TIMEBASE 1942

1942 Leadership of the Zionist movement relocates to the United States. A conference in New York City demands the founding of a Jewish state in all of Palestine and unlimited Jewish immigration.

1942 January 1 Twenty-six nations sign the United Nations Declaration in Washington, D.C. The Atlantic Charter and its eight principles: (1) the renunciation of territorial aggression; (2) territorial changes only with consent of the peoples concerned; (3) restoration of sovereign rights and self-government; (4) access to raw materials for all nations; (5) world economic cooperation; (6) freedom from fear and want; (7) freedom of the seas; and (8) disarmament of aggressors are also endorsed by the signatories at the Arcadia Conference. (See August 9, 1941)

1942 January 2 Japanese forces take Manila and the naval base of Cavite in the Philippines.

1942 January 7 The Arcadia Conference comes to an end. During the proceedings each of the 26 signatory nations has agreed to use all of their military and economic resources to defeat the Axis, pledging not to make a separate peace or armistice with the enemy.

1942 January 10 German Jews are ordered to turn in all of their wool and fur clothing. (Persecution)

1942 January 14 Dr. Mennecke, a physician involved in the euthanasia program, writes in a letter: "The day before yesterday, a large contingent from our euthanasia program has moved under the leadership of Brack to the Eastern battle-zone... It consists of doctors, office personnel, and male and female nurses, from Hadamar and Sonnenstein, in all a group of 20-30 persons." (Science)

1942 January 15 The Inter-American conference opens in Rio de Janiero to draw up plans for protection of American republics against aggression.

1942 January 16 Donald Nelson is appointed head of the new U.S. War Production Board.

1942 January 17 Field Marshal von Reichenau dies of a stroke while returning to Germany from the Eastern Front.

1942 January 18 The Russian counteroffensive in the Moscow sector reaches a point 70 miles from Smolensk.

1942 January 19 Field Marshal von Bock is appointed to replace von Reichenau.

1942 January 20 The Wansee Conference on the "Final Solution" of the Jewish question is held at Interpol headquarters in Wansee, a quiet Berlin suburb. Reinhard Heydrich presents a plan for the "Final Solution" to the "Jewish Problem."

(These plans provide for the transportation of all of Europe's Jews to extermination camps. Adolf Eichmann will be in charge of the department of the SS responsible for the execution of the plan.)

1942 January 21 Rommel attacks the British in Libya.

1942 January 23 Hungarian Fascists at Sovi Sad in occupied Yugoslavia drive 550 Jews and 292 Serbs to the river and onto the ice. After firing on the ice to break it up, they shoot all those who manage to stay afloat. A total of 2,550 Serbs and 700 Jews are killed by the Hungarians at Novi Sad. (Atlas)

1942 January 26 The Board of Inquiry investigating the Pearl Harbor attack finds Admiral Husband E. Kimmel (Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Fleet) and General Short (Commander-in-Chief Hawaiian Department) guilty of dereliction of duty. Both have already been dismissed.

1942 January 26 Himmler notifies Richard Glücks, inspector of the concentration camps, that the camps are now to take on great economic tasks; he should expect to receive a hundred thousand male Jews and fifty thousand female Jews in the next four weeks to use as laborers. (Architect)

1942 January 27 Rosenberg, with Bormann's concurrence, issues an order forbidding any further discussion of religious questions in the Party's work of ideological indoctrination. (Bundesarchiv, Koblenz; Lewy)

1942 January 28 Hiram J. Perez de Cruet enlists in the U.S. Army.

1942 January 30 Hitler, at the Berlin Sports Palace, reaffirms his prewar prophecy concerning the Jews; once again telling an audience that "the result of this war will be the complete annihilation of the Jews."

1942 January 31 The Japanese clear the British from Malaysia.

1942 American and Filipino forces retreat from Manila to the Bataan Peninsula in the Philippines.

1942 February Himmler tells his masseur, Dr. Felix Kersten, that Hitler has ordered the immediate execution of all Jews in German possession. (Kersten Memoirs)

1942 February The 38,000 Jews of Libya once again come under Italian control. Jewish shops are plundered and 2,600 Jews are deported to a forced labor camp at Giado, building military roads. Many die from starvation and typhus. (Atlas)

1942 February 1 Vidkun Quisling becomes virtual dictator of Norway. (Freedman)

1942 February 2 Hitler tells Himmler and other evening guests: "Today, we must conduct the same struggle that Pasteur and Koch had to fight. The cause of countless ills is a bacillus: the Jew... We will become healthy if we eliminate the Jew." (Architect)

1942 February 4 A meeting takes place at the Ministry of the Occupied Eastern Territories where the "scrapping by labor" of the Eastern peoples is openly discussed. Professors Fischer and B. K. Schultz are among those present. (Science)

1942 February 11 Archbishop Jäger of Paderborn issues a pastoral letter for Lent, which characterizes Russia as a country whose people, "because of their hostility to God and their hatred of Christ, had degenerated into animals." (Lewy)

1942 February 15 The Japanese capture Singapore, the key to British and Dutch defenses in the Far East.

1942 February 17 German Jews are no longer allowed to subscribe to newspapers and magazines. (Persecution)

1942 February 19 Josef Perau, a German military chaplain in Russia, writes of witnessing several hundred corpses being brought to a mass grave near his station everyday, "the total number being already 19,000." (Lewy)

1942 February 19 General Gamelin, Leon Blum and Paul Reynaud are put on trial at Riom by the Vichy government, charged with being responsible for the French defeat of 1940. The trial is never concluded. Blum defends himself so brilliantly that the trial is suspended. He remains a prisoner until 1945.

1942 February The U.S. position in the Philippines is so serious that President Roosevelt orders General MacArthur to escape and proceed to Australia to take supreme command of the Allied forces in the southwestern Pacific. "I shall return," MacArthur promises.

1942 February 28 More than 13,000 Jews have now been deported to Chelmno and gassed since December 8, 1941. Adolf Eichmann himself witnessed the process. (Atlas)

1942 March A conference of "experts" decides to close the loop-hole in the Nuremberg laws that has allowed existing mixed marriages between "Aryans" and Jews. These so-called experts order the compulsory dissolution of racially mixed marriages, to be followed by the deportation of the Jewish partner. If the "Aryan" partner failed to apply for a divorce within a certain period of time, the public prosecutor was to file a petition for divorce, which the courts would be obliged to grant. (Lewy)

1942 March The Lumenclub and the Order of the New Templars (ONT) in Austria are said to have been suppressed by the Gestapo in accordance with a party edict of December 1938. (Daim, Roots)

1942 March The Dutch East Indies surrender to the Japanese.

1942 March 2 5,000 Jews are taken from the ghetto in Minsk to a newly dug pit on the outskirts of town and machine-gunned. No ammunition is wasted on the hundreds of Jewish children seized that day: they are thrown into the pit alive to die of suffocation. (Atlas)

1942 March 6 Adolf Eichmann chairs a conference dealing with the "problem" of half-Jews who are not of the Jewish faith and who are not married to a Jewish partner. (Hilberg)

1942 March 7 The Japanese enter Rangoon in Burma.

1942 March 14 A number of Jews, who had been sent to work on a farm near Ilja in western Russia, escape into the woods and join a partisan group. (Atlas)

1942 March 15 Archbishop Konrad Groeber issues a pastoral letter for People's Memorial Day praising the "victorious German soldiers who are fighting a crusade against Bolshevism, protecting Europe from the Red tide."

1942 March 17 Beginning of "Aktion Reinhard" (Operation Reinhard). Jews from Lublin are transported to Belzec. (Days)

1942 March 17 Two Jewish leaders at Ilja, who had refused to hand over partisan sympathizers to the SS, escape into the forest to join the partisans. As a reprisal, the Germans shoot all old and sick Jews they find in the streets, and force 900 more into a building, lock it, and set it on fire. All 900 perish. (Atlas)

1942 March 17 A second death camp goes into operation just south of the village of Belzec in Galicia. 6,786 Jews are murdered during the first set of deportations. (total victims: 600,000; survivors: 2)

(Two other death camps, Sobibor and Treblinka are now under construction. These are not slave labor camps; their single purpose is to kill every Jew within a few hours of arrival.) (Atlas)

1942 March 18 Martin Bormann issues an order declaring a letter allegedly written by Werner Mölders, the recently killed number one ace of the Luftwaffe, as a forgery. A reward of 100,000 marks is offered for information leading to the apprehension of the real author.

(The Nazis were upset because in this letter, Mölders had reported with pride that Catholics, on account of their dedication, were now finally being accepted as full-fledged Germans and were enjoying the respect of those who earlier had taunted them as meek and other worldly.) (Lewy)

1942 March 23 Rosenberg, minister of the Occupied Eastern Territories, writes about the possible employment of staff for his projected Reich Center for Research on the East: "...I have thought of Geheimrat Eugen Fischer, a person who represents biological research and is a leading member of the KWG." (Science)

1942 March 24 320 German Jews are deported from Würzburg to the death camp at Belzec. Not a single one survives.

(Throughout March, Jews are deported to Belzec from Eastern Galicia and the Lublin area, where within two weeks almost all of the city's large Jewish community is transported.) (Atlas)

1942 March 24 The first Slovak Jews are deported to Auschwitz.

1942 March 25 U.S. Assistant Attorney General Thurman Arnold announces that William Stamps Farish has pled "no contest" to charges of criminal conspiracy with the Nazis. Arnold discloses that Standard Oil of New Jersey (later Exxon) of which Farish is president and CEO has agreed to stop hiding patents from the U.S. for synthetic rubber, which the company has in its possession, and which are already in use by the Nazis at Auschwitz.

1942 March 26 The first deportations of Jews to Auschwitz begins. The first group is from Bratislava in Slovakia. Once at Auschwitz, all are sent to the barracks. No gassing take place until May 4, 1942. (Atlas)

1942 March 26 All Jewish dwellings in Germany must now be marked by a Star of David. (Persecution)

1942 March 27 Jews from France are deported to Auschwitz. All are foreign-born Jews who had been rounded up seven months earlier, and interned. (Atlas)

1942 March 31 The Gestapo raids the ghetto in Minsk, capturing several Jewish leaders who have attempted to organize a resistance group. (Atlas)

1942 April / May The death camp at Sobibor goes into operation. (total victims: 250,000; survivors: 64)

(Some sources say the camp opened in April. Others such as Apparatus say it opened during the first week of May)

1942 Spring The "White Rose" resistance group begins distributing leaflets composed by a group of students and a professor of philosophy at the University of Munich. Their leaflets tell of the murders of 300,000 Jews in Poland and ask why the German people remain so apathetic in the face of these "revolting crimes." (Scholl; Lewy)

1942 Spring In Slovakia, 52,000 Jews are deported and transported to the East.

1942 Spring Locally stationed Security Police and SD units take over the job of murdering Jews in the USSR. (Days)

1942 April 1,750 Jews are taken from Tripoli in North Africa to forced labor sites at Homs, Benghazi, and Derna. Hundreds die from starvation and heat exhaustion. Others are killed in Allied air raids. (Atlas)

1942 April Hitler orders Dr. Heinz Fisher to conduct "Hollow Earth" experiments on the Baltic Island of Rugen.

1942 April Pierre Laval is reinstated to the Vichy government under German pressure. Laval tends more to expediency than Petain, dealing with and yielding to Nazi demands and seeking a comfortable place for France in Hitler's "new order."

1942 April 3 129 German Jews from Augsburg are deported to Izbica and Belzec. The once 1000-strong Jewish community ceases to exist. (Atlas)

1942 April 5 Hitler issues a directive for the summer offensive.

1942 Allen W. Dulles joins Col. William (Wild Bill) Donovan's Office of Strategic Services (OSS, 1942-45).

1942 April 9 American and Filipino armies having retreated from Manila to the Bataan Peninsula surrender to the Japanese after holding out for three months.

1942 April 10 1,700 Jews from Leczyca and 1,240 from Grabow are transported for execution to Chelmno (Kulmhof). (Atlas)

1942 April The Bataan death march begins. Harsh treatment and starvation cause the deaths of nearly 10,000.

1942 April 16 Berlin is informed by the local SS that "the Crimea is purged of Jews." (Atlas)

1942 April 16 2,000 Jews from Gostynin are deported to Chelmno (Kulmhof) for execution. (Atlas)

1942 April 17 2,000 Jews from Gabin and 250 from Sanniki are deported to Chelmno (Kulmhof). (Atlas)

1942 April 18 909 Jews are deported from Ceske Budejovice in Bohemia to Izbica and Belzec. (Atlas)

1942 April 18 U.S. Col. James H. Doolittle leads a B-25 strike on Tokyo. Afterward, all of the planes are ditched over China and the crews bail out. Seventeen of the 79 airmen are lost or killed by the Japanese. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese are killed in retaliation for helping the Americans.

1942 April 22 3,000 Jews from Wloclawk are transported for execution at Chelmo (Kulmhof). (Atlas)

1942 April 24 650 Jews are deported from Nuremberg to Izbica and Belzec. (Atlas)

1942 April 24 German Jews are no longer allowed to use public transportation. (Persecution)

1942 April 25 105 Jews from Bamberg are deported to Izbica and Belzec. (Atlas)

1942 April 26 Hitler demands and receives powers of Supreme Law Lord of Germany.

1942 April 27 In his "Comments on the General Plan for the East", a plan formulated by the SS, Dr. Wetzel mentions the anthropological investigation, supported by the DFG, and conducted by Professor Abel (a department head at the KWI of Anthropology). It involved Soviet citizens in German prisoner-of-war camps: "...he [Abel] gave a stern warning that the Russians should not be underrated... In these circumstances, Abel saw only two possible solutions: either the extermination of the Russian people or a Germanization of its Nordic elements." (Science)

1942 April 28 Several hundred Jews are shot at Przemysl, about 150 miles east of Auschwitz. (Atlas)

1942 May The Allies receive the first authoritative and exact report of the German annihilation of Jews in Poland. More than 700,000 have already been murdered. This information has been smuggled out of Poland by the underground Jewish Socialist Party. (Bauer)

(Only one death camp, Belzec, was mentioned in the report, but it warned that the mass killings were still in progress.) (Atlas)

1942 MayDuring a visit to Sweden, Pastor Dietrich Bonhöffer (Bonhoeffer) takes with him peace proposals from a group of German conspirators led by General Hans Oster, Chief of Staff of the Abwehr, and General Ludwig Beck, but they were rejected by the British Foreign Office.

1942 May 3-9 The Battle of the Coral Sea begins. This battle is the first naval engagement in history in which surface ships do not exchange a shot. The carrier forces are evenly matched, but the American fliers force the Japanese to make a hasty retreat. More than 25 Japanese ships are sunk or disabled. Damage to its heavy carriers hampers Japan's operations for the next several months. The Coral Sea is the first defeat for the Japanese in the South Pacific, and halts the extension of Japan's power southward.

1942 May 4 The killing center at Auschwitz goes into operation, first at Auschwitz itself, then at the nearby camp of Birkenau, where four gas chambers and crematoria are built during late 1942 and early 1943. (total victims: 1.5 - 2 million, survivors: 2,000+) (Atlas)

(Jews from each deportation were selected to live as slave laborers, some at Birkenau itself, others at nearby factories, including a synthetic oil and rubber plant later built at Monowitz. At Birkenau many Jews, particularly women, were selected by SS doctors for bizarre and painful medical experiments. During the War, Birkenau was known as Auschwitz II and Monowitz as Auschwitz III or "Buna.") (Atlas)

1942 May 4 1,200 Jews chosen from recent transports from Germany, Slovakia and France are gassed at Auschwitz.

1942 May 6 After the fall of Bataan, U.S. forces on Corregidor are cut-off. With no way to receive supplies, Lt. Gen. Jonathan M. Wainwright surrenders with more than 10,000 troops, medical personnel, and civilians.

1942 May 9 Wearing of the yellow star of David is made compulsory for Jews living in Holland. (Atlas)

1942 May 9 German Jews are forbidden to enter beauty parlors and barber shops. (Persecution)

1942 May 10 More than 3,000 Jews are killed at Dunajevtsi in the Ukraine.

1942 May 15 German Jews are forbidden by law from keeping pets. (Persecution)

1942 May 18 A public display of anti-Nazi posters in Berlin by a student group led by Herbert Baum leads to their capture (See May 27). (Atlas)

1942 May 19 Germans forces attack Kharkov.

1942 May 21 4,300 local Jews from Chelm are deported and gassed at Sobibor. (Atlas)

1942 May 26 Churchill and Molotov sign a twenty-year mutual aid treaty between Britain and the Soviet Union. (Freedman)

1942 May 26 In Libya, Rommel attacks the British Gazala Line, starting a drive from Libya that will soon take him to El-Alamein, 60 miles from Alexandria, Egypt.

1942 May 27 Reinhard Heydrich, one of Hitler's favorites and now Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, is seriously wounded in Prague by Czech nationals trained as British agents in England. Hitler quickly declares a state of siege in the protectorate, offers a reward of one million marks for the capture of the assassins, and vows to slaughter 10,000 Czechs. (Apparatus)

1942 May 27 At Dubno in the Ukraine, 5,000 Jews, judged to be nonproductive for the German war effort, are taken outside the town and killed. (Atlas)

1942 May 27 All 152 members of the student group which had distributed anti-Nazi posters in Berlin, are shot.

1942 May 28 After nine days of bloody fighting, the Germans are victorious at Kharkov.

1942 May 29 All Jews in France, even the French-born, are prohibited access to all public places, squares, restaurants, cafes, libraries, public baths, gardens and sports grounds. (Atlas)

1942 May 30-31 The first 1,000-bomber raid by the RAF is made on Cologne. Much of the city is destroyed, and 45,000 civilians are made homeless.

1942 June By this time, almost all 15,000 Serbian Jews deported to the concentration camp at Zemun have been gassed in mobile gas units, disguised as Red Cross vans (see November 1941 and August 29, 1942). (Atlas)

1942 June Within days of the attack on Heydrich, more than 13,000 people are arrested, 232 are executed for expressing their approval, and 462 more are executed for possessing weapons or disobeying the police. (Apparatus)

1942 June As Heydrich passes his last hours, his colleges in the SS are shaping his final legacy. Code-named Operation Reinhard in his honor, it calls for nothing less than the systematic murder by gas poisoning of the two million Jews concentrated in the ghettos of the Government General and the incorporated territories of Poland. (Apparatus)

1942 June 3 An American patrol plane sights a Japanese force of 200 ships approaching Midway Island. B-17s from Midway unsuccessfully attack Admiral Kondo's group of heavy support ships.

1942 June 4 Reinhard Heydrich, after suffering for more than a week with a broken rib, a pierced diaphragm, and a grenade splinter jutting into his spleen, dies of blood poisoning in Prague's Bulovka Hospital. Thus died the man who had designed the "Final Solution" and created the Einsatzgruppen.

(Rumors persist in Germany that Heydrich was "allowed" to die on Hitler's orders. He seemed to be recovering until Hitler's doctor arrived from Berlin; after which his condition suddenly worsened.)

1942 June 4-7 The Battle of Midway. A naval force commanded by Adm. Chester W. Nimitz defeats the Japanese force under Adm. Yamamoto Isoroku off Midway. Four Japanese aircraft carriers are sunk with the loss of one U.S. carrier (Yorktown). This battle proves to be the turning point of the war in the Pacific.

1942 June 9 At an elaborate state funeral held for Heydrich in Berlin, Himmler calls Heydrich an "ideal always to be emulated,but perhaps never again to be achieved." (Apparatus)

1942 June 9 German Jews are required to turn in all of their "excess" clothing. (Persecution)

1942 June 9 A gassing van used earlier at Zemun for the murder of Serbian Jews is sent to Riga, for the continuing killing of not only Riga's Jews, but also tens of thousands of Jews deported to Riga from Germany six months earlier. (Atlas)

1942 June 9 The United States and Britain agree to pool all resources of food and production.

1942 June 10 Hours after Heydrich's funeral, SS security police surround Lidice, a village near Prague suspected of harboring the assassins. The entire male population is executed on the spot. Some are said to have burned alive in a barn. The women are sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp. Many of the children are sent to Germany and brought up under different names. The entire village is torched, razed to the ground, and plowed over with grain to remove any trace of habitation. (The official German report stated that 170 men were shot. Executed separately were eleven miners returning from work, and 15 relatives of the Czech agents.) (Apparatus; WWIIDBD)

1942 June 11 German Jews are not allowed to receive cigarette ration cards. (Persecution)

1942 June 14 Shortly after the first 1000-bomber Allied raids on Cologne and Essen, Goebbels publishes an editorial in Das Reich declaring that Germany would repay England "blow for blow" for the attacks on German cities. He goes on to blame the "Jewish press" of London and New York for instigating Britain's "blood-thirsty malice" against Germany. These Jews, Goebbels says, "will pay for it (the bombings) with the extermination of their race in all Europe and perhaps even beyond." (Beast)

1942 June 15 The SS in Riga sends for another gassing van.

1942 June 18 At dawn, SS troops open fire on the Orthodox church in Prague, where Heydrich's assassins have taken refuge with several confederates. After a two-hour siege, all are killed or have taken their own lives. Their hiding place had been betrayed by Karel Curda, a young Czech who had trained with them in Britain.

1942 June 18 Churchill travels to Wahington to confer with Roosevelt.

1942 June 19 German Jews are ordered to turn in all their electrical and optical appliances, as well as typewriters and bicycles. (Persecution)

1942 June 20 All Jewish schools in Greater Germany are closed. (Persecution)

1942 June 20 Tobruk is captured and the Germans breakthrough into Egypt.

1942 June 26 Rudolf Hess is transported 200 miles from Camp Z to P.O.W. Reception Station, Maindiff Court in South Wales, before the war an admission clinic for the County Mental Hospital at nearby Abergavenny. Hess abruptly quits complaining of being poisoned and drugged; begins sleeping proper hours, eats without complaint, and excercises frequently. Hess' disposition becomes sunny and cheerful, and a car is provided for chauffer-driven rides in the countryside literally whenever he pleases. (Missing Years)

1942 Summer The Vatican points out to the head of the Slovak government, Dr. Josef Tiso, a Catholic priest, that the 52,000 Jews deported from Slovakia in the spring had been sent away not for labor service but for annihilation. The deportations ground to a halt because Eichmann's emissary had instructions to avoid "political complications." Thereafter, the Slovakian Jews lived in relative security until September 1944. (Poliakov; Hilberg)

1942 Summer The U.S. Army Air Force joins in operations against Germany. B-17 Flying Fortresses and B-24 Liberators concentrate on high altitude daylight bombing, while the RAF strikes at night.

1942 Summer Himmler assigns Paul Blobel, a former commander of one of his mobile killer groups (Einsatzgruppen) to find the most efficient means of destroying the evidence of Nazi atrocities. Working at Chelmno (Kulmhof) under the code name Sonderaktion 1005 (Special Command 1005), Blobel and a small staff began exhuming victims of the mobile gassing vans. They finally decided upon cremations over huge fireplaces. Any remaining bones were ground up in a special bone-crushing machine. The ashes and bone fragments were buried in the same pits from which the bodies had been disinterred. (Apparatus)

1942 July Roosevelt overrides his American planners, ordering that Operation Torch, the invasion of French North Africa, is to take place, if possible, by October 30. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower is appointed to command the joint Allied operation.

1942 July 1-27 The First Battle of El Alamein takes place in Egypt.

1942 July 2 The BBC features a broadcast by Polish-Jewish spokesman Szmul Zygielbojm, who states bluntly that the Nazis' strategy in Poland consists of the "planned extermination of a whole nation by means of shot, shell, starvation, and poison gas. (Beast)

1942 July 4 The Germans secure Sevastopol, completing their conquest of the Crimea.

1942 July 4 In a secret conversation recorded by Bormann, Hitler declares, "Once the war is over we will put a swift end to the Concordat." The financial subsidies will be eliminated at once and all old accounts settled. Until then all provocative steps have to be avoided.

1942 July 12 General Andrey Andreyevich Vlasov, one of Stalin's favorite generals, who had been awarded the Order of the Red Banner for his successful defense of Moscow against von Bock's Army Group Center, is captured by the Germans. Vlasov soon begins to raise an army from among the Russian POWs to fight alongside the Germans against Stalin. Formed in spite of Hitler's opposition, it is named the Russian Army of Liberation. (Duffy)

1942 July 14 Thousands of Jews are rounded up and arrested in Amsterdam.

1942 July 15 The first train leaves Holland for Auschwitz. 1,135 Dutch Jews are on board.

1942 July 16 Hitler arrives at Vinnitsa.

1942 July 17 The Germans deprive all Jews in Holland of their Dutch citizenship. (Atlas)

1942 July 17 Himmler visits Auschwitz-Birkenau and gives Rudolf Höss (Hoess), the camp commandant, approval for an ambitious expansion plan. Crews begin building a complex of four state-of-the-art killing centers. Each is a brick crematorium containing under one roof all the necessary facilities for the complete process, from undressing through gassing to cremation in specially designed furnaces. (Apparatus)

1942 July 17 A transport of Dutch Jews arrives at Auschwitz, and Himmler witnesses the execution of 449 persons in Bunker 2, his first such experience. That evening, Himmler attends a dinner party at Gauleiter Fritz Bracht's luxurious villa in a forest near Kattowitz. The villa had been loaned to Bracht by Giesche, one of Germany's leading mining firms, whose chief executive officer and general manager was Eduard Schulte. The villa had originally been built for the use of Giesche's American directors. (As a result of a complex financing scheme in the 1920's Giesche's Polish operations were under American management by The Silesian-American Corporation) (See Harriman, Bush and others). (Silence)

1942 July 17 Blind and handicapped German Jews are no longer allowed to display special armbands for the disabled. (Persecution)

1942 July 18 Himmler inspects Auschwitz and the surrounding area with several officials from I.G. Farben. (Silence)

1942 July 22 The Germans begin their most ambitious project to date: the deporting of more than half a million Jews from the Warsaw ghetto. The death camp prepared for them is Treblinka, little more than 40 miles away.

(In just one month, 66,701 Jews are transported to Treblinka and gassed on arrival.) (Atlas)

1942 July 23 The death camp at Treblinka goes into operation. (total victims: 800,000; survivors: under 40)

(Note: A few days later, SS Major Christian Wirth is named inspector of the death camps at Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka.) (See December 8, 1941)

1942 July 28 The Jewish Fighting Organization (JFO) is set up in the Warsaw ghetto.

1942 July 29 Eduard Schulte, general manager of the Giesche mining operation near Auschwitz, departs Breslau by train for Switzerland, where he plans to disclose the German plan for the "final solution of the Jewish question," which he apparently had learned of not long after Himmler's visit to Auschwitz on July 17. He soon gave his information to several Jewish organizations, and through them, anonymously, to the rest of the world. Schulte's warning seems to have been the first report to reach the West of an overall Nazi plan, authorized at the highest levels, to eliminate the Jewish people entirely. (Silence)

1942 July 30 Harold H. Tittmann, the assistant to Myron C. Taylor, Roosevelt's personal representative at the Holy See points out to the Vatican that its silence is "endangering its moral prestige and is undermining faith both in the Church and in the Holy Father himself." (U.S.D.P. 1942; Lewy)

1942 July 31 By the end of the month, 6,000 Dutch Jews have been transported to Auschwitz, where the majority are soon gassed. (Atlas)

1942 August Sister Teresia Benedicta (Edith Stein) is removed from a Dutch monastery, where she had sought refuge. She is later gassed at Auschwitz. (Lewy)

1942 August Eduard Schulte, in return for additional loans, irrevocably transfers ownership of Giesche's Silesian-American shares to Erzag, a Swiss firm controlled by his Swiss financial backers (La Roche). Schulte became an officer of the Swiss new corporation and even obtained German permission to export zinc, an essential war commodity, to Switzerland allegedly to finance the Swiss purchase of the American shares and bonds (Harriman) of Silesian-American. The revenue from the zinc sales stayed in Swiss banks. Almost a year after Germany declared war on the U.S., the U.S. Justice Department took over the Giesche shares of Silesian-American Corporation as enemy-owned property. (Silence)

1942 August German forces move into the Caucasus. Meanwhile, the Sixth Army, led by Gen. Paulus, marches toward Stalingrad, which Hitler hopes to use as a post for defending the occupation of the Caucasus.

1942 August Colonel Kurt Gerstein, who later claims to have joined the SS to investigate the stories of extermination for himself, tries to tell the Papal Nuncio in Berlin about a gassing he had recently witnessed near Lublin. Monsignor Orsenigo refuses to see him so he tells his story to Dr. Winter, the legal advisor of Bishop Preysing of Berlin and a number of others. He also requests that the report be forwarded to the Holy See.

1942 August 4 The first deportations of Jews from Belgium begin. During the next two years, a total of 26 trainloads will make their way to Auschwitz. Of 25,631 deported, only 1,244 will survive the war. (Atlas)

1942 August 7 U.S. Marines land at Guadalcanal in the Solomons.

1942 August 8 Marines on Guadalcanal overrun the airstrip, which is soon renamed Henderson Field.

1942 August 9 The Germans capture the Caucusus oilfields.

1942 August 13 The Swiss police begin turning back Jewish refugees who manage to cross into Switzerland. (Atlas)

1942 August 17 Almost a thousand people, mainly Polish-born Jews, are deported from Paris to Auschwitz. Twenty-seven are French-born children under the age of four, most of whom are deported without their parents, are all gassed within hours of their arrival. (Atlas)

1942 August 19 British and Canadian troops land at Dieppe in the largest commando raid of the war, damaging German installations and emplacements despite heavy losses of men and equipment.

1942 August 21 Himmler again visits with Odilo Globocnik in Lublin. (Architect)

1942 August 21 Photos of Jews being beaten and killed on a transport bound for Treblinka are taken by a young Austrian soldier, Hubert Pfoch, at Siedlce in Poland, while on his way to the Russian Front. (Apparatus)

1942 August 23 German troops reach the Volga above Stalingrad. The Luftwaffe begins heavy bombing of the city with high explosives and incendiaries, causing 40,000 casualties within a few hours.

1942 August 23 A swastika banner is said to have been planted atop Mount Elbrus in the Caucasus Mountains by a special SS detachment. The flag they planted was allegedly blessed according to the secret, mystical rites of the SS inner circle. Mount Elbrus, the highest peak in the Caucasus Mountains, as well as all of Europe, was also known as the "sacred hill of the Aryans," a seat of ancient civilizations, and the magic peak of a sect called by some the "Friends of Lucifer." (Pauwels)

(Mt. Elbrus is an extinct volcano formed during the Tertiary Period, it has two cones rising to 18,510 ft. and 18,481 ft. in altitude.The name Caucasia, which was first recorded by the ancient Greeks, has a disputed derivation.Caucasia, which gave its name to the white race of humankind, has long served as a center of human settlement distinguished by ethnic complexity. About 40 languages are still spoken in the region, many of them in the so-called Caucasian group of languages.) (Grolier)

1942 August 26 At Treblinka, a young deportee from Kielce, having been forbidden by one of the Ukrainian guards to say farewell to his mother, attacks the guard with a knife. The whole train of deportees is machine-gunned. (Atlas)

1942 August 28 Abetz, Papal Nuncio to Vichy France, requests Laval to mitigate the severity of measures taken against the Jews during the mass deportations that had recently begun in France. (PA Bonn; Lewy)

1942 August 29 Berlin is officially informed that the Jewish problem is Serbia is "totally solved." Of Serbia's 23,000 Jews, 20,000 have been murdered. (Atlas)

1942 August 30 Rommel is repulsed at Alam Halfa, Egypt.

1942 September Harold Tittmann and several other diplomatic representatives at the Vatican, with Secretary of State Hull's authorization, formally request that the Pope condemn the "incredible horrors" perpetrated by the Nazis. (Lewy)

1942 September The death camp at Majdanek goes into operation. (victims: 500,000; survivors: fewer than 600)

1942 September 1 German troops reach the outskirts of Stalingrad.

1942 September 2 At Lachwa in Poland, 820 Jews lead by Dov Lopatin revolt against their "liquidation." 700 are killed, 120 escape. Many join a Soviet partisan unit. (Atlas)

1942 September 10 533 Jews are deported from Nuremberg to the camp at Theresienstadt. Only 27 will survive the war. (Atlas)

1942 September 11 Meir Berliner, a young Jew from Argentina trapped in Warsaw by the war, uses his penknife to stab an SS officer to death at Treblinka. (Atlas)

1942 September 15 Polish-born Jews are deported from Lille, France, to Auschwitz. (Atlas)

1942 September 16 The German army enters Stalingrad. Fighting soon becomes street-to-street, block-to-block, house-to-house combat.

1942 September 16 Forty Bulgarian-born Jews are among those deported to Auschwitz from Paris. No Jews in Bulgaria had yet been deported to Auschwitz. (Atlas)

1942 September 16 Heinrich Himmler in a speech at Hegewald says that the blood that coursed through the veins of Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, and Stalin... was German. (Architect)

1942 September 18 The first executions of Jews takes place at the Natzweiler concentration camp in Alsace. (Atlas)

1942 September 18 A decree orders that German Jews are no longer entitled to buy meat, eggs, and milk products. (Persecution)

1942 September 23 The SS launches the "Gehsperre" action designed to make the Lodz ghetto a "working ghetto." All children under 10, all men and women over 60, and the sick or disabled are deported to the death camp at Chelmno. Within two weeks more than 16,000 are gassed. (Atlas)

1942 September 24 Colonel-General Franz Halder, Chief of the general staff of the army (OKH), is fired by Hitler. (Duffy)

1942 September 25 In Paris, 700 Romanian-born Jews are seized by the SS and deported to Auschwitz. (Atlas)

1942 September 25 An instruction to Swiss police states: "Under current practice, refugees on the grounds of race alone are not political refugees." (Atlas)

1942 September 26 Myron C. Taylor, Roosevelt's personal representative at the Holy See, forwards to Papal Secretary of State Luigi Maglione a memorandum of the Jewish Agency for Palestine that reports mass executions of Jews in Poland and occupied Russia, and told of deportations to death camps from Germany, Belgium, Holland, France, Slovakia, etc. Taylor asks if the Vatican can confirm these reports and if so, "whether the Holy Father has any suggestions as to any practical manner in which the forces of civilized public opinion could be utilized in order to prevent a continuation of these barbarities." (U.S.D.P. 1942; Lewy)

1942 Autumn Sobibor becomes the first Operation Reinhard camp to begin exhuming its corpses and burning them. (Apparatus)

1942 October The Germans capture the southern and central parts of Stalingrad and thrust into the industrial sectors of the north. Hand-to-hand fighting takes place in cellars, sewers, and factories. The Soviet casualty rate reaches its peak in mid-October, and the defenders of Stalingrad appear trapped.

1942 October 4 Beginning of deportation of all Jews from concentration camps in Germany to Auschwitz. (Persecution)

1942 October 6 Tittmann reports to the State Department that the Pope's silence is due in part to the desire of the Holy See to assure that Papal pronouncements stand the test of time and that that the Pope has hesitated to condemn German atrocities because he does not want to incur later the reproach of the German people that the Catholic Church had contributed to their defeat. (U.S.D.P. 1942; , Lewy)

1942 October 10 The Holy See replies to Taylor's note (September 26) that up to the present it had not been possible to verify the accuracy of the severe measures reportedly taken against the Jews. (U.S.D.P. 1942; Lewy)

1942 October 15 Ernst Woermann, director of the political department of the Foreign Ministry, records that Papal Nuncio Orsenigo in Berlin had made several inquiries about mass shootings and the fate of the deported Jews with "some embarrassment and without emphasis." (PA Bonn; Lewy)

1942 October Himmler, when received by Count Ciano on a visit to Rome, praises the "discretion" of theVatican. (Lewy)

1942 October 20 The U.S. government orders the seizure of Nazi German banking operations in New York which were being conducted by Prescott Bush. The U.S. Alien Property Custodian took over the Union Banking Corporation and its stock shares, all of which were owned by E. Roland "Bunny" Harriman, Bush, three Nazi executives and two other Bush associates.

1942 October 23 Field Marshal Montgomery begins his attack on El Alamein. After a 5-hour, thousand-gun artillery barrage. Two British columns move forward cutting a deep salient into the German lines.

1942 October 25 Rommel returns to North Africa from sick leave in Germany and immediately counterattacks.

1942 October 25 In Oslo, Norway, 209 Jewish men and boys over the age of 16 are deported to Auschwitz. (Atlas)

1942 October 28 The U.S. government orders the seizure of two Nazi front organizations run by Prescott Bush and Averell Harriman: The Holland-American Trading Company and the Seamless Steel Equipment Corporation.

1942 October 30 Hitler departs Vinnitsa.

1942 November Vichy France loses almost all autonomy after German troops enter unoccupied France.

1942 November 1 Professor Fischer retires. His successor as Director of the KWI of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics is Professor von Verschuer. (Science)

1942 November 2 One of the most carefully organized and intensive Jewish roundups takes place in the Bialystok region. 110,000 Jews, who had been strictly confined to their villages, are now seized and eventually transported to Treblinka and Auschwitz. (Atlas)

1942 November 3 After standing firm for more than a week, Rommel's German and Italian forces begin a withdrawal from El Alamein and begin heading back for Libya.

1942 November 5 Rommel retreats from Fuka.

1942 November 6 Approximately10,000 Jews from Chelm are sent to Sobibor. (Atlas)

1942 November 6 Himmler gives his support to a plan to establish a collection of Jewish skulls and skeletons at the Reich Anatomical Institute in Strasbourg, not far from Natzweiler concentration camp. (Atlas) (see June 21, 1943)

1942 November 7 British forces enter Mersa Matruh, but most of Rommel's divisions have already slipped away.

1942 November 8 - 9 "Operation Torch" - U.S. and British forces land in strength in French Morocco and Algeria. Timed to coincide with Montgomery's offensive, the operation places them in a position to attack Rommel's Afrika Korps from the west.

1942 November 9 Hiram J. Perez de Cruet and Betty Jo Box (Bach) are married in Winnfield, LA.

1942 November 9 Allen Dulles arrives in Bern, Switzerland, on the last train from Vichy France, only hours before the Germans occupy southern France and cut the rail link. Ostensibly taking up a post as assistant to the American minister in Bern, Dulles's real job is to organize the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) Mission in Switzerland. He soon begins setting up a professional intelligence outpost on Germany's southern border. Dulles had already met Eduard Schulte 15 years earlier at Sullivan and Cromwell, Dulles law firm, which sometimes represented Giesche's partner Anaconda Copper. (Silence)

1942 November 9 Hitler attends Blutzeuge (Day of National Memory) ceremonies in Munich.

1942 November 10 Hitler, Laval and Ciano meet in Munich to discuss the situation in North Africa.

1942 November 11 Archbishop Bertram, in the name of the episcopate, sends a letter of protest against the planned compulsory divorce legislation to the Ministers of Justice, Interior and Ecclesiastical Affairs. According to Catholic doctrine, these marriages were indissoluble. (Lewy)

1942 November 11 The Germans occupy Vichy France.

1942 November 16 The deportation of German Gypsies to Auschwitz begins.

1942 November 17 Nazi interests in the Silesian-American Corporation, long-managed by Prescott Bush and his father-in-law, George Herbert Walker, are seized under the U.S. Trading with the Enemy Act. The government announces it is seizing only the Nazi interests, leaving the Nazis' U.S. partners, Bush and his father-in-Law, to carry on the business.

1942 November 17 The Allies warn the Germans that the killing of Jews will be severely punished.

1942 November 19 The Soviet counteroffensive at Stalingrad begins. A large Soviet offensive is launched along the Don and Volga Rivers against Romanian Armies north and south of Stalingrad. Soviet tanks penetrate the front and destroy five Romanian divisions. Hungarian and Italian armies are also crushed.

1942 November 19 Hitler refuses a withdrawal plan by General Kurt Zeitzler, who had replaced Halder as Army Chief of Staff, that would have allowed General Paulus to pull out of Stalingrad and strike the Soviet forces from the rear, crippling their offensive. (Duffy)

1942 November 23 Goering volunteers the Luftwaffe to fly supplies into Stalingrad.

1942 November 25 531 Jewish women and children are seized in Norway and deported from Oslo to Auschwitz. (Atlas) (see October 25, 1942. Of the 740 Jews deported from Norway, only 12 will survive the war. As many as 930 Norwegian Jews escape into Sweden.)

1942 November 26 An article in an SS periodical, the Schwarze Korps, states that in the Napola, SS preparatory schools "pupils learn how to kill and how to die." When inaugurating a new Napola, Himmler reduced the doctrine to its lowest common measure: "Believe, obey, fight; that is all." ( Later, if proven worthy, students were admitted to the Burgs (Ordenburgs) for further SS training and education.) (Pauwels)

1942 November 29 William S. Farish, president and CEO of Standard Oil of New Jersey dies of an apparent heart attack.

1942 November 30 The New York Times runs one of the first articles on the unfolding story of the Holocaust. That article, under the headline: "1,000,000 Jews Slain by the Nazis, Report Says" is only six paragraphs long and buried on page 7. An exhibition of the clipping in June 1996 at the New York Public Library included a caption noting that The Times was criticized for having "grossly underplayed" coverage of theHolocaust, and deemed such criticism as valid. (NY Times, June 26, 1996)

1942 November 30 Romanian leader Marshal Antonescu makes his first secret contacts with the Western Powers.

1942 December Belzec concentration camp shuts down its gas chambers for good and begins exhuming the estimated 600,000 bodies buried there. (Apparatus)

1942 December The researh ward run by the Heidelberg psychiatrist Professor C. Schneider in Wiesloch comes into full operation. In this ward, idiots and epileptics are physiologically and psychologically investigated. After their euthanasia elsewhere, their brains are anatomically and histologically studied. (Science)

1942 December 2 Manhattan Project scientists under Italian-born American physicist Enrico Fermi produce the first controlled chain reaction in an atomic pile at the University of Chicago.

1942 December 4 The Germans deport 817 Dutch Jews to Auschwitz. Atlas)

1942 December 4 The Congress Weekly, a publication of the American Jewish Congress, begins publishing reports from Dr. Gerhart Reigner, a representative of the World Jewish Congress in Switzerland, stating that the Nazi leadership has a plan to resolve the Jewish question in Europe by means of poison gas. In 1983, the source of this information was discovered to be a German businessman named Eduard Schulte who is said to had "close connections with the highest German authorities." Schulte was in fact closely associated with the Silesian-American Corporation which was the holding company for his own company, Giesche, which had operations both in Germany and Poland. The Silesian-American corporation was 49% owned by German Giesche, 51% was held by Anaconda Copper and Harriman and Company. (Before America entered the war, Schulte had tried to arrange a Swiss purchase of all the shares and bonds of the Silesian-American Corporation, but the transaction was blocked by the U.S. Treasury department as "of potential benefit" to Germany) (Silence)

1942 December 8 The Germans deport 927 Dutch Jews to Auschwitz. (Atlas)

1942 December 8 Professor Hallervorden, Department Head at the KWI of Brain Research, writes in a progress report on his research for the DFG: "In addition, during the course of this summer, I have been able to dissect 500 brains from feeble-minded individuals, and to prepare them for examination." (Science)

1942 December The Western Allies begin vigorously denouncing the cold-blooded extermination of the Jews. (Lewy)

1942 December 12 The Germans deport 757 Dutch Jews to Auschwitz. (Atlas)

1942 December 12 Hiram J. Perez de Cruet departs the U.S. for North Africa.

1942 December 16 A German decree orders that all German Gypsies are to be deported to Auschwitz. About 20,000 will be killed at Auschwitz, and many thousands more die at other camps. No more than one-fifth of the prewar population in German-held territories will survive the war (Atlas)

1942 December 16 Himmler issues an order that all persons of mixed Gypsy blood be sent to Auschwitz. (Science)

1942 December 17 The Allies pledge punishment for Nazi extermination of the Jews.

1942 December 20 A pastoral letter by the new Archbishop of Cologne, Dr. Joseph Frings, is read in his archdiocese. Itinsists that all men have the right to life, property and marriage, and that these rights can not be denied be denied even to those "who are not of our blood or do not speak our language. (Lewy)

1942 December 22 Tittmann reports to the State Department that Papal Secretary of State Maglione has informed him that the Holy See, in line with its policy of neutrality, could not protest particular atrocities and had to limit itself to condemning immoral actions in general. He assured Tittmann that everything possible was being done behind the scenes to help the Jews. (U.S.D.P. 1942; Lewy)

1942 December 24 Pope Pius XII makes another of his many calls for the more humane conduct of hostilities during a lengthy Christmas message over Vatican Radio. Humanity, he said, owed the resolution of a better world to "the hundreds of thousands who, without personal guilt, sometimes for no other reason than their nationality or descent, were doomed to death or exposed to a progressive deterioration of their condition." (DA Eichstätt; Lewy)

1942 December 26 Hiram J. Perez de Cruet arrives in North Africa.

1942 December 31 During 1942 a number of Catholic officers serving in Russia and Poland reported to the episcopate about the murder of the Jews. One such officer, Dr. Alfons Hildebrand, took special leave from his unit near Minsk to report the massacres he had witnessed to Cardinal Faulhaber. Dr. Joseph Müller, an officer in Canaris' Military Intelligence Service and a confidant of Cardinal Faulhaber, also kept the episcopate well informed about the systemic atrocities committed in Poland. Another source of information was Dr. Hans Globke, a Catholic and high official in the Ministry of the Interior entrusted with handling racial matters. (Dehler; Lewy)

1942 Gregor Schwartz-Bostunitsch is appointed an honorary SS "professor."

1942 The U.S. government confines 110,000 Japanese Americans in internment camps.

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