Chronology
Warsaw ghetto identity card of Zelman Friedrich. In 1942, he smuggled himself into - and out of - Treblinka and, on his return, reported to ghetto inhabitants what he had seen. He later died in the Warsaw uprising.
YIVO Institute
Here you will find a chronology of the Holocaust that swept through Europe in the 20th century, beginning with the rise of the Nazis in 1923 and ending with the liberation of the forced labour and extermination camps in 1945 and the controversies arising from this period that have occurred since.
These 'concentration camps' were not, however, an invention of Hitler and his henchmen. They were built on a model created by the British in South Africa during the Boer War. The Nazis' first inmates were their political and religious opponents, but it was not long before non-political prisoners were incarcerated, including Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals and Poles. The crowded and insanitary conditions were so harsh that many inmates died of disease and starvation.
At the same time, Hitler instituted a programme of euthanasia – the deliberate killing of people with physical, mental and emotional disabilities.
During World War II, the Nazis established a number of death camps: extermination centres where Jews and other victims were brought to be killed as part of Hitler's 'Final Solution'. Auschwitz–Birkenau in Poland, the best-known camp, was, in fact, a complex consisting of concentration, extermination and slave labour camps, the latter being used to sustain the Nazi economy and war machine.
By the time the camps were liberated in 1944 and 1945, millions were dead.
- 1923–1938 The Nazis grow and take power
- 1939–1941 Invasion and ghettoisation
- 1942–1944 Extermination and resistance
- 1945–present Liberation and the aftermath