SIMPLIFIED TIMELINE

1889 April 20 Adolf Hitler is born at Brannau am Inn, Austria.

1914 August 1 Austria invades Serbia, setting off World War I.

1914 August 16 Hitler, living in Munich, enlists in the Bavarian army.

1918 November 11 Germany signs an armistice with the Allies, ending World War I.

1919 September 20 Hitler joins the German Worker's Party, the DAP, which in 1920 will become the Nazi party.

1920 August 8 Hitler receives permission from the party leadership to rename the German DAP. It now becomes the National Socialist German Worker's Party (NSDAP).

1921 July 11 Hitler becomes uncontested leader of the National Socialist German Worker's Party.

1923 November 9Hitler leads the unsuccessful Beer Hall Putsch in Munich.

1924 Hitler writes Mein Kampf (My Struggle) while imprisoned for his part in the attempted putsch.

1924 December 20 Hitler is released from Landsberg prison after serving less than nine months of his five-year sentence.

1925 February 27 Hitler revives the NSDAP and quickly takes control.

1925 Hitler establishes a "Protection Squad," which soon becomes known as the SS (Schutzstaffel)

1925 July 18 Hitler publishes the first volume of Mein Kampf in Munich.

1927 August 21 Twenty thousand Storm Troopers attend the Congress of the National Socialist Party in Nuremberg.

1928 May 20 The Nazi Party receives 3 percent of the vote in the General elections.

1929 January 6 Hitler appoints Heinrich Himmler as head (Reichsfuehrer) of the SS.

1930 September 14 The Nazis become Germany's second largest political party after 107 National Socialist deputies are elected to the Reichstag.

1932 April 10 Hindenburg is re-elected President in a runoff election with Hitler. Hindenburg receives a clear majority, but Hitler receives 13,418,547 votes (36.8%).

1932 July 31 National Socialists win 230 seats in Reichstag with a total vote of 13,745,000 (37%).

1932 November Thirty-nine prominent industrialists and businessmen petition Hindenburg to appoint Hitler as his new Chancellor. Hindenburg refuses.

1933 January 30 Hitler is appointed Chancellor of Germany by President Hindenburg.

1933 March 20 Dachau concentration camp is established.

1933 April 1 Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses and professions.

1933 September 29 German Jews are banned from owning land and from all public activities.

1934 June 30 Ernst Roehm (Röhm) and other SA leaders are murdered in the "Night of the Long Knives."

1934 August 2 President Hindenburg dies and Hitler declares himself Fuehrer (Führer).

1935 September 15 The Nuremberg laws are passed, removing Jewish legal equality and prohibiting "mixed" marriages.

1935 November 1 German citizenship is revoked for Jews.

1937 July 19 Buchenwald concentration camp is established.

1938 March 12 German troops cross the border and occupy Austria.

1938 July 6-16 An international conference at Evian, France, is held to discuss solutions to the Jewish refugee problem.

1938 August Adolf Eichmann opens a Vienna office for Jewish emigration.

1938 October 28 More than 17,000 Polish-born Jews are expelled from Germany.

1938 November 7 Hershel Gryszpan, a young Jew, said to be homosexual, assinates a German embassy official in Paris.

1938 November 9-10 SA men, acting on orders from Goebbels, instigate Kristallnacht, the first widespread pogrom against the Jews of Germany.

1939 January 24 Hermann Goering orders Reinhard Heydrich to begin plans for the removal of all Jews from Germany through emigration.

1939 January 30 Hitler makes a speech threatening to annihilate the Jews if war breaks out in Europe.

1939 March 15 German troops enter Prague, Czechoslovakia, absorbing the provinces of Bohemia and Moravia into Germany.

1939 May Britain sets limit of 75,000 Jewish refugees into Palestine over the next five years.

1939 August 23 A non-agression pact is signed between Germany and the Soviet Union.

1939 September 1 German troops invade Poland.

1939 September 3 Britain and France declare war on Germany.

1939 September 21 Polish Jews are forced into ghettos.

1939 October The German "euthanasia" program begins. More than 70,000 mentally and physically disabled people will be killed by August 1941.

1939 December 12 Labor camps are swet up throughout Poland. All Jewish males between 14 and 60 are assigned to forced labor.

1940 May 1 The Lodz ghetto, containing 160,000 Jews, is sealed off.

1940 May 10 German troops invade western Europe.

1940 June 22 France signs an armistice with Germany.

1940 October Deportations into Warsaw ghetto begins; 400,000 Jews are incarcerated.

1941 April 6 German invasions of Yugoslavia and Greece trigger pogroms against Jews and Serbs.

1941 June 22 Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union, begins.

1941 July 31 Goering orders Heyrich to begin preparation for the "Final Solution."

1941 August 23 Hitler publicly announces the end of the "euthanasia" program, but it secretly is continued.

1941 September 3 Zyclon B gas is tested for the first time at Auschwitz on Soviet prisoners of war.

1941 September 29-30 More than 30,000 Jews are murdered at Babi Yar outside Kiev.

1941 October 14 Mass deportations of German Jews to the east begin.

1941 October 23 Jewish emigration is officially halted from German-occupied territory.

1941 November 24 The ghetto at Theresienstadt is established.

1941 December 5 A Soviet counteroffensive outside Moscow halts the German winter offensive.

1941 December 7 Japanese aircraft attack Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.

1941 December 8 Thousands of Jews and Gypsies are killed in mobile gassing vans near Chemno (Kulmhof) in western Poland.

1941 December 11 Germany declares war on the United States.

1942 January 20 The Wannsee Conference to organize the "Final Solution" is held Berlin.

1942 March 16 Operation Reinhard (Aktion Reinhard), the mass murder of Polish Jewry , begins.

1942 March 24 The first deportations of Slovakian Jews to Auschwitz begin.

1942 March 27 Reinhard Heydrich is fatally wounded in Czechoslovakia.

1942 June 9 Murders in mobile gassing vans begin in Riga, Latvia.

1942 June 10 The Czech village of Lidice is razed in revenge for the assassination of Heydrich.

1942 July 14 Mass deportations of Dutch Jews to Auschwitz begins, folloed by Jews from Belgium and Luxembourg.

1942 July 22 Deportations of Warsaw Jews to Treblinka begin.

1942 November 4 British victory at El Alamein.

1942 November 16 Deportations of German Gypsies to Auschwitz begin.

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

1942 November 19 The Soviet army launches a huge counter-offensive at Stalingrad.

1943 April 19 A Jewish uprising in the Warsaw ghetto begins.

1943 June Himmler's slave-labor battalions begin exhuming and burning corpses to obliterate evidence of mass murder.

1943 August 2 Jewish revolt and attempted mass break-out at Treblinka is crushed.

1943 August 16 Bialystok ghetto is "liquidated."

1943 September 23 Vilna ghetto is "liquidated."

1943 October 16 Deportations of Italian Jews to Auschwitz begin.

1944 May 15 Deportations of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz begin.

1944 June 6 D-Day. Allies open a "second front" with landings at Normandy.

1944 July 20 A bomb plot to assassinate Hitler fails.

1944 July 23 Red Army liberates Majdanek concentration camp in Poland.

1944 August 6-30 Jews remaining in Lodz ghetto are deported to Auschwitz.

1944 October 7 Inmates at Auschwitz revolt and destroy one of four crematoriums before the uprising is quickly put down.

1944 November 28 Last gassings at Auschwitz before gas chambers are destroyed.

1945 January 27 Auschwitz-Birkenau complex liberated by the Red Army.

1945 April 11 Buchenwald concentration camp liberated by American troops.

1945 April 15 British troops liberate Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

1945 April 28 Dachau concentration camp near Munich is liberated.

1945 April 30 Hitler commits suicide.

1945 May 8 Germany surrenders.

Copyright © 1997 R.H. Perez
All Rights reserved.