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Subjects | Fact sheet | Samples
History: Sample chronology
The Holocaust
1933 The Germans open Ravensbrück, the first concentration camp for women.
20 March 1933 The first Nazi concentration camp is created at Dachau, near Munich, Germany.
10 October 1939 The deportation of Polish Jews to the Lublin ghetto begins.
8 December 1941 The use of gas in the so-called 'final solution' to the Jewish problem begins when 2,300 Polish Jews are gassed at Chelmno, western Poland.
20 January 1942 At the Wannsee Conference in Germany, which is chaired by Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Nazi secret police, Nazi officials discuss 'the final solution' of 'the Jewish question' (in effect, the annihilation of European Jewry).
16 February 1943 German authorities execute resistance fighter Dr Mildred Harnack-Fish, who helped arrange the escape of dissidents and Jews.
19 April 1943 The rebellion of Warsaw Jews against the Nazis begins.
8 May 1943 The rebellion of Warsaw Jews against the Nazis is finally put down. Around 14,000 have died, and the 7,000 survivors are sent to the death camp at Treblinka, Poland.
1944 Following the German occupation of Hungary, about 400,000 Hungarian Jews are rounded up and sent to concentration camps.
1944 The Austrian composer Viktor Ullmann completes his opera Der Kaiser von Atlantis/The Emperor of Atlantis, written in Theresienstadt concentration camp. He is killed the same year. It is first performed in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, in 1975.
27 January 1945 Soviet forces reach the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland.
1947 Het Achterhuis/The Diary of Anne Frank, the diary of a German Jewish girl who lived in hiding in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and later died in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, is published.
1947 The Italian writer Primo Levi publishes Se questo è un uomo/If This is a Man, an account of his experiences in a concentration camp.
1950 The US composer John Cage completes his vocal work The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs; and In the Name of the Holocaust for 'prepared piano' (that is, a piano with has had various objects placed on its wires).
1955 The documentary film Nuit et brouillard/Night and Fog, the story of the Auschwitz concentration camp, directed by French film-maker Alain Resnais, is released in France.
23 May 1960 Israel announces the arrest (following his abduction from Argentina) of Adolf Eichmann, who had been one of those responsible for organizing the mass extermination of Jews in World War II.
19 August 1965 After a 20-month trial in West Germany of former officials of the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz, the court, sitting in Frankfurt, sentences six men to life imprisonment.
1982 The Australian writer Thomas Keneally publishes his novel Schindler's Ark.
1985 The epic Holocaust documentary Shoah, directed by Claude Lanzmann, is released in France.
6 June 1985 A skeleton thought to be that of the fugitive Auschwitz doctor Josef Mengele is exhumed in Brazil. On 21 June, the identity of the remains is confirmed by a team of forensic experts.
27 April 1987 The US Justice Department bars the Austrian president Kurt Waldheim from entering the USA because of his alleged involvement in Nazi atrocities during World War II.
8 February 1988 An international commission finds that Austrian president Kurt Waldheim knew about wartime atrocities in the Balkans, but clears him of war crimes.
25 April 1988 John Demjanjuk (believed to be the former prison-camp guard known as 'Ivan the Terrible') is sentenced to death in Israel for war crimes in the gas chambers in the Treblinka concentration camp during World War II.
November 1991 The records of the rapper Ice Cube provoke controversy in the USA, as they are described as promoting violence against racial minorities. The Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, California, an international centre promoting Holocaust remembrance, asks record stores to stop selling the album Death Certificate.
1993 The film Schindler's List, directed by Steven Spielberg, is released in the USA. Based on Thomas Keneally's Booker Prize-winning book Schindler's Ark, it stars Liam Neeson, Ben Kingsley, and Ralph Fiennes.
3 July 1996 The Hungarian government establishes a fund to compensate Jewish victims of the Holocaust, the first Eastern European country to do so.
10 September 1996 British Foreign and Commonwealth Office documents show that $500 million worth of gold ($6 billion in today's prices) from unknown sources were deposited in Swiss banks during World War II; there is speculation that some belonged to Holocaust victims.
23 January 1997 Switzerland establishes a fund to compensate victims of the Holocaust and their families following the discovery of Nazi gold in Swiss banks.
30 September 1997 The Roman Catholic Church issues a statement, called the 'Declaration of Repentance', in which it formally apologizes for its silence when the French government deported Jews to Nazi death camps in Germany and Poland during World War II. The statement is considered the most direct apology for the silence of the Roman Catholic Church during the Holocaust.
31 October 1997 Pope John Paul II condemns the failure of Christians to speak out against the genocide of the Jews at the hands of the Nazis during World War II. Although the Pope acknowledges that the church was responsible for anti-Semitism in the past, he does not apologize directly to the Jews on behalf of the Roman Catholic Church.
12 January 1998 The German government announces the establishment of a 200 million-mark pension fund that will compensate Jewish Holocaust survivors from Eastern and Central Europe.
12 August 1998 Credit Suisse and UBS AG, Switzerland's two largest banks, agree to pay $1.25 billion to Holocaust survivors and their heirs who had lost assets deposited in accounts before and during World War II.
19 August 1998 Italy's largest insurance company, Assicurazioni Generali SpA, agrees to pay $100 million to the victims of the Holocaust and their heirs who had life insurance policies confiscated by the Nazis during World War II. Several other European insurance firms follow suit a few days later, agreeing to compensate Holocaust victims for lost policies.
11 April 2000 English historian David Irving loses his libel suit against US academic Deborah Lipstadt and her publisher Penguin Books. The judge rules that a claim in her book that he was a Holocaust denier was justified.
6 June 2000 A permanent Holocaust exhibition opens at the Imperial War Museum, London, England.
27 January 2001 The UK stages its first official Holocaust Memorial day, on the date that Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp was liberated by the Russian army.
3 December 2001 Gerhart Riegner, Jewish human-rights campaigner who sought to alert the world in 1942 to the Nazi plan to exterminate the Jews, dies in Geneva, Switzerland (90).
14 December 2001 W(infried) G(eorg) Sebald, acclaimed German-born writer, dies in Norwich, England (57).
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