Wartime Germany - Dates Flashcards
Georg Elser attempts to assassinate Hitler
November 1939
France is invaded
May 1940
Nazi order to remove crucifixes from walls in Catholic Bavaria meets opposition
April 1941
Invasion of the Soviet Union; Operation Barbarossa begins
June 1941
Bishop von Galen publicly challenges the T4 programme
August 1941
Germany declares war on the USA
December 1941
The Wansee Conference
January 1942
German Sixth Army surrenders at Stalingrad (turning point in the war)
January 1943
Goebbels’s ‘Total War’ speech
February 1942
Executions of Hans and Sophia Scholl
February 1943
Operation Flash fails to kill Hitler
March 1943
Axis armies surrender in North Africa
May 1943
D-Day
June 1944
Bomb Plot fails to kill Hitler
July 1944
Dresden destroyed
February 1945
Bonhoffer executed
April 1945
Invasion of Poland
September 1939
Dispute between Frank and Himmler over deportation of German Jews to General Government
1939-41
By this time, racial policy in the General Government was controlled by the SS (Frank had been marginalised)
1941
‘Operation Reinhard’ (building extermination camps to send surviving Jewish ghetto inhabitants)
1941
Economic difficulties in Germany which led to the death of million of Polish Jews (foreign labourers needed feeding, thus killed of Jews so they didn’t need to be fed)
1941-42
Operation Barbarossa
June 1942
In Kiev in this year over a 2 day period, 33,000 Jews were murdered by the Einsatzgruppen
1941
Goering gave Heydrich (Himmler’s deputy) an order to draft a plan for a ‘total solution of the Jewish Questions’
July 1941
Himmler tells Rudolf Hess (commander of Auschwitz) that ‘The Fuhrer has ordered the final solution to the Jewish problem, and we, the SS, are to implement that order’
mid-1941
Wannsee Conference
January 1942
Killings in Auschwitz had been planned since this date (thus Wannsee not necessarily a huge turning point)
August 1941
Law for compulsory Sterilisation of the Mentally ill
1933
A-socials began to be sent to concentration camps
1935
Reich Office for Combating Homosexuality set up (by Himmler - 50,000 homosexuals arrested)
1936
45,000 Jews forced to emigrate due to anti-Semitism following Anschluss
1938
Kristallnacht (20,000 Jews sent to concentration camps)
Nov 1938
Aryanisation begins (Goering driven due to 4 Year Plan, excluding Jews from economic life)
1938
SS establish the Reich Central Office for Emigration (promoting emigration of Jews out of Europe)
January 1939
Euthenasia Aktion T4 programme launched
1939
Madagascar Plan draw up (removal of 4 million European Jews to Madagascar, eventually abandoned by Hitler in 1941)
1940
Einsatzgruppen carry out systematic massacres of Jews in Russia
June 1941
Hitler remarks that “The Jews with be hanged one after the other until Germany is completely cleansed”
1922
Date of Himmler’s appointment diary which states “meeting with Hitler about the Jewish Question: to be exterminated as partisans”
18 December 1941
Hitler’s ‘New Year Message’ (saying that Jews will be the ‘victims of their own plots to exterminate Europe’)
1942
Chelmo begin using Gaswagens (mobile gas chambers) as a result of Himmler’s influence
Dec 1941
