“History holds no parallel to the Nazi murder of the Jewish people,” Sir Hartley Showcross, Chief British Prosecutor at the Trails of War Criminals at Nuremberg.

The term Holocaust refers to the murder of six million Jewish men, women and children as a consequence of the national policy of Nazi Germany to murder all Jews under its control.  The Holocaust represents the transformation of historic anti-Semitism and sporadic, undisciplined mob violence into a relentless, systematic, nationally organized hate and murder machine.

The Holocaust (also called Shoah in Hebrew) refers to the period from January 30, 1933, when Hitler became chancellor of Germany, to May 8, 1945 (V-E Day), when the war in Europe ended. During this time, Jews in Europe were subjected to progressively harsh persecution that ultimately led to the murder of 6,000,000 Jews (1.5 million of these being children) and the destruction of 5,000 Jewish communities. These deaths represented 2/3rds of European Jewry and 1/3 of world Jewry. The Jews who died were not casualties of the fighting that ravaged Europe during World War II. Rather, they were the victims of Germany's deliberate and systematic attempt to annihilate the entire Jewish population of Europe, a plan Hitler called "the Final Solution" (Endlosung).

(In Germany and German Occupied Territories)

Clink a year below for a specific chronology

Taken from Das nationalsozialistische Lagersystem, by Martin Weinmann, with contributions by Anne Kaiser and Ursula Krause-Schmitt, Frankfurt: Zweitausendeins 1990, second edition, 1991. Extract from the synoptical "Zeittafel" (Internationale Entwicklung--Deutsche Politik--Lagersystem), pp. LXXXIX-CXXXIV. All rights reserved. Copyright 1990 by Zweitausendeins, Postfach, D-60381 Frankfurt. Translated for the Holocaust Memorial Center by Hans R. Weinmann.

Glossary of Names and Commonly Used Terms

Click a year below for a specific chronology

Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Reich Main Security Office, first recommended that Jews be compelled to wear identifying badges following the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 9 and 10, 1938. Shortly after the invasion of Poland in September 1939, local German authorities began introducing mandatory wearing of badges. By the end of 1939, all Jews in the newly-acquired Polish territories were required to wear badges. Upon invading the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Germans again applied this requirement to newly-conquered lands. Throughout the rest of 1941 and 1942, Germany, its satellite states and western occupied territories adopted regulations stipulating that Jews wear identifying badges. Only in Denmark, where King Christian X is said to have threatened to wear the badge himself if it were imposed on his country’s Jewish population, were the Germans unable to impose such a regulation.

Abegg, Elisabeth (Germany)
Elisabeth Abegg was a Quaker who taught history at the Berlin Luisen girls' school until she was dismissed in 1933 by the Nazi school director for her anti-Nazi views. In 1942, at age 60, she began using her home as a temporary shelter and assembly point for rescuing many Jews. She then expanded her activities to create a rescue network made up of friends and former students. They sheltered Jews in and around Berlin , Alsace and East Prussia and provided false identities, money and provisions. She even sold her jewelry and other valuables to finance her rescue operations.

That Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jew who lost 72 of the 74 members of his family in the Holocaust, coined the term "genocide" in 1944 to describe the Nazis' systematic annihilation of the Jews of Europe. A portmaneau of the Greek genos - family; tribe, race, and Latin caedere - to kill; to cut down, Lemkin's specifc definiton was "the destruction of a nation or an ethnic group."

Lemkin, a lawyer and scholar, escaped Warsaw when the Germans invaded Poland. He eventually immigrated to the United States, where he became the driving force behind the drafting and adoption of the International Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, adopted unanimously by the United Nations General Assembly in Paris on December 9, 1948. The Convention was brought into force in 1950, when the required number of countries had ratified its provisions.