Holocaust Timeline: Key Events and the Full History of Nazi Germany's Genocide of Europe's Jews and Other Victims

This Holocaust timeline of events records, with the gravity the subject demands, the systematic persecution and murder that Nazi Germany carried out against Europe’s Jews and millions of other victims between 1933 and 1945. As a timeline of the Holocaust, it follows the shift from discriminatory laws to ghettos, mass shootings, and industrialized killing in dedicated camps, tracing dates that historians treat as the core chronology of the genocide. Read as a holocaust events timeline, it closes with liberation, postwar justice, and the remembrance institutions built to keep the historical record intact.

Holocaust Timeline: Persecution and Early Events Under Nazi Germany

Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany in January 1933, and the Nazi government began stripping Jews of civil rights almost immediately, including an April 1933 boycott of Jewish businesses and the dismissal of Jewish civil servants. The 1935 Nuremberg Laws formalized this persecution, revoking German Jews’ citizenship and criminalizing marriage or relationships between Jews and non-Jews. Violence escalated sharply on the night of November 9–10, 1938, in a nationwide pogrom later called Kristallnacht, or the “Night of Broken Glass,” during which synagogues were burned, Jewish-owned businesses were destroyed, and thousands of Jewish men were arrested. Following the September 1939 invasion of Poland, German occupation authorities began confining Jewish populations to sealed ghettos in cities including Warsaw and Łódź, where overcrowding, forced labor, and starvation caused widespread death even before the mass deportations that followed.

Ghettos, Mass Murder, and the “Final Solution”

After Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, mobile killing units known as Einsatzgruppen carried out mass shootings of Jewish civilians and others across occupied Soviet territory. In January 1942, senior Nazi officials met at the Wannsee Conference near Berlin to coordinate what they called the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question”: the systematic deportation of Jews from across German-occupied Europe to dedicated killing centers. Between 1942 and 1944, deportations reached their peak, sending victims by rail to camps including Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Sobibor, and others built specifically for mass murder. Historians widely estimate that approximately six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, alongside millions of Roma, disabled people, Soviet prisoners of war, political prisoners, and other groups the Nazi regime targeted for persecution or death.

Liberation, Justice, and the History of Holocaust Remembrance

Soviet forces liberated the Auschwitz camp complex in January 1945, and British, American, and other Allied forces liberated additional camps over the following months as they advanced across Germany, revealing the scale of the killing to the wider world. Postwar trials, most notably the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, prosecuted senior Nazi officials for crimes against humanity, establishing legal precedents still cited in international law today. In the decades since, institutions including Yad Vashem and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum have preserved testimony, documentation, and the history of the Holocaust for future generations, and International Holocaust Remembrance Day, observed each January 27, marks the anniversary of Auschwitz’s liberation. This Holocaust timeline would be incomplete without acknowledging that Nazi persecution also killed millions of Roma, disabled people, Soviet prisoners of war, and political prisoners alongside the six million Jewish victims. Any timeline of the Holocaust carries an obligation beyond dates: it exists so that this history is neither forgotten nor distorted, a responsibility that shapes how the events are documented and taught today.

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