Timeline: Hitler's Notion of Building a Racial State


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1933 | 1934 | 1935 | 1936 | 1938 | 1939 | 1940 | 1941 | 1942 | 1944 | 1945

1933 back to top

January:
  • The Nazi party takes power in Germany. Adolf Hitler becomes chancellor.


    • February:
  • Nazis "temporarily" suspend civil liberties. They are never restored.

    March:
  • The Nazis set up the first concentration camp at Dachau. The first inmates are 200 Communists.

    April:
  • The Nazis announce a one-day boycott of Jewish businesses.
  • The Nazis enact the Civil Service Law, requiring proof of Aryan ancestry and political reliability to hold a government job.

    July:
  • The Nazis pass the "Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring," allowing for the compulsory sterilization for "eugenic reasons" of the "feebleminded, schizophrenics, alcoholics, and other carriers of supposedly single-gene traits.

    • 1934 back to top

    The government offers special loans to "racially sound" married men whose wives agree to give up jobs outside the home. For each child the government forgives 25 percent of the principal owed on the loan.

    August:
  • Hitler combines the positions of chancellor and president to become "Fuhrer."

    November:
  • The Law against Dangerous Career Criminals permits the detention and castration of sex offenders and others guilty of "racial-biological" crimes.

    • 1935 back to top

    June:
  • The "Law for the Alteration of the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring" sanctions compulsory abortion, up to and including the sixth month of pregancy, for women considered "hereditarily ill."

    September:
  • The "Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor" bars marriage and sexual relations between Aryans and Jews, Gypsies, Africans, and their bastards.
  • The "Citizenship Law" distinguishes between citizens and and Jews and other non-Aryans who are deprived of citizenship rights.

    October:
  • The "Law for the Protection of the Hereditary Health of the German People" requires the registration and exclusion of "alien" races and the "racially less valuable" from the "national community." Before a marriage can take place, public health officials have to issue a "certificate of fitness to marry."

    • 1936 back to top

    March:
  • German soldiers occupy the Rhineland, a buffer zone between Germany and France and Belgium established after World War I.

    • 1938 back to top

    January:
  • The government withdraws the licenses of all Jewish physicians.

    March:
  • German troops annex Austria.

    April:
  • Jews are banned from almost every profession in Germany and Austria.
  • Jews are required to carry special papers identifying them as Jews.

    November:
  • On the night of the 9th-10th, Nazis gangs attack Jews throughout Germany and Austria, looting and then burning homes, synagogues, and businesses. They kill over 90 Jews and send over 30,000 others to concentration camps.
  • Jews are ordered to pay damages from the events of Kristallnacht.
  • Jews are barred from theaters, concerts, circuses, and other public places, including schools.

    • 1939 back to top

    March:
  • Germany takes over Czechoslovakia.

    September:
  • Germany invades Poland. World War II begins in Europe.
  • Hitler secretly orders the systematic murder of the mentally and physically disabled in Germany and Austria.

    December:
  • Polish Jews must relocate. They are also required to wear armbands or yellow stars.

    • 1940 back to top

    January:
  • German physicians begin gassing mental patients, using carbon monoxide gas in fake showers in a psychiatric hospital near Berlin. The program is carried out under the code name T4 (the abbreviated address of the head of Hitler's "euthanasia program"). By September, over 70,000 are dead.

    Spring:
  • Approximately 30,000 people are killed at Hartheim, a mental hospital in Austria.
  • Nazis begin deporting German Jews to Poland.
  • Jews are forced into ghettoes.

    June:
  • The Nazis begin gassing Jews. The first 200 are from a mental institution.
  • Germany conquers much of Western Europe.

    • 1941 back to top

  • German psychiatrists train the SS, the Nazis' elite troops, on mass murder techniques learned by experimentation on mental patients.
  • The Reich Interior Minister orders the killing of Jews in German mental hospitals. Roving bands of T4 commissions select those too ill to work as well as Jews and "Gypsies" in concentration camps and send them to gas chambers at psychiatric hospitals.

    June:
  • Germany invades the Soviet Union.
  • Jews throughout Europe are forced into ghettoes and internment camps.
  • Mobile killing units begin the systematic slaughter of Jews. In two days, one unit murders 33,771 Ukrainian Jews at BabiYar-the largest single massacre of the Holocaust.
  • The first death camp at Chelmno in Poland begins operations.

    December:
  • After the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, the United States enters World War II by declaring war on both Japan and its main ally, Germany.

    • 1942 back to top

    January:
  • At the Wannsee Conference, Nazi officials turn over the "Final Solution"-their plan to kill all European Jews-to the bureaucracy.
  • Five death camps begin operation in Poland: Majdanek, Sobibor, Treblinka, Belzec, and Auschwitz-Birkenau.

    December:
  • The United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union acknowledge that Germans are systematically murdering the Jews of Europe.

    • 1944 back to top

    March:
  • Germany occupies Hungary.

    June:
  • The Germans deport 12,000 Hungarian Jews a day to Auschwitz.

    • 1945 back to top

    January:
  • As the Russian army pushes east, the Nazis evacuate the death camps.

    May:
  • World War II ends in Europe with Hitler's defeat. Hitler's racial state is dismantled. About one-third of all Europe's Jews are dead and most of the survivors are homeless.


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