What Happened
The Catastrophe of European Jewry
The Shoah (Hebrew: שואה — "catastrophe") was the state policy of persecution and annihilation of the Jews of Europe carried out by Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945. Step by step, Jews were stripped of their rights, their property, their freedom, and finally their lives. By the end of the war, about six million people had been murdered — roughly two out of every three European Jews.
The Holocaust did not begin with the death camps. It began with words, laws, and indifference — and moved from propaganda and boycotts to ghettos, mass shootings, and factories of death. Remembering this sequence matters, so that we can recognize its first signs today.
Chronicle
From Laws to Death Camps
1933
The Nazis come to power in Germany. Boycotts of Jewish shops, dismissals, and the first concentration camps for political opponents begin.
1935
The Nuremberg racial laws strip Jews of German citizenship and civil rights and forbid marriage with non-Jews.
1938
Kristallnacht (the Night of Broken Glass): across Germany and Austria, synagogues, shops, and homes are smashed and burned, and tens of thousands of Jews are sent to camps.
1939
The Second World War begins. The Jews of occupied Poland are herded into overcrowded ghettos, doomed to hunger and disease.
1941
After the invasion of the USSR, the Einsatzgruppen carry out mass shootings. At Babi Yar near Kyiv, more than 33,000 Jews are murdered in two days.
1942
The Wannsee Conference coordinates the "Final Solution." The death camps are in operation — Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor, Bełżec.
1943
The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising: for nearly a month, poorly armed fighters resist the Wehrmacht. A symbol of Jewish heroism.
1945
The liberation of Auschwitz on January 27 and of other camps. The world sees the scale of the crime. The war in Europe ends in May.
"Forgetfulness prolongs the exile, while remembrance is the secret of redemption."Baal Shem Tov
Scale
Numbers That Must Not Be Forgotten
6,000,000Jews murdered
1,500,000among them, children
2 / 3of European Jewry annihilated
1,000+destroyed communities and shtetls