936 November At Petrovaradim in Yugoslavia, the editor of an antisemitic newspaper modelled on Streicher's "Der Stürmer" is tried and acquitted. (Atlas)

1936 November Dr. Ritter, a psychologist and psychiatrist, begins his work on Gypsies in the Section for Research on Race-hygiene and Population Biology in the Reich Department of Health in Berlin, funded by the DFG. (Science)

1936 November 4 President Roosevelt is relected, carrying every state except Maine and Vermont.

1936 November 5 The Iron Guard (Legionaries) denounces the Romanian government as a tool of Jews and Freemasons.

1936 November 7 The so-called International Brigade, composed primarily of Socialists and Communists, arrives in Madrid and a battle for the city begins.

1936 November 8 The National Christian Party stages the largest antisemitic demonstration in Romanian History.

1936 November 12 The opening session of the Peel Commission begins in Palestine.

1936 November 13 The Research Department for the Jewish Question (Forschungsabteilung judenfrage) opens in Munich.

1936 November 15 The Romanian Ministry of Labor announces that Jewish refugees will not be allowed to establish themselves in Romania. (Edelheit)

1936 November 18 Germany and Italy officially recognize General Franco as head of the Spanish state.

1936 November 23 The Nazis blacklist some 2,000 works written by Jewish authors.

1936 November 25 The Anti-Comintern Pact is signed by Germany and Japan. They will soon be joined by Italy

1936 November 25 Chaim Weizmann testifies before the Peel Commission in Palestine.

1936 November 29 The National Council for Palestine, located in New York, urges the Peel Commission to insist on Britain honoring its obligation to establish a Jewish homeland in Palesine.

1936 November 29 Soviet Prime Minister Vlacheslav Molotov denounces the Nazi persecution of German Jews. Antisemites claim Molotov and Stalin are both married to Jewesses.

1936 November 30 Moshe Shertok, head of the Political Department of the Jewish Agency, testifies before the Peel Commission, blaming the Colonial Office and its restrictive immigration policy as the reason for "illegal" Jewish immigration to Palestine. (Edelheit)

1936 December 1 The Hitler Youth (Hitlerjugend) becomes an official agency of the Reich.

1936 December 3 All Jewish charitable organizations in Germany lose their tax exempt status.

1936 December 6 A new Nazi press campaign aimed at totally eliminating Jews from German economic life is begun.

1936 December 7 The last Jewish department store in Germany is "Aryanized."

1936 December 9 The trial of David Frankfurter, the Jew accused of assassinating Swiss Nazi leader Wilhelm Gustloff, begins in Grisons state court (S).

1936 December 9 King Edward VIII sends a coded telegram to Baron Eugene de Rothschild requesting permission to stay at Rothschild's Castle Enzesfeld near Vienna. (Cowles)

1936 December 11 King Edward VIII abdicates the British throne and becomes the Duke of Windsor. He quickly leaves the country and begins an extended stay at Rothschild's castles in Austria. (Cowles)

1936 December The Duke of York (father of Queen, Elizabeth) becomes King George VI of England.

1936 December 12 Chiang Kai-shek declares war on Japan.

1936 December 14 David Frankfurter is sentenced to 18 years in a Swiss prison for killing Nazi leader Wilhelm Gustloff.

1936 December 18 The Nazis proclaim an anti-Jewish boycott limited to Breslau.

1936 December 20 Walter Gross, chief of the Nazi Racial Bureau, announces a nationwide racial propaganda campaign.

1936 December 25 The U.S. announces new agreements that facilitate trade with Germany. (Edelheit)

1936 December 27 The Basque autonomoius government, headquartered in Guernica, seizes a German vessel in Spainish waters. It will be released two days later.

1936 December 27 Britain and France agree on a mutual policy of non-intervention in the Spanish civil war.

1936 Action Francaise is officially dissolved by the French government for complicity in a physical attack on Leon Blum. (Surviving clandestinely, Action Francaise contributes to the ideology of the Vichy Government during World War II. It disintegrates in 1944 when France is liberated and Maurras, its leader, is imprisoned for collaboration.)

1936 Ioannis Metaxas establishes a Greek dictatorship.

1936 In Lithuania, where severe restrictions had been imposed on the number of Jews allowed to enter universities, not a single Jewish student is granted admittance to study medicine. (Atlas)

1936 The influential Jesuit magazine Civilta Cattolica published in Rome emphasizes that opposition to Nazi racialism should not be interpreted as a rejection of anti-semitism, and argues, as the magazine had done since 1890, that the Christian world (though without un-Christian hatred) must defend itself against the Jewish threat by suspending the civic rights of Jews and returning them to the ghettos. (Lewy)

1936 The German government gives the National Association of German Catholics Abroad a sum of more than 139,000 marks, in 1936 alone, for its pro-German and pro-Nazi activities among the German minorities of Poland, Romania, and Yugoslavia. (Lewy)

1936 A Polish Jesuit periodical asserts that it is necessary "to provide separate schools for Jews, so that our children will not be infected with their lower morality." (Atlas)

1936 The Iron Guard, an influential antisemitic organization in Romania, bombs a Jewish theater in Timisoara, killing two Jews and injuring many more. (Atlas)

1936 Diana Mitford, Unity Mitford's sister, marries Sir Oswald Mosley in Berlin. Their wedding reception is held at the home of Joseph Goebbel's. (Guiness)

1937 January 1 The Polish law banning Jewish ritual slaughter (Shechita) goes into effect.

1937 January 1 All Jewish-owned employment agencies in Germany are ordered closed.

1937 January 6 The Zionist Organization in Poland votes to support the Polish Socialist parties in all future elections. (Edelheit)

1937 January 7 Heiress to the Dutch throne, Princess Juliana, marries Prince Bernhard.

1937 January 10 The Polish government dissolves the Warsaw Jewish kehilla.

1937 January 12 The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem testifies before the Peel Commission in Palestine.

1937 January 15 The Schuschnigg government proclaims amnesty for Austrian Nazis.

1937 January 16 The Gestapo orders all Jewish youth organization in Germany dissolved.

1937 January 17 Germany prohibits foreign warships from free passage through the Kiel Canal.

1937 January 20 President Roosevelt is inaugurated for a second term.

1937 January 22 German citizens are asked not to patronize Jewish doctors.

1937 January 23 The second Stalinist trial of counterrevolutionaries opens in Moscow. Thirteen of the fifteen defendents receive death sentences.

1937 January 24 Goering sorders Heydrich to organize emigration of Jews still residing in Germany.

1937 January 30 The Peel Commission returns to Britain.

1937 January 31 The Danzig Senate creates a secret police force modelled on the Gestapo.

1937 January Hitler formally abrogates the Treaty of Versailles.

1937 February 1 The Nazis issue a decree prohibiting Herman citizens from accepting any form of Nobel Prize.

1937 February 2 In reply to a question from the Reich Minister of Science, Education, and National Culture about the number of Jews and half-Jews supported by the DFG, its president reports: "None at all." (Science)

1937 February 4 President Roosevelt begins an effort to "pack" the Supreme court.

1937 February 10 Nazi officials close all Catholic schools in Bavaria.

1937 February 16-22 Hermann Goering visits Poland.

1937 February 18 Under a new German conscription law, half and quarter Jews will be eligible for military and labor service.

1937 February 18 Czechoslovakia signs an agreement with Sudeten Germans guaranteeing them broader minority rights.

1937 February 27 France establishes a ministry of defense.

1937 February 27 Anti-Jewish violence again breaks out in Romania.

1937 March The Duke of Windsor leaves the Rothschild's castle in Austria. (Cowles)

1937 March 5 German officials announce that the nation's film industry is completely cleansed of Jews.

1937 March 14 A papal encyclical, Mit Brennender Sorge (With Burning Sorrow) is published, dealing with the condition of the Catholic Church in Germany and condemning Nazi racism.

1937 March 21 Mit brennender Sorge, is read from the pulpits of all Catholic Churches in Germany on Palm Sunday. It has been smuggled into Germany, secretly printed and distributed by messenger throughout the nation. "With deep anxiety and with ever-growing dismay" Pius XI says he has watched the tribulations of the Catholic Church in Germany. The Concordat of 1933 is now being openly violated, and the conscience of the faithful oppressed as never before. True belief in God, the Pope declares, is irreconcilable with the deification of earthly values such as race, people or the state. Important as these are in the natural order, they can never be the ultimate norm of all things. Belief in a national God or a national religion, similarly is a grave error. The God of Christianity cannot be imprisoned "within the frontiers of a single people, within the pedigree of one single race." (Lewy)

1937 March 21 The Polish Senate passes a law making it illegal for Jews to manufacture, distribute or sell Catholic religious materials.

1937 March 22 The Gestapo confiscates all copies of the Pope's encyclical it can find. Twelve print shops are soon closed and dispossessed without compensation for having printed the encyclical letter. Strong protests are lodged with the bishops and the Vatican. (Lewy)

1937 March 26 The Pope publishes an encyclical entitled Divini Redemptoris, condemning atheistic Communism.

1937 Spring A decision is made that all German colored children are to be illegally sterilized. After the prerequisite expert reports are provided by Dr. Abel, Dr. Schade, and Professor Fischer, the sterilizations are carried out. (Science)

1937 April The Duke of Windsor visits Germany at the invitation of Adolf Hitler. Windsor meets privately at least twice with Rudolf Hess. (Wolff Hess, Missing Years)

1937 April 6 Hitler orders the resumption of the immorality and foreign exchange trials against Catholic clergymen, which had been halted shortly before the Olympic Games in the summer of 1936.

1937 April 9 The Gestapo seizes all B'nai B'rith lodges in Germany.

1937 April 11 A new order from the German Ministry of the Interior deprives all Jews of municipal citizenship.

1937 April 12 The German Foreign Ministry sends a note of protest to Papal Secretary of State Pacelli describing the Pope's encyclical as a call to battle against the leadership of the German state and a grave violation of the Concordat (See March 21). (Lewy)

1937 April 13 The Gestapo prohibits all Jewish public meetings for 60 days with the exception of synagogue services.

1937 April 16 Swiss officials announce that they are refusing to grant permanent resident permits to German Jewish refugees to avoid flooding the labor market.

1937 April 20 General Franco declares Spain a totalitarian state and assumes dictatorial power.

1937 April 20 The International Order of B'nai B'rith is banned throughout Germany.

1937 April 26 German warplanes from the Luftwaffe's Condor Legion destroy the Spanish (Basque) town of Guernica during what is described as the first air bombardment of an undefended town in history. More than 1,600 civilians are killed.

1937 April 30 Pacelli replies to Germany's note of protest. "The Holy See," the Papal Secretary declares, "which has friendly, correct, or at least tolerable relations with states of one or another constitutional form and orientation, will never interfere in the question of what concrete form of government a certain people chooses to regard as best suited to its nature and requirements. With respect to Germany also, it has remained true to this principle and intends so to continue." (Lewy)

1937 May On his arrival in America, Walter Krivitsky, Stalin's chief of Military Intelligence, reveals to the U.S. State Department the full details of Stalin's purges. Krivitsky claims Stalin is determined to forge a pact with Hitler and has turned against the old Bolsheviks and officers of the Red Army because they are opposed to any alliance with Hitler. "Stalin, in the name of anti-fascism, destroyed the anti-fascists," Kivitsky says.

1937 May The curriculum vitae of Karl Maria Weisthor (Wiligut) is sealed after confidential scrutiny. Weisthor's psychiatric history remains a closely guarded secret. (Roots)

1937 May Anarchists and radical Marxists in Spain stage an abortive revolution in Barcelona that is opposed by the Socialists and Communists. The Communists, who as the conduit for Soviet aid had become increasingly influential on the Loyalist side, lead a drive to repress the ultra-leftist elements. Many are tortured and murdered.

1937 May 1 President Roosevelt signs the third U.S. Neutrality Act.

1937 May 6 The airship Hindenburg catches fire and is destroyed while maneuvering to land at Lakehurst, N.J. Claims and speculation that it was sabotaged have never been supported by solid evidence.

1937 May 9 A Nazi decree bars Jews from receiving university degrees.

1937 May 14 German Jews are forbidden to play music by Beethoven or Mozart during Jewish cultural concerts.

1937 May 20 Professor von Verschuer, now at the University of Frankfurt, mentions in a letter to Professor Fischer his report for Rosenberg, "Proposals for the Registration of Jews and Part-Jews". (Science)

1937 May 28 Neville Chamberlain, Chancellor of the Exchequer, is elected leader of the Conservative Party of Britain, forms a new cabinet and becomes Prime Minister of Great Britain, replacing Stanley Baldwin.

1937 May 30 Anti-Franco Spanish forces bomb the German battleship Deutschland off Ibizia, killing 26 and injuring 71.

1937 May 31 The German fleet shells the Spanish city of Almeira in retaliation for the attack on the Deutschland.

1937 June 3 Duke of Windsor marries Wallis Simpson (Warfield) in Tours, France.

1937 June 8-9 Air raids on Madrid, Barcelona, Bilbao and Valencia cause heavy damage and loss of life.

1937 June 11 The Soviet "Generals' Trials," the third Stalinist purge trial, opens in Moscow.

1937 June 12 Soviet Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevski is executed in Moscow. It is said that Tukhachevski had confided his plan for a coup against the Communist regime to military officials while visiting London and Paris and that Moscow was immediately informed by its agents. (Sturdza)

(Note: Others claim Tukhachevski was set up by Reinhard Heydrich who used forged documents from WWI to frame Tukhachevski in an effort to disrupt the Soviet military and weaken its leadership.) (Secrets)

1937 June 12 Heydrich issues a secret directive ordering Jewish "race-violators" into "protective custody" after they have served their prison sentences.

1937 June 13 The Swiss state of Geneva bans the Communist Party.

1937 June 16 General Lucjan Zieligowski in a speech to the Polish Senate declares, " there is no place in Poland for the Jews."

1937 June 16 The German People's Church (Deutsche Volkskirche) is accredited as the official Nazi church.

1937 June 16 New Stalinists purges are held in Belorussia.

1937 June 20 The Czech government institutes compulsory military training for all citizens from six to sixty. Actual military call-up is from seventeen to thirty.

1937 June 21 Leon Blum resigns as premier of France. Camille Chautemps forms a radical Socialist government, with Blum as vice premier.

1937 June 28 The Ninth Congress of the International Chamber of Commerce opens in Berlin.

1937 June 30 The French legislature votes to give emergency powers to the Chautemps government.

1937 Summer Otto Rahn makes a second expedition to Montsegur.

1937 July 1 The Gestapo again arrests Pastor Martin Niemoeller, leader of the German Confessional Church in Berlin.

1937 July 2 Severe limitations are put on the number of Jewish pupils (already partially restricted in 1933) allowed to attend German schools. (Persecution)

1937 July 2 Aviatrix Amelia Earhart and her copilot Fred Noonan disappear over the Pacific Ocean during the last leg of an attempted flight around the world.

1937 July 6 A German decree forbids Jews from studying medicine.

1937 July 7 A Chinese-Japanese military conflict at Marco Polo Bridge near Peking provides the pretext for an all-out Japanese campaign of conquest in China.

1937 July 7 The Peel Commission publishes its plan for the partitioning of Palestine into two separate states: one Arab and the other Jewish.

1937 July 15 The German-Polish Convention of May1922 expires along with its protection of Jewish minority rights in Upper Silesia. The Jews of Upper Silesia are now exposed to the full rigors of Nazi rule. (Atlas)

1937 July 19 Ettersberg, a new concentration camp, originally designed for professional criminals, is opened in central Germany. Its name is changed to Buchenwald on July 28. (Edelheit)

(Note: Other sources say it was opened on July 16.)

1937 July 24 An order segregating Jews from "Aryans" in German health resorts and public baths is issued.

1937 July 27 The trial of five German Jews accused of a 1929 ritual murder (blood libel) opens in Bamburg.

1937 July 28 Japanese troops occupy the Chinese capital of Peking.

1937 July 30 The League of Nations Permanent Mandates Commission discusses the Peel Commission's plan for partitioning Palestine.

1937 August Jews are accused of sacrilege at Humenne in Czechoslovakia. (Atlas)

1937 August 3 Italy bars foreign Jews from universities and institutions of higher learning.

1937 August 3-16 The Twentieth World Zionist Congress meeting in Zurich debates the partitioning of Palestine as proposed by the Peel Commission.

1937 August 4 Most Jewish teachers are barred from teaching in Italian schools.

1937 August 5 The Nazi Propaganda Ministry forbids any further mention of Leo Schlageter or Horst Wessel in the Catholic press. This is another attempt by Goebbels and his staff to put an end to the Catholic practice of "borrowing" Nazi heroes.

1937 August 8 The World Zionist Congress debates the partitioning of Palestine. Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion defend the plan.

1937 August 8 The Romanian government prohibits the singing of Hatikvah (the Zionist national anthem) in Jewish schools.

1937 August 11 Hjalmar Schacht has a loud argument with Hitler at Obersalzberg. (Schacht was one of the few people who dared to shout at Hitler.) After a closed-door meeting, Schacht tenders his resignation. Hitler, obviously upset, insists he must reconsider.

1937 August 13 The German Ministry of Education orders all Germans knowing a foreign language to register with the government.

1937 August 18 The Romanian Orthodox Church urges the Romanian people to fight the "Jewish parasite."

1937 August 23 The Radical Peasants Party criticizes the antisemitism of the Romanian Orthodox Church. (Edelheit)

1937 August 29 China and the Soviet Union sign a treaty of nonagression.

1937 September Brothers of the Hungarian branch of the Order of the New Templars (ONT) found the small priory of Szent Kereszt below Vaskapu Hill at Pilisszentkereszt in northern Hungary. (Roots)

1937 September 4 Nazi officials order all Rotary Club chapters in Germany dissolved.

1937 September 5 Hjalmar Schacht takes a leave of absence from the Economics Ministry. That same month he tells Max Warburg he can no longer keep M.M. Warburg in the Reich Loan Consortium. (Warburgs)

1937 September 9 Sachsenburg concentration camp is closed.

1937 September 12 The Romanian National Soldiers Front calls on Romanian citizens to deal with the "Jewish Plot."

1937 September 13 An Anti-Jewish month is proclaimed by Polish antisemitic groups.

1937 September 25-28 Mussolini and Hitler meet in Berlin.

1937 September 27 The Romanian government prohibits Zionist fundraising nationwide.

1937 October 4 Amin al-Huseini, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, flees Palestine for Lebanon.

1937 October 5 President Roosevelt, in a major speech in Chicago, warns Americans against continued isolationism, speaking of the need to "quarantine the aggressors." A strong negative response to this call indicates the strength of isolationist sentiment in the U.S.

1937 October 13 Germany guarantees Belgian independence.

1937 October 14 Professor von Verschuer protests to Reich Minister of Justice Gürtner that his expert opinion incriminating the defendant in a "race dishonour trial," has not been accepted and that, as a result, the defendant has been set free. (Science)

1937 October 16 The Hungarian National Socialist Party is founded in Hungary.

1937 October 16 Police in Czechoslovakia disrupt a Sudeten German Party rally at Teplitz. Party leader Konrad Henlein demands that ethnic Germans receive autonomy.

1937 October 20 Felix Warburg, international banker, philanthropist and Jewish communal leader dies in the United States. (Edelheit)

1937 October 20 Jewish market stalls and shops are picketed by Nazi police.

1937 October 21 The Catholic Center Party is eliminated and the Nazis take absolute control of the city.

1937 October 23 Nazis and Nazi sympathizers in Danzig stage a massive pogrom.

1937 October 27 Jewish access to public bathhouses in Danzig is limited to specified hours, one day a week.

1937 October 28 The Spanish Loyalists (Socialists) government escapes to Barcelona.

1937 October 29 The League of Nations High Commission complains that he is powerless to act in the city's internal affairs.

1937 November General Kutiepov, chief of the former Nationalist Russian Army in exile, is kidnapped by Communist agents on the streets of Paris, taken to Moscow and executed.

1937 November 1 The Swiss Court of Criminal Appeal quashes the judment of the lower court's verdict on the authenticity of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in its entirety. (See May 14, 1935)

1937 November 3 The Danzig Senate isolates Jewish merchants and seizes their bank deposits, charging them with tax evasion.

1937 November 5 The Hossbach Memorandum: Hitler outlines secret plans and contingencies in the event of a future war, telling his generals that he intends to destroy Czechoslovakia. Some historians contend that this document's historical significance has been greatly exaggerated. Others, such as William Shirer, emphatically state that it was on this date that Hitler first imparted his decision to go to war to the Commanders-in-Chief of the three armed services. (Shirer I)

1937 November 5 Germany and Poland sign an agreement regarding treatment of each other's minorities.

1937 November 6 Italy joins the German-Japanese Anti-Comintern Pact.This grouping prefigures their later alliance structure in World War II.

1937 November 8 Goebbel's propaganda Ministry sponsors Der Ewige Jew (The Eternal Jew) an anti-Jewish exposition under the direction of Julius Streicher. It closes on February 4, 1938.

1937 November 9 Japanese troops occupy Shanghai.

1937 November 13 The Jewish Socialist Party (Bund) celebrates the 40th anniversary of its founding in Poland.

1937 November 16 Only in rare cases can Jews now obtain passports for foreign travel. (Persecution)

1937 November 17-21 A meeting between Lord Halifax and Hitler is said to mark the beginning of Britain's so-called "appeasement" policy toward Germany. They meet to discuss the deteriorating situation in Czechoslovakia.

1937 November 18 A catholic official refuses to allow permission for the Ministry of Ecclesiastical Affairs to consult diocesan files on Jewish conversions and mixed marriages "on grounds of pastoral secrecy." (Up to this time, the Church had closely cooperated with the government in determining and sorting out those of Jewish descent. It was only when Catholics of Jewish descent were threatened that the Catholic church balked. Yet, even then, they continued disclosing the names of non-Catholics of Jewish extraction right through the war years, when the price of being Jewish was deportation and death.) (Lewy)

1937 November 24 Hjalmar Schacht is removed as German minister of the economy and is replaced by Walter Funk. Schacht remains president of the Reichsbank.

1937 November 26 Nazis begin "Aryanizing" Jewish business in Danzig.

1937 November 28 The Bar Association in Lublin (P) restricts the number of Jews in the legal profession to a percentage corresponding to the ratio of Jews in the total population.

1937 November 29 Pro-Nazi Sudeten German deputies resign en masse from the Czech parliament, precipitating a national crisis. (Edelheit)

1937 December 5 Spanish Loyalists (Socialists) begin a last-ditch counteroffensive in the civil war. (Edelheit)

1937 December 6 The Dutch People's Party, a new antisemitic political party, is established in Holland.

1937 December 8 The Iron Guard (Legionairies) announces the opening of a chain of cooperative stores aimed at underselling Jewish stores and forcing them out of business.

1937 December 11 Italy withdraws friom the League of Nations.

1937 December 12 Japanese forces sink the U.S. gunboat Punay in China's Yangtze River. Japan apologizes and agrees to pay reparations.

1937 December 12 Communists receive 98% of the vote in the first elections to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR.

1937 December 13 Nanking, the Nationalist capital falls to the Japanese.

1937 December 14 Himmler orders all those "identified" as "asocial" incarcerated in concentration camps.

1937 December 15 Polish bishops call for segregation of all Jewish students in Polish elementary schools.

1937 December 20 General Ludendorff dies. Hitler attends his funeral.

1937 December 20 The Jewish Party in Romania fails to win a single seat during parliamentary elections.

1937 December 21 Britain officially repudiates the Peel Commission's Partition Plan.

1937 December 28 King Carol of Romania appoints Octavian Goga and Alexander Cuza to head a National Christian Party government. During its 44 days in power it issues numerous anti-Jewish decrees.

1937 December-January General Miller, General Ktiepov's successor, is kidnapped in Paris and later executed in Moscow.

1937 Otto Rahn's second book Luzifers Hofgesind. Eine Reise zu Europas guten Geisten (Lucifer's Court in Europe) is published in Leipzig.

1937 After four months service with the SS-Death's Head Division Oberbayern at Dachau, Otto Rahn is given leave to devote himself fully to writing until his resignation from the SS in February 1939. (Roots)

1937 John D. Rockefeller appoints William S. Farish president and CEO of Standard Oil of New Jersey.

1937 Nikolai Bukharin is arrested by the Soviet secret police..

1937 Joseph Kennedy, Sr., is named U.S. ambassador to Great Britain. His sons, Joe Jr. and John, both work as international reporters for their father.

1937 Leon Trotsky publishes The Revolution Betrayed, an expose of Joseph Stalin and his regime.

1938 January 4 Goering issues a decree classifying even firms with 25% Jewish ownership as subject to "Aryanization".

1938 January 6 U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull declares that America cannot intervene in Romania's internal affairs.

1938 January 9 Max Warburg dedicates a new Jewish Community Center in Hamburg.

1938 January 10 Professor Otto Warburg, scientist, communal leader and Zionist leader, dies.

1938 January 14 A Romanian decree forbids Jews from employing Christian female servants under the age of forty.

1938 January 14 Romanian police order all Jewish libraries and Jewish owned bookstores closed in Bessarabia. The same day, the Romanian press publishes instructions for dismissing all Jewish doctors from social insurance institutions.

1938 January 19 American and European Jewish organizations submit a protest petition to the League of Nations regarding the treatment of Jews in Romania.(Edelheit)

1938 January 21 Romania formally abrogates the minority rights of Jews, and revokes the citizenship of many Jews who have been resident there since the end of the war. (Atlas)

1938 January 24 German War Minister Blomberg is forced to resign and army Commander-in-Chief Fritsch is accused of homosexuality and then sent away on leave.

1938 January 25 The Gestapo is given the power to place prisoners in "protective custody" at its own discretion.

1938 January 28 President Roosevelt asks Congress for increased appropriations to build-up the U.S. armed forces.

1938 January Archbishop Groeber, a "promoting member" of the SS, known as the "brown bishop," is excluded from the SS, but refuses to voluntarily give up his promoting membership. (Lewy)

1938 February 4 Hitler announces he is personally taking over command of the German armed forces. Fritsch is forced to resign and Konstantin von Neurath is replaced by Joachim von Ribbentrop as Foreign Minister. Hitler assumes complete control of the Wehrmacht and announces a complete reorganization of the armed forces supreme command (OKW). Sixteen high-ranking generals are dismissed and 44 others are transferred to other posts. Hitler successfully eliminates the most important dissidents in the Wehrmacht and replaces them with men he feels he can either trust or manipulate. General Walter von Brauchitsch is appointed Commander-in-Chief of the army (OKH). General Wilhelm Keitel is appointed Commander-in-Chief of the OKW.

1938 February 4 Austrian Nazis vandalize numerous Jewish businesses in the suburbs of Vienna.

1938 February 6 Romanian Prime Minister Goga warns that he will not tolerate foreign interference in his domestic antisemitic policy.

1938 February 10 The Goga government in Romania is dissolved. The new government, headed by Dr. Miron Christea, nullifies some of Goga's anti-Jewish legislation.

1938 February 12 A meeting between Hitler and Austrian Chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg at Obersalzberg leads to a greater Nazi role in Austrian government and public life.

1938 February 16 Chancellor Schuschnigg names Arthur Seyss-Inquart, a virulent Austrian Nazi, minister of the interior.

1938 February 16 Lithuania adopts a new constitution guaranteeing equal rights to all citizens regardless of race or creed. (Edelheit)

1938 February 20 British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden resigns and is replaced by Lord Halifax, Edward F.L. Wood.

1938 February 20 Bishop Ehrenfried of Wurzburg in a pastoral letter expresses the desire that "the totalitarianism of the State and the totalitarianism of the Church" should coexist "without conflicts and bitterness." (Lewy)

1938 February 20 Franz Josef Rarkowski is consecrated as bishop of the German army in a lavish ceremony conducted by Nuncio Orsenigo, assisted by Bishops Preysing and Galen. Rarkowski will hold this post until the end of World War II. (Lewy)

1938 February 23 Volksruf, a violently antisemitic newspaper, begins publication in Austria.

1938 February 24 Nazi-instigated disturbances erupt throughout Austria after Chancellor Schuschnigg calls for a plebiscite (referendum) on Austrian independence.

1938 February 28 The American Legion begins a nationwide campaign against the pro-Nazi German-American Bund.

1938 March 1 Thousands of Jews are deprived of their livelihood when the Polish government revokes Jewish tobacco dealers' licenses. (Edelheit)

1938 March 2 Long-time Bolshevik Nikolai Bukharin is publicly tried in a so-called "show trial" on trumped-up charges of conspiring to overthrow the Soviet state. He is quickly convicted and sentenced to death after making a forced confession.

1938 March 4 Hitler rejects British concessions in Africa.

1938 March 7 J. Dreyfus and Company, a large Jewish-owned investment bank in Germany, is "Aryanized."

1938 March 8 More than 2,000 Nazi demonstrators march through the center of Vienna shouting anti-Jewish slogans.

1938 March 11 Hitler issues an ultimatum demanding that Schuschnigg resign as Austrain chancellor. Arthur Seyss-Inquart becomes chancellor, paving the way for a complete Nazi take over.

1938 March 12 Operation Otto -- German troops enter Austria unopposed. Hitler tells a large crowd in Linz, his old home town, that "Providence had called him out of Linz and charged him with a mission to restore his homeland to the German Reich." (Operation Otto referred to the first name of the pretender to the Austrian throne: Archduke Otto von Habsburg.)

1938 March 13 The Reichstag "legalizes" Austrian Anschluss (union or annexation) by passing the Law Concerning the Reunion of Austria, declaring it a German province. Hitler, proclaiming the unity of the German people, realizes his dream of a union between Germany and his native Austria.

1938 March 13 Hitler with General Keitel at his side enters Vienna in a triumphant motorcade. Thousands of ecstatic Austrias greet him with unbridled enthusiam, waving Nazi flags and screaming his name.

1938 March 13 More than 138,000 Austrian Jews now come under Nazi rule. The activities of all Jewish organizations and congregations are quickly forbidden, and the Gestapo launces a campaign of terror, looting hundreds of Jewish shops and apartments. Many Jewish leaders are arrested, and more than 500 Jews, driven to despair, soon commit suicide.

1938 March 13 Leon Blum recovers the office of French premier and begins his second term. His Front Populaire government will last only to April 15, 1939.

1938 March 13 Nikolai Bukharin is executed by a Soviet firing squad.

1938 March 15 Austria enacts its first anti-Jewish laws since Anchluss. Hitler places Hermann Goering in charge of the Austrian economy.

1938 March 18 The Gestapo and SD are empowered to act in Austria outside those powers enacted by law. (Edelheit)

1938 March 20 The Polish Association of High School Teachers in Cracow (P) proposes a ban on all Jewish teachers.

1938 March 21 Lichtenburg concentration camp near Prettin (Torgau) reopens

1938 March 22 Britain announes a drive against Jewish "illegal" immigration to Palestine.

1938 March 23 Leon Blum's government in France announces a plan to permit legalized residence for Jewish refugees who agree to become farmers.

1938 March 24 Professor Kleist, a psychiatrist, ends his report on the German mental hospital in Herborn, where "uthanasia" by starvation is being practiced, with these sentences: "As long as there is no law for the destruction of lives unworthy to be lived, those who are beyond cure have the right to humane treatment which assures their continued existence. The expenditure on these unfortunates should not fall below an acceptable minimum level." (Science)

1938 March 24 The Romanian Ministry of Agriculture bans Jewish ritual slaughter (shechita).

1938 March 26 Jewish professors and instructors are dismissed from Austrian universities.

1938 March 28 Hitler gives General Keitel secret directives for Operation Green against Czechoslovakia.

1938 March 28 Berlin's Jewish community loses its incorporated status.

1938 March 29 The Spanish civil war comes to an end.

1938 March 31 The Polish Senate passes the Expatriots Law, canceling citizenship for Polish Jews living outside the country, unless their passports are checked and stamped by Polish consular officials by the end of October. (Edelheit)

1938 April 1 A number od Austrian Jews are sent to Dachau concentration camp.

1938 April 1 Jewish patients are barred from Danzig's public hospitals and welfare institutions. All Jewish doctors and nurses are dismissed.

1938 April 7 Codreanu is arrested in Romania and will later die in prison.

1938 April 8 Eduard Daladier forms a new French government.

1938 April 8 The Rothschild Bank in Austria is "Aryanized" and taken over by the Austrian Credit Institute.

1938 April 10 A plebiscite (referendum) is held in Austria to legalize Anchluss. Jews are excluded from voting.

1938 April 11 Bulgaria outlaws the Bulgarian Nazi Party (Ratnizi)

1938 April 13 The Roman Congregation of Seminaries and Universities attacks as erroneous eight theses taken from Nazi doctrine. Antisemitism is neither mentioned nor criticized. (Lewy)

1938 April 15 Starting in Dabrowa, hundreds of Jews are injured and much property destroyed during anti-Jewish attacks in Poland. (Atlas)

1938 April 17 An attempted coup by Fascists and the Iron Guard is smashed by the Romanian government. Many of the instigators are arrested.

1938 April 19 All remaining Jewish banks in Austria are "Aryanized."

1938 April 22 Trouble breaks out in the Sudetenland signaling the beginning of the Czechoslovak Crisis.

1938 April 22 A German Law is published making it illegal for non-Jews to help conceal Jewish holdings.

1938 April 24 A Sudeten German Congress at Karlsbad demands full autonomy for Sudeten Germans.

1938 April 25 Nazis stage anti-Jewish riots in Theusing (G).

1938 April 26 The German government requires registration of all Jews with assets exceeding 5,000 Reichsmarks,, whether in Germany or abroad. Only British and American Jews living in Germany are exempted.

1938 April 27 The Woodhead Commission arrives in Palestine to study the Peel Commissions partition plan.

1938 May 2 The Gestapo orders the Jewish community offices in Vienna reopened.

1938 May 3 Flossenburg concentration camp opens in Germany.

1938 May 3 The DFG places 15,000 RM at the disposal of Dr. Ritter, "for the continuation of your research work on asocial individuals and on the biology of bastards (Gypsies, Jews)." (Science)

1938 May 3-9 Hitler makes a state visit to Mussolini in Rome, but omits the customary courtesy call on the pope. (Lewy)

1938 May 13 A major anti-partition demonstration is held in Beirut, Lebanon.

1938 May 17 The Czech government confiscates two Nazi-run newspapers, Die Rundschau and F.S., published by Sudeten German parties led by Konrad Henlein.

1938 May 19 Britain and France reject Hitler's demands concerning Czechoslovakia.

1938 May 20 Czechoslovakia orders a partial mobilization in response to Hitler's demands and unrest in the Sudetenland.

1938 May 24 The Nuremberg Laws are officially introduced in Austria. Books written by Jews and works not favoring Nazi ideology are removed from Vienna's libraries and bookstores.

1938 May 26 The U.S. House of Representatives establishes the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) to investigate activities of both the left and right.

1938 May 29 The Hungarian government passes its first law specifically restricting the number of Jews in the liberal professions, administration, commerce and industry to 20 percent. (Atlas)

1938 May 30 The Japanese government arrests 1,300 alleged Communists.

1938 May 30 Hitler signs a revised OKW plan for Operation Green (Fall Gruen) against Czechoslovakia.

1938 May 30 The Gestapo arrests almost 2,000 Jews in raids on cafes in Berlin and Vienna. Some 1,000 Austrian Jews are sent to Dachau.

1938 June 1 German political prisoners and all German Jews with previous criminal records are sent to Buchenwald. They are soon followed by 2,200 Austrian Jews.

1938 June 2 Italian Fascist leader Roberto Farinacci, a vocal antisemite, is appointed minister of State.

1938 June 7 Latvia and Estonia sign nonagression treaties with Germany.

1938 May 9 Munich's main synagogue is vandalized and destroyed.

1938 June 14 The German ministry of the interior requires registration of all Jewish-owned enterprises. Pressure is put on Jews to sell their business holdings to certain favored individuals or firms (I.G. Farben, the Flick Group, major banks etc.) at prices far below their actual market value. (Days)

1938 June 15 Operation June (Juni Aktion) sends some 1,500 German Jews to concentration camps.

1938 June 20 German Jews are forbidden to work in the stock and commodity exchanges.

1938 June 22 African-American boxer Joe Louis defeatss German boxer Max Schmeling at Madison Square Garden in New York City.

1938 June 26 Nazis in Austria order all "non-Aryans" dismissed from all Jewish owned firms and close the parks of Vienna to Jews. Jewish schoolchildren are completely segregated.

1938 June 28 Germany and Italy officially recognize Switzerland's neutrality.

1938 June 29 Nearly 40,000 Austrian Jews are dismissed from their jobs.

1938 July 2 Almost 40,000 Austrian Jews are taken into "protective custody."

1938 July 5 Trade unions in Vienna are dissolved and their funds and property are seized by the German Labor Front.

1938 July 5 President Roosevelt convenes an international conference on refugees in the French resort town of Evian on Lake Geneva. It soon becomes clear that more and more countries, including the U.S., want to restrict the number of Jewish refugees allowed to immigrate to their nations. The Australian delegation declares, "since we have no racial problem, we are not desirous of importing one." (Atlas)

1938 July 6 The Law for the Alteration of Regulations of Industrial Enterprises prohibits numerous Jewish business activities in Germany. Jews can no longer operate real estate, information, loan, private security, marriage, brokerage, or administrative offices. They are even prohibited from serving as tour guides and are ordered to declare their assets and "sell" their businesses.

1938 July 8 The main synagogue in Munich is demolished on Hitler's orders. (See June 9)

1938 July 8 Alfred Rosenbergg proposes a plan for establishing a reservation for 15 million Jews on the island of Madagascar.

1938 July 11 The French chamber passes a law authorizing the prime minister to govern by decree in the event of war.

1938 July 14 The third regulation of the Reich Citizenship Law is published. All Jewish-owned businesses are again advised they must register with the government.

1938 July 19 King George VI of Britain pays a state visit to France.

1938 July 20 All members of the Wehrmacht are forbidden to live in Jewish-owned homes or apartments.

1938 July 23 A new German law decrees that as of January 1, 1939, Jews will be required to carry special identification cards, which they must obtain from the local police. (Persecution)

1938 July 25 The fourth regulation of the Reich Citizenship Act bars all Jewish doctors from medical practice beginning September 30, 1938. After that date, Jewish physicians may treat only Jews and must call themselves Krankenbehandler (medial orderlies or literally "caretakers of the sick"). (Persecution; Edelheit)

1938 July 25 British Fascists and Nazi sympathizers paint antisemitic graffiti throughout the city of London.

1938 July 27 All Jewish street names in Germany are changed and given new names. (Persecution)

1938 July 30 Germany begins preparations for building new fortifications on its western border. A number of prohibited areas are established.

1938 July 31 In a period of 19 months prior to this date, William Dudley Pelley mails 3.5 tons of antisemitic propaganda from his headquarters in America.

1938 August 2 A major clash breaks out between Socialists and Nazis in Switzerland.

1938 August 3 New anti-Jewish legislation is introduced in Italy.

1938 August 5 New laws regulating the meat and cattle industry in Poland virtually eliminate Jews from participation.

1938 August 7 The Beirut synagogue is bombed by Arab terrorists.

1938 August 8 Mauthausen, the first concentration camp in Austria, goes into operation.

1938 August 10 The great synagogue and Jewish community center in Nuremberg is demolished on Nazi orders. (Edelheit)

1938 August 11 Poland withdraws its permanent delegate from the League of Nations.

1938 August 11 Hermann Goering tells an American diplomat that within ten years the United States will become the most antisemitic country in the world and that the combination of Jews and blacks raise grave questions about America's future. (Architect)

1938 August 13 The Wehrmacht stages large-scale military maneuvers.

1938 August 16 The German Ministry of Justice orders an increase in the Gestapo's power in Austria.

1938 August 17 A new decree orders that as of January 1, 1939, German Jews may have only Jewish first names. If they keep an "Aryan" first name (Michael etc.), they must add Jewish middle names such as "Israel" or "Sarah." (Persecution)

1938 August 17 Special passports for Jews are inroduced in Germany. (Eyes)

1938 August 17 Hitler issues a new decree indicating that the Waffen-SS is destined to be more than just a private police force. By authorizing motorization of the SS-Verfuegungstruppen (SS-VT or "field troops"), Hitler serves notice that it will fight in the coming war and enforce the Nazi-dominated peace that he is sure will follow. (The SS, Time-Life)

1938 August 19 Swiss officials take measures to block Jewish refugees trying to enter Switzerland.

1938 August 19-20 At a meeting of the German Committee for Public Care and Welfare Law, professors of medicine and law discuss with civil servants from the Ministry of the Interior the possibility of a "law on asocial individuals" that would allow people so defined to be sterilized or committed to concentration camps. According to later drafts of this law, which was never passed, two physicians and a police officer were to decide on the sterilization and further disposal of these individuals to concentration camps. (Science)

1938 August 26 The Central Office for Jewish Emigration is established in Vienna under the direction of Adolf Eichmann. Within eighteen months, 150,000 Austrian Jews will be induced to emigrate. (Days)

1938 August 27 General Ludwig Beck, one of the top Wehrmacht generals resigns in disagreement over Hitler's Czechoslovakian policy, which he believes will lead to war. (Edelheit)

1938 August Late in the month, Max Warburg, his wife, Alice, and their daughter, Gisela, depart Germany for New York. First they will make a stop-over in London. (See September 1938) (Warburgs)

1938 September The Soviet Union joins the League of Nations.

1938 September In London before leaving for America, Max Warburg meets with George Rublee, an American lawyer and head of the Inter-Governmental Committee on Refugees, and Lord Winterton at the British Foreign Office.

1938 September 1 Hitler demands the immediate cession of Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland to Germany.

1938 September 1 The Italian government orders all Jewish residents who settled in the country after 1919 to leave the country within six months or be deported.

1938 September 5 More riots and demonstrations are staged in the Sudetenland by Konrad Henlein and the Nazis.

1938 September 6 The U.S. Congress passes the Alien Registration Act.

1938 September 6-12 Hitler, speaking at the Nazi Party Rally in Nuremberg, verbally attacks Czechoslovakian President Benes, demanding the right of self-determination for the Sudeten Germans.

1938 September 7 All Jews naturalized in Italy after January 1, 1919, lose their citizenship.

1938 September 7 Pope Pius XI, during a reception for Catholic pilgrims from Belgium, is said to have condemned the participation of Catholics in antisemitic movements and to have added that Christians, the spiritual descendents of the Patriarch Abraham, were "spiritually Semites." This statement was omitted by all the Italian papers, including "L'Osservatore Romano". (La Croix, no. 17060; Lewy)

1938 September 7 France announces a partial mobilization in response to Hitler's demands on Czechoslovakia.

1938 September 8 The British Inner Cabinet meets to discuss the Czechoslovakian crisis (Munich crisis).

1938 September 12 Italy orders the expulsion of all foreign Jews.

1938 September 13 Czechoslovakian President Benes declares martial law in the Sudetenland..

1938 September 14 The Graf Zepplin II, the largest airship ever built, departs Germany on its maiden voyage.

1938 September 15 Hitler and Sir Neville Chamberlain and Hitler meet for the first time, at Obersalzberg (Berchtesgaden) to discuss the Czechoslovakian crisis.

1938 September 16 British Lord Runciman recommends that Czechoslovakia relinquish all border territories with a majority of ethnic Germans to Germany.

1938 September 18 British and French cabinet members, meeting in London, finalize an Anglo-French plan to "appease" Hitler in regard to Czechoslovakia.

1938 September 20-21 The Czech government is forced to accept the Anglo-French "appeasement plan" after being bluntly informed by representatives of Britain and France that they can expect no help if the Germans attack.

1938 September 22 Neville Chamberlain and Hitler meet at Bad Godesburg to discuss events in Czechoslovakia and Hitler's demands for the Sudetenland.

1938 September 22 Czech Premier Milan Hodza resigns, and a new Czechoslovakian government is formed by General Jan Sirovy.

1938 September 22 The International Brigades withdraw from Spain.

1938 September 23 Jewish synagogues at Cheb and Marienbad in Czechoslovakia are burned by German-speaking citizens of the Sudetenland. The new Czech government mobilizes its army.Atlas)

1938 September 23 Mussolini offers to mediate the Czechoslovakian crisis. A conference is called to settle the issue at Munich, setting the stage for an Anglo-French sellout of Czechoslovakia, whose representatives are not even invited to attend.

1938 September 24 Anti-Jewish riots break out in Strasbourg, France.

1938 September 25-26 The French government changes its position on the Anglo-French plan, committing itself to defend Czechoslovakia if the Germans attack.

1938 September 26 Hitler makes an angry speech at the Berlin Sportspalast, attacking Czechoslovakia's alleged mistreatment of its German-speaking citizens.

1938 September 27 Hitler warns that he will crush Czechoslovakia if his demands concerning the Sudetenland are not met.

1938 September 27 The fifth ordinance under the Reich Citizenship act closes the legal professions to Jewish lawyers in the German states.

1938 September 27 Police in Denmark adopt strict measures to prevent illegal Jewish immigrants from entering their country.

1938 September 27-28 The Britsh Home Fleet is mobilized in response to the Czechoslovakian crisis.

1938 September 29 The Munich Conference begins. Britain and France (Czechoslovakia's allies) quickly agree to turn over Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland to Hitler, who in return promises to make no further territorial demands in Europe. Czechoslovakia is excluded from participation in the conference.

(Note: Unlike Austria, Czechoslovakia was a democratic state, and its president, Eduard Benes, was prepared to militarily resist Hitler's demands, but realized it was hopeless without British and French assistance.)

1938 September 30 The Munich Agreement is signed by Chamberlain, Hitler, Daladier and Mussolini. The Czechoslovakian Sudetenland is ceded to Germany. After returning to England, Chamberlain declares, "I believe it is peace for our time."

1938 September 30 A new wave of anti-Jewish riots break out in Poland. (Edelheit)

1938 October Early in the month, the Polish government announces that all Jews who have lived outside Poland for more than five years will have their passports revoked. This law is to take effect of October 30. (Germany soon announces that there is no place in Germany for these "stateless" Jews.) (See October 26)

1938 October 1 German troops occupy the Czechoslovakian Sudetenland. Almost all of the 20,000 Jews in the Sudetenland soon flee to the still independent provinces of Bohemia and Moravia.

1938 October 2 Polish troops occupy Teschen in Czechoslovakia.

1938 October 4 On the advice of Swiss authorities, thhe letter "J" is printed on the front pages of German Jews' passports.

1938 October 5 German Jews have their passports revoked. (Edelheit)

1938 October 6 Dr. Eduard Benes, President of Czechoslovakia, resigns.

1938 October 6 Thousands of Jews with Polish passports who live in Germany and Austria have their passports recalled for "inspection and validation." (Edelheit)

1938 October 7 Slovakia and Transcarpathian Ruthenia are granted autonomy from what is left of Czechoslovakia. Father Josef Tiso, a Catholic priest, becomes leader of Slovakia.

1938 October 7 The Fascist Grand Council in Italy bans Jewish ritual slaughter (shechita).

1938 October 8 Hitler issues a decree establishing SS-Sicherheitpolizei Sonderkommandos (SS Security Police Special Units) for duty in the Sudetenland.

1938 October 13 The Italian government announces that no new business licenses of any kind will be issued to Jews.

1938 October 13 Chamberlain declares to the House of Commons that "The Munich Agreement does not permit us to diminish our efforts towards the realization of our military program."

1938 October 13 The Crown Jewels of the Holy Roman Empire and the Holy Lance (Reichskleinodien and Helige Lanz) are transported by train under heavy armed guard from Vienna to Nuremberg. (Spear)

1938 October 20 The Nazis begin harassing Communists, Jews and other anti-Nazis in Czechoslovakia.

1938 October 24 German Foreign Minister Ribbentrop and Polish Ambassador Lipski meet at Berchtesgaden. Ribbentrop invites Polish Foreign Minister Beck to visit Berlin and puts forward the following suggestions: (1) Danzig to be a German city. (2) Free port for Poland in Danzig with communications assured by extraterritorial railroad and highway through Danzig. (3) An Extraterritorial zone one kilometer wide for a railroad and highway across the Polish Corridor uniting the two portions of Germany carved out at Versailles. (4) Both nations to recognize and guarantee their frontiers. (5) An extension of the German-Polish treaty of Friendship. These proposals are standing and open until August 10, 1939, when Poland will reject them and declare "any intervention by the Reich Government (will be regarded as) an act of aggression."

1938 October 26 Himmler orders the police to collect all Polish Jews in Germany with valid passports and deport them before October 29th. (Architect)

1938 October 28-29 Some 15,000 "stateless" Jews are forced to leave their homes throughout Germany and to go, with only one suitcase, to the nearest railway station. They are then taken through the night to the German-Polish border and forced across at gun point. (See October 1938) (Atlas)

1938 October 30 The sixth ordinance of the Reich Citizenship Act bars all Jews from working as patent agents.

1938 October 31 Polish Foreign Minister Beck instructs Ambassador Lipski to negate Ribbentrop's proposals.

1938 November Karl Wolff visits Malvwine Wiligut (Wiligut/Weisthor's wife) at her home in Salzburg and learns of Weisthor's (Wiligut's) psychiatric history. Weisthor's stay in an Austrian asylum becomes an embarrassment for Himmler.

1938 November 2 Hungary occupies and annexes southern Slovakia.

1938 November 7 Ernst vom Rath, Third Secretary of the German Embassy in Paris, is shot by Herschel Grynszpan, a seventeen-year-old Jewish youth whose family had been expelled from Germany to Poland on October 28.

(Note: This was not the first assassination of a Nazi official by a Jew. Wilhelm Gustloff had previously been killed by a Jewish assassin in Switzerland and the SD was convinced both murders were part of a much broader Jewish conspiracy.) (Architect)

1938 November 8 Himmler addresses a select meeting of high-ranking SS leaders in Munich. He does not mention the vom Rath assassination, but tells them that within 10 years there will be unprecedented clashes -- not only a struggle among nations, but also an ideological struggle against the Jews, Freemasons, Marxists and Catholics worldwide. (Architect)

1938 November 9 Hitler authorizes Goering to deal with all Jewish political affairs. Hitler tells Goering that he is interested in sending German Jews to Madagascar and that he will make an initiative to the Western powers. (Architect)

1938 November 9-10 Enst vom Rath dies and a massive pogrom, known now as Kristallnacht (the night of glass) is launched against the Jews of Germany. 191 synagogues are set on fire and 76 others are completely destroyed, along with hundreds of Jewish shops and schools. 91 Jews are killed during the night of November 9th alone and 35,000 male Jews are arrested, herded into concentration camps and their property seized. (Atlas)

1938 November 10 Hitler, in a speech to hundreds of German journalists, discounts the prospects for peace and urges the press to help convince the German public to support his regime in the event of any future war. (Architect)

1938 November 10 The Gestapo closes the Central Organization of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith. (Edelheit)

1938 November 11 Hitler gives Goering a mandate to resolve the Jewish question "one way or another" and to coordinate the necessary steps by various agencies. (Architect)

1938 November 11 Reinhard Heydrich reports on Kristallnacht to Goering, stating that 36 Jews have been killed and 20,000 arrested.

1938 November 11 A new law decrees that German Jews may neither carry nor possess firearms. (Persecution)

1938 November 12 Goering summons a large number of officials from various agencies to the Air Ministry in Berlin to deal with the economic consequences of Kristallnacht and the ways to remove Jews from the German economy. (Architect)

1938 November 12 German Jewry is ordered to pay "Atonement Payments" of one billion Reichsmarks to the German government for the damages caused by German citizens during Kristallnacht, and insurance payments amounting to more than ten million Reichmarks are soon paid to the German government. (Days)

1938 November 12 Jews are prohibited from attending theaters, movies, concerts, and exhibits. Jews are no longer allowed to own stores and artisan businesses. (Persecution)

1938 November 12-14 Nazis in Danzig burn down two synagogues and badly damage two others.

1938 November 13 Nazi officials seriously consider the Madagascar Plan for the first time.

1938 November 14 In response to the Kristallnacht pogrom, President Roosevelt recalls American Ambassador Hugh Wilson from Berlin to Washington.

1938 November 15 All Jewish children are excluded from the German school system. (Goebbels)

1938 November 16 Neville Chamberlain suggests that Jewish refugees come to Britain as a temporary measure. (Edelheit)

1938 November 17 Socialist members of the French Chamber of Deputies criticizes the government for not officially protesting the persecution of German Jews.

1938 November 18 The U.S. State Department extends visitor's visas to some 15,000 mostly-Jewish refugees already in America, because of Kristallnacht.

1938 November 18 The Legislative Assembly of the American Virgin Islands adopts a resolution offering the islands as a haven for Jewish refugees. (Edelheit)

1938 November 18 Members of the Iron Guard (Legionaries) blows up the Ereschitza synagogue in Romania.

1938 November 19 Polish Ambassador Lipski meets with Ribbentrop in Berlin and informs him that, "any tendency to incorporate the Free City (Danzig) into the Reich will inevitably lead to conflict" between Poland and Germany.

1938 November 20 Father Charles Coughlin, head of the misnamed Union of Social Justice, makes a notorious antsemitic radio broadcast, prompting group pressure that will eventually force him off the air.

1938 November 21 German Jews with assets over 5,000 Reichsmarks are forced to pay a special 20 percent tax on their registered assets to the Reich treasury.

1938 November 23 All Jewish-owned plants and retail businesses in Germany are dissolved by a special administrative order. Jews are completely eliminated from German economic life. (Persecution; Edelheit)

1938 November 24 The Danzig Senate introduces legislation resembling the Nuremberg Laws for Jews still living in the Nazi-dominated "Free City."

1938 November 24 Das Schwarze Korps, an SS periodical, claims that it would welcome the founding of a Jewish state.The German people are not in the least inclined to tolerate in their country hundreds of thousands of criminals, who not only secure their existence through crime, but also want to exact revenge... In such a situation we would be faced with the hard necessity of exterminating the Jewish underworld... The result would be the actual and final end of Jewry in Germany, its absolute annihilation. (Architect)

1938 November 26 Russian-Polish trade and nonagression are signed.

1938 November 27 Soviet Jews in Moscow, Leningrad, Odessa and Kiev hold mass meetings protesting Kristallnacht.

1938 November 28 Nazi officials introduce residential restrictions on Jews. Movement of Jews from locality to locality is prohibited. The presidents of German regional councils are empowered to impose curfews on their Jewish populations and designate certain places as off-limits (Judenbann). (Persecution)

1938 November 29 Goering tells Hugo Rothenberg, a Danish Jew who had earned Goering's gratitude two decades earlier, that under all circumstances the Jews would have to leave Germany and recommended a foreign loan to finance their emigration. Goering warns him that Germany naturally had other ideas in case emigration did not work. He did not spell out their nature. (Architect)

1938 November 30 Father Charles Coughlin makes an antisemitic broadcast to an estimated 3.5 million American listeners on a nationwide radio network. Coughlin, with one of the largest antsemitic libraries in America, had been using antisemitic overtones in his propaganda before 1936, but it was only after the defeat of his third party in that year that he began to use antisemitism as a political weapon. (McWilliams)

1938 December The Nazi Party issue an edict affecting many sectarian groups in the Reich. (Roots)

1938 December Hjalmar Schacht meets in London with George Rublee, American lawyer and director of the inter-governmental commitee. Schacht presents a plan to allow 150,000 German Jews to leave Germany over a three year period. (Architect)

1938 December 1 Great Britain initiates a program of accelerated rearmament and military expansion.

1938 December 2 Jews in Danzig are ordered to contribute to the "atonement" fine of one billion Reichsmarks imposed on German Jews after Kristallnacht.

1938 December 3 A new decree orders that all Jewish enterprises and shops are now subject to compulsory "Aryanization," the forced disposal of all Jewish stores, businesses, and financial holdings. (Goebbels)

1938 December 3 German Jews are forced to give up their driver's licenses and vehicle registration papers. They are also forced to sell their securities and jewelry. (Persecution)

1938 December 4 Father Charles Coughlin verbally attacks the "Jewish international banking house" in an American radio address.

1938 December 5 The seventh ordinance of the Reich Citizenship Act orders a reduction in pensions for compulsorily retired Jewish officials.

1938 December 6 A new declaration of nonaggression and friendship is signed between Germany and France, providing a mutual guarantee of their common borders. Hitler disavows any interest in Alsace-Lorraine, and during the coming months, will cite this as proof of his peaceful intentions.

1938 December 8 All Jews are banned from conducting research at German universities. Jewish students can no longer attend German Universities. (Persecution)

1938 December 8 Himmler signs an order regarding the need to regulate the "Gypsy question" in Germany. (Edelheit)

1938 December 11 The Nazi Party wins in elections held in Memel. The Jewish situation becomes even more precarious.

1938 December 11 Twenty thousand Libyan Jews are deprived of their Italian citizenship.

1938 December 13 Neuengamme concentration camp is established as part of Sachsenhausen. It will eventually become independent with many sub-camps of its own.

1938 December 13 Jewish property is pillaged and synagogues burned in Slovakia during a renewed anti-Jewish campaign.

1938 December 14 Goering announces he has taken control of all Jewish affairs. All Jewish-owned businesses are placed under the contol of "Aryan" general managers.

1938 December 15 The New York Daily News reprints a scurrilously antisemitic pamphlet by William Dudley Pelley.

1938 December 16 A remarkable editorial in The New York Daily News says that the Bill of Rights means only "that our government shall not officially discriminate against any religion. It does not mean that Americans are forbidden to dislike other Americans or religions or any other group. Plenty of people just now are exercising their right to dislike the Jews."

1938 December 22 All Jews are forced to retire from Italain military service.

1938 December 23 The Hungarian parliament introduces new racially-defined antisemitic laws.

1938 December 28 Jews are forbidden to use sleeping compartments or dining cars on German railways.

1938 December 31 An internal SS report states that 22.7 % of the SS membership still belongs to the Catholic faith (despite all pressures to leave the Church). (Lewy)

1938 Outraged at Hitler's treatment of the Jews and fearing that Hitler will outlaw Christianity, Protestant pastor, Martin Niemoller, organizes the Pastor's Emergency League to oppose Hitler's policies.

1938 Pastor Martin Niemoller is arrested by the Gestapo and thrown into a concentration camp until liberated in 1945.

1938 Edward R. Stettinius, Jr., becomes chairman of the board of U.S. Steel.

1938 Otto Hahn discovers the principles of nuclear fission.

1938 Sigmund Freud flees to England to escape Nazi persecution in Vienna.

1938 The SS Training Office orders a specially revised and expanded, one-volume edition of Michael Prawdin's two books on Genghis Khan (See 1934, 1935). This book was frequently given as a Christmas present by Himmler and every SS leader received a copy. Hitler is said to have derived his ideas concerning Blutkitt (blood cement) from this source. (Architect)

1938 The U.S. and Britain send aid to the Chinese in their war against Japan.

1939 January The Ahnenerbe is officially incorporated into the SS and its leaders absorbed into Himmler's personal staff. At that time it has 50 branches under the direction of Professor Wurst, an expert on ancient sacred texts who had taught Sanskrit at Munich University. (Pauwels)

1939 January 1 A decree is published eliminating Jews from the German economy.

1939 January 5 Polish Foreign Minister Joseph Beck confers with Hitler at Berchtesgaden. Hitler says he is considering a formula that would make Danzig politically German and economically Polish, and that he is ready to give a formal and clear guarantee for the German-Polish frontiers. (Sturdza)

1939 January 6 Beck and Ribbentrop meet in Munich. Ribbentrop asks for "the reunion of Danzig with Germany" and proposes a number of guarantees.

1939 January 9 The Reich Office of Racial Research exempts Karaites from antisemitic legislation. (Edelheit)

1939 January 10 Neville Chamberlain and Lord Halifax arrive in Rome to meet with Mussolini.

1939 January 11 The Danzig Senate orders 1,000 of the 4,000 Jews still in Danzig to leave by the end of the month.

1939 January 14 Pope Pius XI urges foreign diplomats at the Vatican to grant as many visas as possible to victims of German and Italian racial prejudice. (Edelheit)

1939 January 17 Denmark, Latvia and Estonia sign a nonagression pact with Germany. Norway, Sweden and Finland insist on strict neutrality.

1939 January 17 Slovakian premier, Father Tiso, declares his foremost task is to solve the "Jewish question."

1939 January 17 The eighth ordinance of the Reich Citizenship Act is passed, barring Jewish dentists, veterinarians and chemists from practicing their professions. Jewish dentists may only treat Jewish patients.

1939 January 19 Hjalmar Schacht has his last meeting with George Rublee in Berlin. (Architect)

1939 January 21 Hitler dismisses Hjalmar Schacht as president of the Reichsbank and replaces him with Walter Funk. Schacht was left as an unpaid minister without portfolio until 1943. (Children)

(Note: A secret report to Hitler, prepared by Himmler, had accused Schacht of being disloyal to Nazi interests in his negotiations with George Rublee.) (Architect)

1939 January 21 Hitler tells Czech foreign minister Chvalkovsy, "We are going to destroy the Jews -- they are not going to get away with what they did on November 9, 1918. The day of reckoning has come."

1939 January 23 Chamberlain announces the introduction of National Service and says, "It is a project that must make us prepared for war."

1939 January 24 Goering orders Reinhard Heidrich to establish the Reich Central Office for Jewish Emigration is established to organize and accelerate the emigration of the Jews. Heydrich names Gestapo chief Heinrich Mueller to head the department. Almost 80,000 Jews will leave Germany in 1939. (Days)

(Note: Goering commissions Heydrich to bring the "Jewish question to as favorable a solution as present circumstances permit.") (Apparatus)

1939 January 24 Germany and Poland reach an agreement on Jewish deportees. One thousand Jews at a time may return to Germany to settle their accounts. A special proprietary account for this purpose will be set up in Germany for deposits only. (Edelheit)

1939 January 26 General Franco's forces capture Barcelona.

1939 January 27 Ribbentrop repeats Germany's Danzig proposals in Warsaw.

1939 January 28 Chamberlain tells as audience in Birmingham that Great Britain must prepare herself to defend not only her territory but also "the principle of Liberty."

1939 January 30 Hitler, in an address to the Reichstag, gives public notice of his intentions, "If international Jewry should succeed in Europe or elsewhere, in precipitating nations into a world war, the result will not be the Bolshevization of Europe and a victory for Judaism, but the extermination of the Jewish race." Hitler also comments on the lack of offers from the so-called democratic states to accept Jewish refugees.

1939 January 30 Archbishop Groeber in a pastoral letter concedes that Jesus Christ could not be made into an "Aryan," but the son of God had been fundamentally different from the Jews of his time -- so much so that they had hated him and demanded his crucifixion, and "their murderous hatred has continued in later centuries." (Lewy)

1939 January-February For the tenth anniversary of the Lateran Treaty, Pope Pius XI drafts a discourse that is said to have condemned totalitarianism in the strongest terms. After his death (February 10), his successor, Pius XII, chooses not to deliver the speech. (Lewy)

1939 February For the tenth anniversary of the Lateran Treaty, Pope Pius XI drafts a discourse that is said to have condemned totalitarianism in the strongest terms. After his death, his successor, Pius XII, chooses not to deliver the speech. (Lewy)

1939 February 3 A bomb thrown into a Budapest synagogue kills one Jewish worshipper and injures many others. (Atlas)

1939 February 5 Karl Wolff, Chief Adjutant of Himmler's person staff, informs Weisthor's SS staff by letter that Weisthor (Wiligut) has retired on his own application for reasons of age and poor health and that his SS office will be dissolved. (Berlin Document Center; Roots)

1939 February Otto Rahn unexpectedly resigns from the SS. (See February 5 and March 13) (Rahn file, Berlin Document Center; Roots)

1939 February 6 Einsatz des Juedischen Vermoegens is published, decreeing complete "Aryanization" of Jewish property in the Reich. (Edelheit)

1939 February 6 Bishop Hilfrich of Limburg is a pastoral letter writess that Jesus had been a Jew, but "the Christian religion has not grown out of the nature of this people, that is, is not influenced by their racial characteristics. Rather it has had to make its way against this people." Christianity, the bishop concludes, is not to be regarded as a product of the Jews; it is not a foreign doctrine or un-German. "Once accepted by our ancestors, it finds itself in the most intimate union with the Germanic spirit." (Lewy)

1939 February 7 Alfred Rosenberg, at a press conference in Berlin, discusses a plan to settle all 15 million of the world's Jews on the island of Madegascar.

1939 February 8 Six members of the Romanian Legion of St. Michael (Iron Guard) are arrested in Romania and later murdered by Armand Calinescu's police.

1939 February 10 Pope Pius XI dies.

1939 February 11 The tenth anniversary of th