From the Gleichschaltung and the first concentration camp at Dachau through the Night of the Long Knives, the Nuremberg Laws, the remilitarisation of the Rhineland and the Berlin Olympics, the Anschluss and Munich, Kristallnacht and the invasion of Poland, Blitzkrieg in the West, Barbarossa and the Wannsee Conference, the Holocaust and Stalingrad, D-Day and the July plot, to the Götterdämmerung in the Berlin bunker and the Nuremberg trials. Slide across the years to read the major events of the twelve years that produced the greatest catastrophe in European history.
Within weeks of the Enabling Act, the Nazis open the first concentration camp at Dachau on 22 March; on 1 April the SA organises a national boycott of Jewish businesses; on 7 April Jews and political opponents are dismissed from the civil service. The 'coordination' (Gleichschaltung) of every German institution under Nazi control begins.
From the Gleichschaltung and the first concentration camp at Dachau through the Night of the Long Knives, the Nuremberg Laws, the remilitarisation of the Rhineland and the Berlin Olympics, the Anschluss and Munich, Kristallnacht and the invasion of Poland, Blitzkrieg in the West, Barbarossa and the Wannsee Conference, the Holocaust and Stalingrad, D-Day and the July plot, to the Götterdämmerung in the Berlin bunker and the Nuremberg trials. Slide across the years to read the major events of the twelve years that produced the greatest catastrophe in European history.
Within weeks of the Enabling Act, the Nazis open the first concentration camp at Dachau on 22 March; on 1 April the SA organises a national boycott of Jewish businesses; on 7 April Jews and political opponents are dismissed from the civil service. The 'coordination' (Gleichschaltung) of every German institution under Nazi control begins.
On 30 June, SS execution squads kill SA chief Ernst Röhm and at least eighty-five other rivals — including two of Papen's aides, former Chancellor Schleicher, and Gregor Strasser. On 2 August Hindenburg dies; Hitler abolishes the presidency, fuses it with the chancellorship, and the army swears personal allegiance to him as Führer.
On 15 September, at the Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg, the Reichstag passes the Reich Citizenship Law and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour. Jews are reduced from citizens to subjects, forbidden to marry or have sexual relations with 'Aryans', and forced out of the remaining professions.
On 7 March, three German battalions march into the demilitarised Rhineland in violation of Versailles and Locarno. Britain and France do not act. In August Berlin stages the Olympic Games with Leni Riefenstahl's cameras as the regime's showcase to the world — though Jesse Owens wins four gold medals.
On 5 November, in a four-hour conference at the Reich Chancellery, Hitler tells the heads of his armed forces and his foreign minister that Germany must seize 'living space' in central Europe by force, no later than 1943-45. The minutes, taken by Colonel Friedrich Hossbach, become the clearest documentary evidence of his intentions. Four months earlier, on 19 July in Munich, the regime opens the 'Entartete Kunst' exhibition, ridiculing 650 confiscated works by Beckmann, Kirchner, Klee, Kandinsky, Nolde, and other masters of European modernism. Buchenwald concentration camp opens on the Ettersberg above Weimar that same month.
On 12 March, the Wehrmacht marches unopposed into Austria. Hitler — born an Austrian — drives through cheering crowds in Linz and Vienna and proclaims the union of his birthplace with the Reich. Austria ceases to exist; the seven-million population becomes German citizens. Persecution of the country's 200,000 Jews begins immediately.
On 29-30 September, after a summer of manufactured crisis over the German-speaking Sudetenland, Hitler, Mussolini, Daladier, and Chamberlain meet in Munich. They sign over the Sudetenland — and the Czechoslovak frontier defences — to Germany without consulting Prague. Chamberlain returns to London with 'peace for our time'.
On the night of 9-10 November, in retaliation for the Paris assassination of a German diplomat by a Polish Jewish teenager, Goebbels orchestrates a national pogrom. SA and SS men, in plain clothes, burn 267 synagogues, smash 7,500 Jewish shops, and kill at least 91 Jews. Some 30,000 Jewish men are arrested and sent to concentration camps.
On 15 March, six months after Munich, the Wehrmacht enters Prague in a snowstorm. Hitler spends the night in Hradčany Castle and proclaims the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia; Slovakia becomes a clerical-fascist puppet state under Jozef Tiso. Czechoslovakia, born at Versailles, ceases to exist. For the first time Hitler has annexed a non-German population by force, exposing the racial rather than national logic of his expansion.
On 23 August, Foreign Ministers Ribbentrop and Molotov sign a non-aggression pact in Moscow, with a secret protocol partitioning Poland and the Baltic states. On 1 September, the Wehrmacht invades Poland from west, north, and south. On 3 September, Britain and France declare war. The Second World War has begun.
On 10 May, three German army groups invade the Low Countries; Guderian's panzers break through the Ardennes and reach the Channel at Abbeville on 20 May, cutting off the British and French armies in Belgium. Dunkirk is evacuated; Paris falls on 14 June; on 22 June France signs an armistice in the same Compiègne railway carriage as 1918.
From 10 July, the Luftwaffe attempts to destroy RAF Fighter Command as the precondition for the planned invasion of Britain (Operation Sea Lion). On 15 September — Battle of Britain Day — RAF Spitfires and Hurricanes shoot down 60 German aircraft over southern England. On 17 September Hitler indefinitely postpones the invasion. From 7 September the Luftwaffe turns to nightly bombing of London and other cities; the Blitz kills some 43,000 British civilians by May 1941.
On 22 June, three million Axis troops invade the Soviet Union along a 2,900-kilometre front from the Baltic to the Black Sea. The largest invasion in military history begins with the largest mass murder in history. From day one, Einsatzgruppen behind the front lines shoot Jews, communists, and Soviet officials en masse.
On 7 December Japan attacks Pearl Harbor; four days later, on 11 December, Hitler declares war on the United States — relieving Roosevelt of the need to do so first. The European war becomes a world war. American industrial power is committed to the destruction of the Reich.
On 20 January, fifteen senior officials of the SS and the Reich ministries meet in a villa at Wannsee outside Berlin. Reinhard Heydrich announces the Final Solution to the Jewish Question — the planned murder of Europe's eleven million Jews. The bureaucratic coordination of the Holocaust begins.
On 23 October-11 November, in the western desert of Egypt, General Bernard Montgomery's Eighth Army breaks Rommel's Panzerarmee Afrika at the Second Battle of El Alamein. On 8 November, an Anglo-American force under Eisenhower lands in Vichy French Morocco and Algeria — Operation Torch, the first major American ground commitment of the European war. Caught between two advancing armies, the Axis is squeezed out of North Africa.
On 31 January-2 February, the encircled German Sixth Army under Field Marshal Paulus surrenders at Stalingrad. Of 300,000 men committed, more than 100,000 are dead and 91,000 are captured; only 6,000 will ever return to Germany. Two weeks later, in the Berlin Sportpalast, Goebbels asks the crowd: 'Do you want total war?'
On 19 April, the eve of Passover, SS Brigadeführer Jürgen Stroop's troops enter the Warsaw Ghetto to liquidate its surviving 60,000 Jews. They are met with armed resistance by the Jewish Combat Organisation (ŻOB) under twenty-three-year-old Mordechai Anielewicz. The fighting lasts nearly a month; the Germans burn the ghetto block by block. On 16 May Stroop dynamites the Great Synagogue on Tłomackie Street and reports: 'The Jewish quarter of Warsaw is no more.'
On 10 July, Anglo-American forces land in Sicily. On 25 July, the Fascist Grand Council in Rome deposes Mussolini; King Victor Emmanuel III has him arrested at the Quirinal and appoints Marshal Badoglio prime minister. On 3 September the new Italian government secretly signs an armistice with the Allies, announced on 8 September. The Wehrmacht responds with Operation Achse: disarming Italian troops across Europe and occupying northern and central Italy in days.
On 6 June, after years of preparation and deception, 156,000 American, British, and Canadian troops land on five Normandy beaches under General Eisenhower's supreme command. The Atlantic Wall is breached. Within three months Paris is liberated; the Reich faces armies converging from east, west, and south.
On 20 July, Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg places a briefcase bomb under Hitler's situation-map table at the Wolfsschanze headquarters in East Prussia. The bomb detonates but Hitler survives. The coup attempt in Berlin collapses by midnight. Stauffenberg and the conspirators are shot the same night; some 5,000 are executed in the following months.
On 1 August, with the Red Army approaching the Vistula, the Polish Home Army (Armia Krajowa) under General Tadeusz Bór-Komorowski rises against the German garrison of Warsaw. Some 40,000 fighters seize central districts of the city; the population joins them. The Red Army halts on the east bank of the Vistula and does not move. Over sixty-three days, SS units under Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, including the Dirlewanger and Kaminski brigades, methodically destroy the city. Bór-Komorowski surrenders on 2 October.
On 27 January, soldiers of Marshal Konev's 322nd Rifle Division enter the gates of Auschwitz-Birkenau and find some 7,000 starving prisoners; the SS has marched the rest west on death marches a week earlier. From 4-11 February, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin meet at Yalta in the Crimea to settle the occupation zones of Germany and the political shape of postwar Europe. On the night of 13-14 February, RAF Bomber Command and the USAAF burn the city of Dresden in successive raids; at least 25,000 civilians die in the resulting firestorm.
On 30 April, with Soviet troops two streets from the Reich Chancellery, Hitler shoots himself in the Berlin Führerbunker. Goebbels poisons his six children and shoots himself the next day. On 7 May, General Jodl signs an unconditional surrender at Reims; ratification at Berlin-Karlshorst follows on 8 May. The Third Reich, which had claimed it would last a thousand years, has lasted twelve.
On 20 November, twenty-two principal Nazi defendants — Göring, Hess, Ribbentrop, Keitel, Speer, and others — stand trial before an International Military Tribunal of American, British, French, and Soviet judges in Nuremberg, the city of the rallies and the racial laws. Twelve are sentenced to death, seven to imprisonment, three acquitted. A new chapter in international law opens.