Budapest, Hungary • February 14, 1945 On December 29, 1944, Soviet and Romanian troops (Romania had broken from the Axis and was now a Soviet ally) began laying siege to Budapest, the capital of Adolf Hitler’s vassal state of Hungary. Budapest, split in two by the River Danube, was a city of over 800,000 residents and…
Stockholm, Sweden • February 5, 1945 Within 5 months from the start of the German conquest of Norway in April 1940 the first Norwegian political prisoners, initially Jews, communists, and prominent political opponents, were deported to Germany, first by Adolf Hitler’s Norwegian Reichskommisar, or Governor-General, Josef Terboven, then by the Norwegian government of Nazi collaborator Vidkun…
Auschwitz-Birkenau, Poland • January 27, 1945 In the months following the Red Army’s entry into the abandoned Nazi death camp at Majdanek on the outskirts of Lublin, Poland, where more than 79,000 people had been killed, the growing list of liberated camps (the Nazis had over 40 death camps) characterized by mounds of corpses and emaciated…
Washington, D.C. • January 22, 1944 On this date in 1944 President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9417, which created the War Refugee Board (WRB), an independent government agency. The president said that “it was urgent that action be taken at once to forestall the plan of the Nazis to exterminate all the Jews…
Warsaw, Occupied Poland • January 18, 1943 In October 1940, a little over a year after Nazi Germany’s conquest of its eastern neighbor Poland, German Governor-General Hans Frank established a Jewish ghetto in Poland’s capital, Warsaw, moving some 90,000 Jews from all over Poland into the ghetto. (Poland’s Jewish community numbered 3.5 million at the time.) The…
Warsaw, Liberated Poland • January 17, 1945 On this date in 1945 Warsaw fell to Soviet and Polish Communist forces as the Nazis beat a hasty retreat from the ruins of Poland’s capital. In moving against the retreating Wehrmacht (German armed forces), the Soviets liberated 800 Jews in Częstochowa and 870 Jews in Łódź, Poland. Ten…
Near Bad Orb, Germany • December 26, 1944 On the first day in December 1939, 4 months since the outbreak of war in Europe, the German Wehrmacht (military) established a prisoner of war camp, Mannschafts-Stammlager IX B, outside Bad Orb, roughly 30 miles/48 km northeast of Frankfurt am Main in the state of Hessen. Over the course of the…
Riga, German-Occupied Latvia • November 30, 1941 On November 25 and 29, 1941, Einsatzgruppe 3 (Special Task Group 3), one of many SS (short for Schutzstaffel) mobile death squads operating behind German front lines, murdered5,000 “Reich Jews,” that is, German- and Austrian-born Jews. These men, women, and children had arrived in the Baltic ghetto at Kaunas, Lithuania’s second…
Warsaw, Occupied Poland • November 4, 1939 On this date in 1939 in Nazi-occupied Poland, newly appointed Governor-General Hans Frank established the Warsaw ghetto and began forcing the city’s Jews into a single area. Ten days later Frank and his deputy Arthur Seyss-Inquart ordered Jews in Poland to wear a white bracelet bearing a hexagonal…
Auschwitz (Oświęcim), German-Occupied Poland • November 1, 1940 On this date in 1940 SS Hauptsturmfuehrer (Captain) Rudolf Hoess (also Höß or Hoeß; pronounced “hearse”) (1901–1947) reported for duty as commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp in the newly annexed province of Upper Silesia in former Poland. During Hoess’s tenure at Auschwitz, the 20,000‑acre/8,094‑hectare complex of 3 separate camps…