1942–1944:
Extermination and resistance
1942
January: Mass killings of Jews using Zyklon-B begin at Auschwitz–Birkenau. The bodies are buried in mass graves in a nearby meadow.
20 January: Wannsee Conference in Berlin agrees to co-ordinate the 'Final Solution'.
31 January: SS Einsatzgruppe A reports a tally of 229,052 Jews killed.
March: In occupied Poland, Belzec extermination camp becomes operational. The camp is fitted with permanent gas chambers using carbon monoxide piped in from engines placed outside the chamber. Later it substitutes Zyklon-B.
17 March: Jews are deported from Lublin to Belzec.
24 March: The deportation of Slovak Jews to Auschwitz begins.
27 March: The deportation of French Jews to Auschwitz begins.
May: In occupied Poland, Sobibor extermination camp becomes operational. The camp is fitted with three gas chambers initially using carbon monoxide piped in from engines. Later Zyklon-B is used.
18 May: The New York Times reports on an inside page that Nazis have machine-gunned over 100,000 Jews in the Baltic states, 100,000 in Poland and twice as many in western Russia.
27 May: SS leader Rudolf Heydrich, Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia, is mortally wounded by Czech underground agents.
June: Gas vans are used in Riga.
1 June: Jews in France, Holland, Belgium, Croatia, Slovakia and Romania are ordered to wear yellow stars.
4 June: Heydrich dies of his wounds.
2 July: Jews from Berlin are sent to Theresienstadt.
14 July: The deportation of Dutch Jews to Auschwitz begins.
22 July: Deportations start from the Warsaw ghetto to the new Treblinka extermination camp in Poland. The camp is fitted with two buildings containing 10 gas chambers, each holding 200 persons. Carbon monoxide gas is piped in from engines placed outside the chamber, but Zyklon-B will later be substituted. Bodies are burned in open pits.
The deportation of Belgian Jews to Auschwitz begins.
August: The deportations of Croatian Jews to Auschwitz begin.
5 October: Heinrich Himmler orders that all Jews in concentration camps in Germany are to be sent to Auschwitz or Majdanek.
22 October: The SS put down a revolt at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in north Germany by a group of Jews about to be sent to Auschwitz.
December: Himmler orders the deportation of Gypsies in 'Greater Germany' to Auschwitz.
1943
18 January: The first attempt at armed resistance by Jews in the Warsaw ghetto.
March: The start of deportations of Jews from Greece to Auschwitz, which last until August and total 49,900 people.
19 April: A 27-day armed revolt breaks out in the Warsaw ghetto organised by the Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa (ZOB – 'Jewish Fighting Organisation') – a coalition of Bundists, Communists and Zionists using weapons smuggled into the ghetto. The Waffen SS responds by bringing in tanks and machine guns, burning blocks of buildings, destroying the ghetto and ultimately killing many of the remaining 60,000 Jewish ghetto residents. The Warsaw ghetto uprising is the first large revolt by an urban population in German-occupied territory.
19–30 April: The Bermuda Conference takes place. Representatives from the US and Britain discuss the problem of refugees from Nazi-occupied countries, but no action results.
11–12 May: Szmul Zygielbojm, representative of the Jewish Workers' Bund in the London-based Polish Parliament-in-Exile, commits suicide in protest at the Allies' indifference to the plight of the ghetto Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland.
11 June: Himmler orders the liquidation of all Jewish ghettos in occupied Poland.
August: Jewish paramilitary organisations within the Bialystok ghetto attack the German army. The revolt ends the same day with the death or capture of all the resisters.
2 August: 200 Jews torch parts of Treblinka death camp and escape during a revolt. Nazis hunt them down. Only a dozen survive.
1 September: The inhabitants of the Vilna ghetto in Lithuania revolt. Most of the participants are killed, but some manage to escape and join partisan units.
October: The Danish underground helps transport by sea 7,220 Danish Jews to safety in Sweden.
7 October: The Sonderkommando ('special unit', prisoners forced to handle the bodies of gas chamber victims) succeed in blowing up one of the four crematoria at Auschwitz. All the saboteurs are captured and killed.
14 October: Mass escape from Sobibor camp: Jews and Soviet POWs break out, with 300 making it safely into nearby woods. Fifty survive and join Soviet partisans. Exterminations then cease at Sobibor, after more than 250,000 deaths. All traces of the death camp are removed and trees are planted.
16 October: Jews in Rome are rounded up and more than 1,000 are sent to Auschwitz.
9 November: The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) is created at a 44-nation conference in the US.
1944
19 March: The Nazis occupy Hungary (Jewish population: 725,000).
7 April: Two Jewish inmates escape from Auschwitz–Birkenau and make it safely to Czechoslovakia. One of them, Rudolf Vrba, submits a report to the Papal Nuncio in Slovakia, which is forwarded to the Vatican.
14 April: First transports of Jews from Athens to Auschwitz take place, eventually totalling 5,200 persons.
16 May: Jews from Hungary arrive at Auschwitz. Adolf Eichmann, in charge of all transports to the camps, arrives to oversee and speed up the extermination process personally. By 24 May, an estimated 100,000 have been gassed.
6 June: D-Day – Allied landings in Normandy.
July: Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg arrives in Budapest and saves nearly 33,000 Hungarian Jews by issuing diplomatic papers and establishing 'safe houses'.
The Soviet army overruns Majdanek concentration camp and publicises the atrocities carried out there.
Author Morris Cohen coins the term 'Holocaust' for the Nazi genocide of the Jews, in his book Legal Claims against Germany. The Gypsies call it the Parajmos, which means 'devouring', or Samudaripen ('mass killing'). The Hebrew word is Sho'ah, meaning 'desolation; in Yiddish, the language spoken by the majority of the Jewish victims, it is Khurban ('catastrophe').
20 July: A plot by German officers to assassinate Hitler fails.
24 July: Soviet troops liberate Majdanek camp, where over 360,000 people had been murdered.
1 August: The Polish Home Army launches an uprising against the Nazi occupation of Warsaw. They are joined by surviving members of the ZOB (Jewish Fighting Organisation), who had been involved in the Warsaw ghetto rebellion.
2 August: Zigeunernacht ('Gypsy Night'): 4,000 Roma are gassed and cremated in a single action at Auschwitz–Birkenau.
4 August: Anne Frank and her family are arrested by the Gestapo in Amsterdam, then sent to Auschwitz. Anne and her sister Margot are later sent to Bergen-Belsen where Anne dies of typhus on 15 March 1945.
6 August: Lodz, the last Jewish ghetto in Poland, is liquidated and 60,000 Jews are sent to Auschwitz.
25 August: Allied reconnaissance aircraft fly over Auschwitz and take detailed photos of the whole complex. The photos are filed and no Allied bombing of Auschwitz follows. The killing there continues for several more months. See Auschwitz: The forgotten evidence.
2 October: Warsaw city centre falls to the Germans, signalling the end of the uprising. Instead of coming to their aid, the Soviet army has waited on the other side of the Vistula river until German reinforcements arrived and destroyed the Polish rebels.
7 October: A revolt by a Sonderkommando at Auschwitz–Birkenau results in the complete destruction of Crematorium IV.