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…
Washington, D.C. and London, England · December 17, 1942 In remarks he made to senior Nazis at a conference in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee on January 22, 1942, SS-Obergruppenfuehrer Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Reich Security Main Office and head of the German secret police apparatus, spoke of “practical experience” that was being collected “in…
Riga, Occupied Latvia · November 30, 1941 On November 25 and 29, 1941, Einsatzgruppe 3 (Special Task Group 3), one of many SS (Schutzstaffel) mobile death squads operating behind the front lines, murdered 5,000 “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 largest…
Paris, France · November 7, 1938 On this date in 1938, 17-year-old Herschel Grynszpan, an unemployed German-born Polish Jew living illegally in Paris, France, fatally wounded Ernst vom Rath, Third Secretary at the German embassy. He shot Rath, he told authorities, out “of love for my parents and for my people.” His was an act…
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 “Star…
Auschwitz-Birkenau, Occupied Poland · October 30, 1944 On this date in 1944 in Poland, the last murders by poison gas took place at the Nazis’ largest and arguably most infamous death camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau (Polish, Oświęcim), one of eight camps used for mass murder during World War II. (Six were in what is today’s Poland, one…
Kiev, Occupied Ukraine · September 29, 1941 By the end of 1940, sixteen months after Adolf Hitler had plunged Europe into war by invading Poland, the number of Jews killed by Nazi Germany approached 100,000. But in 1941 the death toll grew exponentially as mass murder of Jews became state policy. By the end of…
Berlin, Germany · September 27, 1937 On this date in 1937 the Reichssicherheitshauptamt, Reich Security Main Office (known by its acronym RSHA), was created by Reichsfuehrer-SS Heinrich Himmler through the merger of the SS (Schutzstaffel) intelligence service, the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), or Security Service, and the Sicherheitspolizei (SiPo), or Security Police. The SiPo comprised the notorious…
Brest-Litovsk, Occupied Eastern Poland · September 19, 1939 Adolf Hitler’s armies stormed over Poland’s border on September 1, 1939, in what became known as the first blitzkrieg—“lightning war.” Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin hastened to claim his share of the spoils under the terms of a secret protocol in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact signed in Moscow the month before,…
Nuremberg, Germany · September 10, 1935 On this date in 1935 the Nazis convened their annual party congress in Nuremberg completely fixated on the charismatic savior-figure Adolf Hitler, Germany’s chancellor since January 1933. The 1935 “Rally of Freedom” (Reichsparteitag der Freiheit) touted Hitler’s wildly popular reintegration of the Saar region—formerly a League of Nations mandate—into…