The Nazi regime organized a one-day, nationwide boycott targeting Jewish-owned shops and Jewish professionals—an early, highly visible state action signaling escalating antisemitic policy.
The Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service authorized dismissal of civil servants deemed “non-Aryan,” helping institutionalize antisemitic discrimination across state employment and public life.
At a special Reichstag session during the Nazi Party Rally, Germany adopted the Nuremberg Laws, including the Reich Citizenship Law and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor, stripping Jews of citizenship and outlawing marriages/sexual relations with “German or kindred blood.”
Representatives of 32 countries met at Évian-les-Bains to discuss the growing refugee crisis driven largely by Nazi persecution; the conference is widely remembered for producing few concrete commitments to accept additional Jewish refugees.
An executive order required German Jews with “non-Jewish” first names to adopt additional names—“Israel” for men and “Sara” for women—tightening bureaucratic identification and social exclusion.
On November 9–10, Nazi forces and collaborators attacked Jews, synagogues, and Jewish businesses across Germany (including annexed territories), marking a major escalation to open, state-tolerated violence and mass arrests.
German authorities ordered creation of the Warsaw Ghetto, initiating forced segregation of Jews in Warsaw; it became the largest ghetto in occupied Europe and a major site of starvation, disease, and later deportations to killing centers.
The Warsaw Ghetto was sealed, restricting movement in and out and intensifying the humanitarian catastrophe created by overcrowding and severe rationing under German occupation.
Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union opened a new phase of the Holocaust: SS and police units (including Einsatzgruppen) and collaborators carried out widespread mass shootings of Jews and other targeted groups in occupied areas.
Reinhard Heydrich decreed that Jews aged six and older in the Reich and certain annexed territories must wear a visible Jewish badge (yellow Star of David), further institutionalizing public identification and exclusion.
German SS and police units and auxiliaries murdered tens of thousands of Jews at the Babyn Yar ravine (also spelled Babi Yar) in one of the largest mass shootings of the Holocaust, carried out over September 29–30, 1941.
Senior Nazi officials met in Berlin-Wannsee to coordinate interagency implementation of the “Final Solution,” aligning bureaucratic responsibilities for deportation and mass murder across German-occupied Europe.
Killing operations began at Belzec, the first of the Operation Reinhard killing centers, marking the start of mass gassing in purpose-built facilities designed to murder Jews deported from across occupied territories.
As Soviet forces approached, the SS evacuated much of Auschwitz by forcing nearly 60,000 prisoners westward on “death marches,” during which many died from murder, exposure, and exhaustion.
Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz, Birkenau, and Monowitz, finding thousands of survivors and extensive evidence of mass murder at the camp complex—an event that became a central symbol of the Holocaust’s end phase in Europe.
Nazi Anti-Jewish Policies and the Holocaust (1933–1945)
