1945–present:
Liberation and the aftermath
1945
6 January: The Soviets liberate Budapest, freeing over 80,000 Jews.
14 January: The liberation of eastern Germany by Soviet troops.
17 January: Warsaw is liberated by the Soviet army. They find 300 Jews still living in the ruined ghetto
18 January: The Nazis evacuate 66,000 from Auschwitz.
27 January: Soviet troops liberate Auschwitz. The Nazis had blown up the gas chambers at Auschwitz before they arrived in an effort to destroy the evidence of mass killings.
February: Allied leaders Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin meet at Yalta and agree that the Axis leaders should be prosecuted once the war is over.
April: Survivors of the concentration camps hold the first annual commemoration of the 1943 Warsaw ghetto rebellion.
4 April: Ohrdruf, near Weimar in Germany, is the first death camp to be liberated by the Americans.
10 April: The Allies liberate Buchenwald.
15 April: British troops liberate around 40,000 prisoners from Bergen-Belsen in West Germany. The first newsreel images of the remaining sick and starving inmates shock the world.
23 April: Soviet troops reach Berlin.
29 April: The US 7th Army liberates Dachau.
30 April: Hitler commits suicide in his Berlin bunker.
2 May: Theresienstadt is taken over by the Red Cross.
US Supreme Court justice Robert Jackson is appointed chief American counsel for the prosecution of Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg.
5 May: Mauthausen is liberated.
7 May: Germany surrenders unconditionally. The war in Europe is over.
23 May: Heinrich Himmler commits suicide.
Around one million people, including 50,000 Jewish survivors, who refuse to go back to countries where their families and communities were murdered, are deposited in displaced persons (DP) camps under the auspices of the Allied armies and the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA).
July: Allied leaders Truman, Atlee and Stalin meet in Potsdam.
19 October: Indictments are issued against the surviving Nazi leaders.
20 November: The Nuremberg Trials begin. The defendants plead 'Not guilty'.
1946
4 July: In Kielce, Poland, a pogrom is launched, which leaves 42 Jews dead and 50 wounded.
1 October: The verdicts against the major war criminals are handed down by the International Military Tribunal: 12 of the 24 defendants are sentenced to death.
1947
11 July: A ship called Exodus 1947, carrying 4,554 Jewish survivors, sets sail from France for Palestine. It is intercepted by British destroyers and forced to return first to Marseilles and then to Hamburg, where the passengers are removed by force and put in a British-administered holding camp.
29 November: The UN General Assembly votes to partition Palestine into two countries, one Jewish and one Arab.
1948
14 May: The state of Israel is established.
15 May: War breaks out between the new state of Israel and its Arab neighbours. It is known to Israelis as the 'War of Independence' and to the Palestinians as the Nakba ('Catastrophe').
9 December: The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide is adopted by the UN General Assembly.
10 December: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is adopted by the UN General Assembly.
1949
April: Final sentences bring to an end the four-year-long series of war crimes trials in Germany and Japan.
12 August: revision of the Geneva Convention on the Laws and Customs of War.
1952
Publication of The Diary of Anne Frank, the account of a teenage girl whose family hid from the Nazis in a tiny garret in Amsterdam. They were betrayed and Anne died of typhus in Bergen-Belsen just before the camp was liberated.
1953
18 May: The government of the new state of Israel sets up Yad Vashem ('A Memorial and a Name'), the Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority, to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust, trace survivors and research the history of the Nazi period.
1957
The last displaced person camp – Föhrenwald in Bavaria – closes.
1958
Elie Wiesel publishes Night, an account of his experiences in Auschwitz–Birkenau and Buchenwald concentration camps. More Holocaust memoirs soon follow.
Italian author Primo Levi publishes If This Is a Man, his account of his arrest for anti-Fascist activity in 1943 and being held in Auschwitz until the camp was liberated in 1945.
1960
Psychologist Bruno Bettelheim publishes The Informed Heart, his account of a year spent in Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps. It describes the psychology of terror and shows how it can be resisted.
11 May: Israeli Security Service agents seize Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi official who had co-ordinated deportations of Jews to extermination camps, who has been living in Argentina under the pseudonym Ricardo Klement for the past 10 years. He is taken to Jerusalem to stand trial in an Israeli court for numerous crimes, and testifies from a bulletproof glass booth.
1961
15 December: Eichmann is found guilty and sentenced to death.
Raul Hilberg publishes The Destruction of the European Jews, widely accepted as the best detailed account of the Holocaust. Hilberg calculated that the Nazis murdered 5.1 million Jews; other historians now put the number at six million.
1962
1 June: Eichmann is executed by hanging – the only official civil execution ever carried out in Israel.
1963
German-born American political philosopher Hannah Arendt publishes Eichmann in Jerusalem: A report on the banality of evil. She argues, controversially, that many Nazis were ordinary people caught up in an evil system and that Hitler might have been stopped if the victims had resisted.
1964
Paul Rassinier, a French Holocaust survivor, publishes The Drama of the European Jews. An early revisionist, he claims that there was no Nazi policy of genocide against the Jews and that no gassings took place.
1968
26 November: Convention on the Non-Applicability of Statutory Limitations to War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity.
1976
Arthur Butz publishes the revisionist bible, The Hoax of the 20th Century: The case against the presumed extermination of European Jewry. He claims that Zyklon-B gas was used not for extermination, but for delousing.
1977
David Irving publishes Hitler's War, which attempts to exculpate the German leader from all knowledge of the Holocaust.
Supplementary protocols to the Geneva Convention on the Laws and Customs of War.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center is founded in Los Angeles, California, to commemorate the Holocaust and defend human rights and the Jewish people. The Museum of Tolerance is added to it in 1993.
1978
The television mini-series, Holocaust, starring James Woods, Fritz Weaver and Meryl Streep, is broadcast in the United States and then around the world, bringing a factually accurate version of the events of the Nazi period to a much wider public.
1979
Martin Sherman's play, Bent, opens at London's Royal Court Theatre. With scenes set in a concentration camp, it tells the story of the persecution of gay men by the Nazis.
1979
The Institute for Historical Review, a pseudo-academic body based in the US and dedicated to denying the Holocaust, is established.
1980
Robert Faurisson publishes Testimony in Defence: Against those who accuse me of falsifying history, and creates controversy by linking his denial of the Holocaust to his right to free speech.
1982
Australian novelist Thomas Keneally's Schindler's Ark wins the Booker Prize in Britain. Based on the true story of Oskar Schindler, a Nazi who rescued Jews from certain death, it is made by Steven Spielberg into a hugely successful film – under the title Schindler's List – in 1993.
1985
23 October: Shoah, an 9.5-hour documentary by French film-maker Claude Lanzmann, which provides detailed testimony by survivors, bystanders and perpetrators of the Holocaust, is broadcast all over Europe.
1987
Eminent British historian Martin Gilbert publishes The Holocaust, a most detailed account, based on archival documents, of Hitler's attempt to eradicate the Jews.
1988
German-born Ernst Zündel is sentenced to 15 months' imprisonment by a Canadian court for denying the Holocaust. The conviction is overturned four years later.
1989
November: The fall of the Berlin Wall and the opening of borders with Eastern Europe enable more people to travel to countries where the genocide of the Jews was carried out and gain access to archives of documents about the Holocaust.
1993
26 April: The US Holocaust Memorial Museum opens in Washington DC. By June 2006, 24.1 million people have visited it.
Deborah Lipstadt's book, Denying the Holocaust, the first full-length account of those who attempt to deny that the Holocaust ever happened, is published.
1995
Bruno Dössekker, a Swiss musician, publishes Fragments under the pseudonym of Binjamin Wilkomirski. An account of a childhood spent in the concentration camps, it is a bestseller despite being revealed as a work of fiction.
1996
American academic Daniel Goldhagen publishes Hitler's Willing Executioners, a controversial book that argues that thousands of ordinary Germans participated in the extermination of European Jews.
2000
11 January–11 April: David Irving's attempt to sue Deborah Lipstadt for libel fails in the British High Court. The judge condemns him for being a Holocaust denier, a racist and a falsifier of history. See Holocaust on trial.
2001
27 January: First Holocaust Memorial Day, established in Britain to remember all victims of the Holocaust and Nazi persecution: Jews, Roma and Sinti (Gypsies), East European civilians, Russian prisoners of war, trade unionists, Communists, political opponents, disabled people, Jehovah's Witnesses, gay men, and black Germans. In addition, those observing the day – which is the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by Soviet troops – are urged to reflect on more recent atrocities and to educate themselves about the dangers of anti-Semitism, racism and all forms of discrimination.
13 September: The Jewish Museum in Berlin reopens for the first time since it was closed by the Nazis in November 1938, following Kristallnacht. The new museum is located in a building designed by Daniel Libeskind.
2002
1 July: The International Criminal Court in The Hague is established.
2006
September: The first rabbis to be trained in Germany since the Nazi period are ordained in Berlin.