January 1942

The United Nations establishes the United Nations War Crimes Commission to handle future prosecution of Nazi war criminals.

Christian Wirth, Nazi executions expert, hooks an armored-car diesel engine to the gas chambers at Belzec.

Mass killings of Jews using Zyklon B begin at Auschwitz-Birkenau. The bodies are buried in mass graves in a nearby meadow.

Nearly all of the remaining Jews in Odessa, Ukraine, are deported to concentration camps.

A special medical commission visits the Gross-Rosen concentration camp to select human subjects for medical experimentation.

In France, Joseph Darnand establishes the Milice Française (French Militia), a Fascist paramilitary organization.

January 1

Declaration of the United Nations signed by Allied nations. The United Nations is formed in Washington, D.C., by 26 signatories who agree to work together to defeat the nations of the Tripartate Pact, and to work for a single, commonly shared resolution to the war.

In the U.S., the Counter-Intelligence Corps (CIC) is established to investigate and arrest suspected Nazi war criminals.

The Germans execute 23 Czechoslovakian workers for sabotage.

January 5

The Jewish ghetto at Kharkov, Ukraine, is liquidated.

January 6

Molotov hands over information on mass graves.

January 7

Throughout the day at the Chelmno death camp, Jewish deportees from nearby villages are systematically gassed in vans; German and Ukrainian workers pull gold teeth and fillings from the corpses' mouths. Germans undertake van gassings of 5000 Gypsies from Lódz, Poland.

January 9

One thousand Jews are deported from the Theresienstadt camp/ghetto to Riga, Latvia.

January 12

The seeds of the postwar Nuremberg Trials are sown when China and nine European nations pass a resolution to try Axis leaders for war crimes “whether they have ordered them, perpetrated them or in any way participated in them.”

January 13

The first of 10,000 Jews selected by the Jewish Council of the Lódz Ghetto report for labor.

The governments-in-exile of Belgium, Czechoslovakia, France, Greece, Holland, Luxembourg, Norway, Poland, and Yugoslavia condemn German atrocities against their citizens without specifically mentioning Jews. The British Foreign Office approves the declaration but doesn't mention Jews.

January 14

Concentration and expulsion of Dutch Jewry begins.

The United States blacklists 1800 European companies, making it illegal for any American to continue or begin business transactions with them.

January 16

Red Army Major Senitsa Vershovsky is shot by an Einsatzkommando unit at Kremenchug, Ukraine, for protecting Jews.

Start of the “resettlements” from Lodz to the extermination camp Chelmno.

January 17

Walter von Reichenau, a Wehrmacht general who cooperated with Einsatzgruppen in Russia, dies of a heart attack.

January 19

Soviet forces recapture Mozhaisk, the closest that German troops had come to Moscow. With this, the Soviet capital is saved from occupation.

January 20

The Wannsee Conference of top Nazi leaders is held in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee; attending are Heydrich, Meyer, Leibbrandt, Stuckart, Neumann, Freisler, Bühler, Luther, Klopfer, Kritzinger, Hofmann, Müller, Eichmann, Schöngarth, and Lange. Discussion pertains to the number of European Jews still to be dealt with, the future of slave labor, the separation of Jewish men from Jewish women, mass deportations, and extermination: the “Final Solution.” According to the protocol of the meeting, five million Jews in the USSR are marked for death (including nearly three million in the Ukraine), 700,000 in the Unoccupied Zone of France, 5600 in Denmark, and 200 in Albania. Figures also are given for nations not yet under Nazi control, including England (330,000), Spain (6000), Switzerland (18,000), Sweden (18,000), and Turkey (55,500). The total meeting time is less than 90 minutes.

January 21

Jews in the Vilna Ghetto establish the Unified Partisan Organization to resist Nazi terror.

January 21-23

Hungarian Fascists drive 550 Jews and 292 Serbs to the Danube River at Novi Sad, Yugoslavia. They force them onto the ice, shoot the ice to break it up, and then shoot those who do not quickly drown.

January 24

Four hundred Jewish intellectuals are arrested and subsequently murdered in Kolomyia, Ukraine.

January 30

In a speech to the German public, Hitler commemorates the ninth anniversary of his taking power, declaring that the end result of the war will not be the destruction of the Aryans but will be the complete annihilation of the Jews. The speech is monitored in Washington, D.C., and London.

January 31

Report from Einsatzgruppe A pertaining to the liquidation of 229,052 Jews in the Baltic states.

Late January 1942

Start of deportations to Theresienstadt.

February 1942

Thirty-three Jewish doctors in the Warsaw Ghetto begin a study of the effects of starvation as they themselves slowly starve to death.

Jewish partisans in the Eastern Galicia region of Poland attack German troops in several locations.

Bricks and cut stone made by concentration-camp inmates are diverted from future official monuments and buildings to construct badly needed German arms factories.

February 1

The SS Wirtschafts-Verwaltungshauptamt (Economic-Administrative Main Office; WVHA), led by Oswald Pohl, is established.

February 13

At the Minsk Ghetto, Nazis execute Jewish leaders deported from Hamburg, Germany, three months earlier.

February 15

The first mass gassings of Jews at the Auschwitz death camp begin.

February 19

Jews at the Dvinsk concentration camp are forced to witness the execution of a Jewish woman who exchanged a piece of cloth with a non-Jewish inmate for a box of flour.

February 22

Ten thousand Jews are deported from the Lódz Ghetto to the Chelmno extermination camp, where they are gassed.

February 24

More than 30,000 Jews deported from Lódz Ghetto to Chelmno.

The ship SS Struma, flying a neutral Panamanian flag and carrying Jewish refugees fleeing from Romania, is sunk in the Black Sea after Britain pressures Turkey to turn the ship back from Istanbul. More than 700 Jewish passengers attempting to save their lives by reaching Palestine are drowned. Only one passenger survives.

February-March 1942

Mass murder of Jews in Charkow (Kharkov), Ukraine (14,000 victims).

March 1942

This month, nearly 5000 Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto die of starvation.

Jews from the Lódz Ghetto are gassed at the Chelmno death camp.

The Nazis begin deportations from Central Europe to the death camp at Belzec, Poland.

In Norway, the Hirdens Bedriftsvern, a collaborationist, anti-Resistance unit, is created to protect Norwegian factories and infrastructure from saboteurs.

A Russian collaborationist group, Russian National People's Army, is established in Smolensk.

A brief article appears in the London press reporting that all Jews in Mariupol, Ukraine, have been killed.

March 1

The Nazis begin the construction of a new death camp at Sobibór. By October 1943, 250,000 Jews had been murdered there.

March 1-2

Thousands of Belorussian Jews are transported to Koidanav, Belorussia, where they are murdered.

March 2

Six Jews at the Janówska labor camp near Lvov are forced to spend the night outside; all six freeze to death.

Children from a Jewish nursery in the Minsk Ghetto are thrown into a sandpit, tossed sweets, and then smothered to death. More than 5000 Jewish adults from Minsk are also killed.

March 3

Belgian Jews are drafted for forced labor.

March 5

In the wake of the February 24 Struma sinking, the British War Cabinet reaffirms its decision not to allow “illegal” Jewish refugees admission to Palestine.

March 6

First conference on sterilization: Definitions pertaining to sterilization of persons of mixed blood.

During a meeting at the Head Office for Reich Security, Adolf Eichmann emphasizes the need for strict security during deportation and annihilation of Jews presently living in Germany, Austria, Moravia, and Bohemia.

March 13

Germans have already killed 240,000 Jews in Ukraine alone.

March 14

At Ilja, Poland, Jews sent to labor on a farm join Soviet partisans in a nearby forest. In reprisal, the Germans shoot old and sick Jews in the streets, then herd more than 900 Jews into a building that is set ablaze. All inside die.

March 15

Trumpeting his Wehrmacht, Hitler predicts that the Red Army will be “beaten in every direction in the summer.”

March 16

More than 1800 Jews from Pochep, Russia, are executed.

March 17

Extermination camp Belzec established. Full-scale extermination begins; deportees are accepted from Poland and from as far away as the western provinces of Germany. By the end of 1942, 600,000 Jews will be murdered there. From March 17 until April 14, nearly 30,000 Jews from the Lublin Ghetto are deported to the Belzec death camp.

March 19

Nazis arrest and deport to Auschwitz 50 Jews from Kraków as part of an operation directed against Jewish intellectuals.

mid-March 1942

Start of “Aktion Reinhard,” code name for the operation that had as its objective the physical destruction of the Jews in the interior of occupied Poland within the framework of the Final Solution.

March 21

Resettlement of the ghetto in Lublin: 26,000 persons sent to extermination camps Belzec and Majdanek and other camps.

March 23

Over the next two days, the SS transfers 1,000 women — mainly German Jewish women but also Romani (Gypsy) women — from Ravensbrück to Auschwitz-Birkenau in German-occupied Poland. The SS establishes a women's camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

March 24

The first deportations of Jews from Western Europe to Belzec begins.

March 26

Public notices pertaining to the identification of Jewish homes in Germany.

Between March and October 1942, deportation of 60,000 Slovakian Jews, some to Auschwitz, others to the extermination camp Majdanek.

The first transport of Jews sent by Adolf Eichmann's office goes to Auschwitz.

March 27

The first deportations of Jews from France to Auschwitz begin. By the end of 1944, the Germans had deported more than 75,000 Jews from France to camps in the East, above all, to the Auschwitz-Birkenau killing center in Occupied Poland, where most of them perished.

March 28

Fritz Sauckel is named chief of manpower to expedite recruitment of slave labor.

March 31

German troops raid the Minsk Ghetto, searching for and arresting Jewish Resistance leaders.

Late March 1942

Arrival of initial transports of Jews at the concentration and extermination camps Auschwitz (Auschwitz I & Auschwitz II).

Fifteen thousand Jews are deported from Lvov, Ukraine, to Belzec.

March-April 1942

German SS and police united deport Jews from Lublin, in the General Government, to Belzec, where they are killed. The Lublin deportations are the first major deportations carried out under Operation Reinhard, the code name for the German plan to kill more than 2 million Jews living in the General Government of Occupied Poland.

April 1942

Prohibition of the use of public transportation by Jews. Exception only for forced laborers, if their workplace is farther than seven kilometers from their place of residence. Taking a seat in the conveyance is not allowed.

Additional restrictions during the course of World War II: Jews were forbidden to use public telephones and automatic ticket dispensing machines; to congregate in railroad stations or visit restaurants; to enter forests (parks) or step on lawns; to keep dogs, cats, birds, or other pets; to place orders with organized skilled trades; and to obtain newspapers or periodicals. All electrical or optical equipment had to be turned in without compensation, as well as bicycles, typewriters, fur coats, and wool items.

Jews could not obtain any seafood items or ration cards for meat, clothing, milk, or tobacco. They were not allowed any white bread, fruit, canned fruit, candy or sweets, and shaving soap.

Jewish Anti-Facist Committee established in USSR.

Sobibór death camp is nearly operational; gassings begin in May.

More than 4400 Jews die of starvation in the Warsaw Ghetto.

The first transports of Jews arrive at the camp at Majdanek which will begin gassing Jews later in the year.

The London Sunday Times runs but does not highlight a news item about the Nazi executions of 120,000 Romanian Jews.

German headquarters at Arras, France, is attacked by the French Resistance.

In Russia, a collaborationist group, Druzhina (Bodyguard), is established and led by Soviet defector Lieutenant Colonel V. V. Gil.

Early April 1942

Jews are mocked and hanged at Mlawa, Poland.

April 1

965 Slovakian Jews are deported to Auschwitz.

April 3

This day’s deportations from Augsburg, Germany, empty the town of Jews, ending a Jewish presence that was established in 1212. They are deported to the Belzec death camp.

April 5

The Lutheran Church of Norway issues “Kirken grunn” (“Foundations of the Church”), a letter condemning Nazism and racism and protesting efforts of Vidkun Quisling, Norway’s German puppet, to “nazify” Norway’s churches.

April 8

Einsatzgruppen Report: No Jews left in Crimea.

April 11

A German proclamation issued in Lvov, Ukraine, excoriates Polish civilians who assist Jews.

Three thousand Jews from Zamosc, Poland, are deported to the Belzec death camp.

April 16

SS officials in the Ukraine inform authorities in Berlin that the Crimea is judenrein (purged of Jews).

April 17

The Nazi government decrees that apartments occupied by Jews in Greater Germany must be identified as such.

April 18

In the Warsaw Ghetto, 52 people on a wanted list are dragged from their beds and killed. This will become known as “The Night of Blood.”

One thousand Jews who leave the Theresienstadt, Czechoslovakia, camp/ghetto by train for a ghetto at Rejowiec, Poland, are diverted to the death camp at Sobibór.

Disgusted with the inability to take Leningrad, Hitler relieves Field Marshal Wilhelm von Leeb of command of German forces in north Russia.

April 20

At a birthday banquet for Hitler in East Prussia, Hermann Göring announces that he was responsible for the Reichstag fire of February 27, 1933, that set off Nazi reprisals against purported Communist subversion.

April 24

Jews throughout Greater Germany are prohibited from taking public transport.

April 26

The Reichstag grants Hitler full authority in executive, legislative, and judicial matters.

April 27

One thousand Jews are deported from the Theresienstadt, Czechoslovakia, camp/ghetto to Izbica Lubelska, Poland; one, a woman who escapes after arrival, survives. Other Theresienstadt deportees are sent to their deaths at the Sobibór and Belzec extermination camps.

Nazis execute 60 Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto. Among the victims are people suspected of being involved with the ghetto’s underground newspaper.

April 29

A German truck that refuels near the Lódz Ghetto carries luggage belonging to “resettled” Jews who have already been murdered at the Chelmno death camp.

April 30

The Jews of Pinsk, Poland, are ordered to establish a ghetto within one day. Twenty thousand Jews will move into it.

Twelve hundred Jews are killed in Diatlovo, Belorussia. The Jews offer armed resistance, but it is futile.

May 1942

More than 3600 Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto die of starvation. Nazis force their way into Jewish apartments in Warsaw, shoot and club the residents, and throw the bodies from windows.

A slave-labor camp opens near Minsk, Belorussia.

Small groups of Jewish youths manage to escape into the woods outside Lida and Stolpce, towns in Belorussia.

After trial gassings in April, an SS special detachment begin gassing operations at the Sobibor killing center. By November 1943, the special detachment had killed approximately 250,000 Jews at Sobibor.

Slovakian Jews and resident Jews at Chelm are deported to the nearby Sobibór death camp and gassed. In addition, more than 36,000 Polish Jews from communities located between the Vistula and Bug rivers are gassed at Sobibór.

In the Eastern Galicia region of Poland, Jews aged 14 to 60 are driven to isolated spots and killed by hand grenades and machine guns after being forced to dig their own graves. Other victims of this Aktion include orphans, residents of old-age homes, and women in the streets.

Inmates at Auschwitz-Birkenau are put to work as slave laborers at the camp itself and at a synthetic-oil and rubber plant at nearby Monowitz.

Jewish women at Auschwitz-Birkenau are selected for medical experiments.

A Jewish inmate at a labor camp at Schwenningen, Germany, is buried in earth up to his shoulders as punishment for having an attack of diarrhea outside a barracks; after more than ten hours in the ground, the man dies.

A slave-labor camp opens at Maly Trostinets, Belorussia.

In Holland, a collaborationist auxiliary police unit, Vrijwillige Hulp-Politie (Volunteer Auxiliary Police), is established. It is charged with the roundup of Dutch Jews for deportation to the East.

Communist Jews in Paris initiate organized armed resistance to the Nazi occupiers.

The Bund (Jewish Labor Organization of Poland) appeals to the Polish government-in-exile in London to persuade the Allied governments to warn the German government about the consequences of the murder of the Polish Jews. The Bund’s appeal contains detailed information concerning the systematic mass murder of Jews. It reports that 700,000 Polish Jews have already been executed.

2600 Libyan Jews are deported to a forced-labor camp at Giado, Libya, to build roads for the military.

More than 1750 Jews are deported from Tripoli, Libya, to forced-labor sites at the Libyan cities of Benghazi, Homs, and Derna. Hundreds perish from heat and hunger, and others die during Allied bombings after being forbidden to use air-raid shelters.

Early May 1942

Jewish Council members at Bilgoraj, Poland, are executed after refusing to compile a list of candidates for deportation.

260 Luxembourg Jews, some converted to Christianity, are sent to Chelmno.

May 1

About 1000 Jews are murdered at Dvinsk, Latvia. Only about 450 Jews are left in Dvinsk, down from 16,000 from the previous year.

May 4

First selection for gassing preformed at Auschiwtz-Birkenau. These were the weak, sick and “unfit” prisoners. They were housed in an isolation ward prior to being killed in the gas chambers. Between May 1940 and January 1945, more than one million people were killed or died at the Auschwitz camp complex. Close to 865,000 were never registered and most likely were selected for gassing immediately upon arrival. Nine out of ten of those who dies at the Auschwitz complex were Jewish.

May 4-8

Six Jews in Lódz, Poland, fearing deportation, commit suicide.

May 4-15

More than 10,000 Jews are deported from the Lódz Ghetto to Chelmno.

May 5

Jewish teachers and educators in the Warsaw Ghetto create a special day for children, during which they are treated to games, plays, and special rations of sweets.

In the ghetto at Lódz, Prof. Jakob Edmund Speyer, a Jew from Frankfurt, Germany, who invented an important painkiller called Eukodal, dies of exhaustion.

May 9

The Jews of Markuszow, Poland, led by Shlomo Goldwasser, Mordechai Kirshenbaum, and brothers Yaakov and Yerucham Gothelf, escape to nearby forests.

American poet Ezra Pound, who is working for the Fascist Italian government, broadcasts from Italy: “You would do better to inoculate your children with typhus and syphilis” than allow more Jews into the United States. America, Pound continues, is ruled by Jews and their allies, who are “the dirtiest dirt from the bottom of the Jew’s ash can.”

May 11

Alter Dworetsky, a member of the Jewish Council at Diatlovo, Belorussia, escapes to a nearby forest, only to be shot to death by Soviet partisans after refusing to hand over his pistol.

May 11-12

American Zionists participating in the Biltmore Conference at New York City’s Biltmore Hotel demand that Jews be given sovereignty over Palestine. The demand is ignored by Britain, which controls Palestine.

May 14

Noted Jewish Viennese pianist Leopold Birkenfeld is murdered at the Chelmno death camp.

May 18

The New York Times reports that more than 100,000 Jews have been machine-gunned by Nazis in the Baltic countries, 100,000 in Poland, and some 200,000 in western Russia.

During a public protest of Nazi antisemitism staged in Berlin by Herbert Baum and his followers, portions of “The Soviet Paradise,” a government-sponsored anti-Bolshevik exhibition, are set afire. Most members of Baum’s group, as well as approximately 500 other Berlin Jews, are arrested.

May 21

The I.G. Farben synthetic-rubber and petroleum plant opens at Monowice, near Auschwitz, using Jewish forced laborers from the camp.

May 22

In an exercise conducted in a forest outside Mielec, Poland, Gestapo agents “cast” Jews as partisans, beat and mutilate them, and then kill them.

May 26

Great Britain and the Soviet Union sign a mutual assistance treaty.

May 27

Belgian Jews are ordered to wear the Yellow Star.

Jozef Gabcik and Jan Kubis, British-trained Czech partisans armed with small arms and grenades, mortally wound Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Reich Security Police and SD, in an ambush of his car in Prague.

May 29

Vichy France forbids Jews access to all restaurants and cafes, libraries, sports grounds, squares, and other public places.

Three thousand Jews led by Asher Czerkaski resist Germans at Radziwillow, Ukraine; 1500 are killed but the others melt into nearby forests.

In the Warsaw Ghetto, an ill Jewish man is tossed through a window to the ground, where he is shot.

May 30

Britain’s first 1000-bomber raid on Germany (the target is Cologne) encourages Jews to hope that the war might soon be over.

June 1942

The World Jewish Congress, based in New York, announces at a press conference that Eastern Europe is being turned into “a vast slaughterhouse for Jews.”

At the Belzec and Sobibór death camps, more than 23,000 Jews are gassed.

Auschwitz is ravaged by an epidemic of typhus.

Germans invade Jewish hospitals in Sosnowiec, Poland, murdering newborns and tearing patients from operating tables. Ambulatory patients are sent to Auschwitz and gassed.

A young Sosnowiec Jew named Harry Blumenfrucht endures two weeks of Nazi torture, refusing to name his co-conspirators in a scheme to steal weapons. His suffering ends when he is hanged.

Jews from Dabrowa Tarnowska, Poland, led by Rabbi Isaac and gathered in a Jewish cemetery, defy their Nazi captors when they hold hands, dance, and drink “to life.” The enraged Germans shoot and disembowel the entire group.

Four thousand Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto die of starvation.

At Lutsk, Ukraine, Jewish resistance is led by Joel Szczerbat.

Three thousand Jews at Pilica, Poland, are deported to Belzec, but several hundred manage to escape before the journey is complete.

In Norway, Jews are given identity cards stamped with the letter “J.”

In Yugoslavia, a collaborationist paramilitary force, Heimwehr (Home Defense), is established.

Mordecai Gebirtig, a Kraków carpenter whose songs of freedom are sung throughout Poland, is executed at Belzec.

June 1

Treblinka extermination camp opened. Mass exterminations by gassing were started on July 23, 1942; 700,000 Jews murdered there by August 1943.

Polish Jews are deported from Hrubieszów to the Sobibór death camp. Another 500 will be deported the following week.

Warsaw’s underground newspaper, Liberty Barricade, published by the Polish Socialist Party, reveals Nazi gassing activity at the Chelmno death camp.

Auschwitz III (also known as Monowitz or Buna) opened. This was an I.G. labor camp.

June 1-6

Seven thousand Jews from Kraków, Poland, are murdered at the Belzec extermination camp.

June 2

Start of deportation of German Jews to Theresienstadt.

The BBC reports that 700,000 Jews have been exterminated. Its information comes from a report smuggled out of Poland by the Jewish Bund in Warsaw.

Viennese Jews are deported to the Minsk Ghetto. One woman, Elsa Speigel, decides to leave her 51/2-month-old son, Jona, behind. The baby will eventually be sent to the the camp/ghetto at Theresienstadt, Czechoslovakia, where he will survive the war.

June 3

Jews revolt in Breslau, Germany.

In Warsaw, Nazis shoot 110 Jews in a prison on Gesia Street. Ten Jewish policemen are among the victims.

June 4

Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Reich Security Police and SD, dies of blood poisoning caused by injuries suffered in the May 27 attack by Czech partisans.

The U.S. declares war on Romania.

June 5

Army Group South besieges Sevastopol.

The SS reports that 97,000 persons have been “processed” in mobile gas vans.

June 5-6

During a roundup of Jews in Kraków, Poland, SS men brutally torment two men--one who has just one leg and another who had lost his eyesight while fighting for Germany in World War I.

June 6

Adolf Eichmann insists via a telegram sent to Gestapo officials that residents of a mental institution must be included in a planned mass deportation of Jews from Coblenz, Germany, to Lublin, Poland.

The Jewish ghetto at Kraków, Poland, is liquidated; 6000 Jews from the city are murdered at Belzec.

June 7

A Jewish woman who has escaped from the Warsaw Ghetto into the city proper is dragged back to the ghetto and shot.

The Jewish Yellow Star is made mandatory in Occupied France.

June 8

The Jewish Council at Pilica, Poland, warns that every able-bodied Jew must attempt to flee to nearby forests.

June 9

At Lidice, Czechoslovakia, Germans begin to murder over 190 men and boys in retaliation for the attack on Reinhard Heydrich. The Germans will murder another 47 men, women, and children at Lezaky, Czechoslovakia.

When a Jewish mother at Pabianice, Poland, fights fiercely for her baby during a deportation, the baby is taken from her and thrown out a window.

German police in Lódz report to their superiors in Poznan that 95 Lódz Jews have been publicly hanged.

A gassing van is sent to Riga for the execution of Jews.

June 10

One thousand Jews are deported from Prague to the East, where they are murdered.

June 11

Adolf Eichmann meets with representatives from France, Belgium, and Holland to discuss deportation plans for Jews.

June 11-12

Ten thousand Jews from the Tarnów Ghetto are murdered at the Belzec extermination camp.

June 12

Jewish babies, children, and elderly of Khmel’nik, Ukraine, are shot in a nearby forest.

Anne Frank turns 13 years old.

June 13

Three thousand Jews are deported from the Theresienstadt camp/ghetto to their deaths.

British Ambassador to the Vatican Francis d’Arcy Osborne observes about Pope Pius XII that his “moral leadership is not assured by the unapplied recital of the Commandments.”

June 14

Two thousand Jews break out of Dzisna, Belorussia.

June 15

Authorities in Riga request a second gassing van.

June 16

The American chargé d’affaires in the Vatican, Harold Tittmann, reports to the State Department that Pope Pius XII is adopting “an ostrich-like policy towards atrocities that were obvious to everyone.”

June 18

Jozef Gabcik and Jan Kubis, British-trained Czech partisans who mortally wounded Reinhard Heydrich on May 27, are discovered with several other partisans inside Prague’s Sts. Cyril and Methodius Church. The church is besieged by German troops and SS. All partisans perish.

June 19

Jews revolt at Glebokie, Belorussia; 2500 are murdered in the Borek Forest.

Summer 1942

The Third Reich achieves its high point of conquest and territory.

Three-year-old Jewish twins in Sosnowiec, Poland, Ida and Adam Paluch, are spirited away from Gestapo agents by their aunt and sent to live with separate Catholic families.

June 20-October 9

13,776 Jews are deported from Vienna to Theresienstadt.

June 21

Germans wrest Tobruk (Libya) from the British.

June 22

First transports from Drancy camp to Auschwitz.

June 24

Thousands of Lvov Jews are killed at Janówska, Ukraine, and Piaski, Poland.

June 25

An article in the London Daily Telegraph reports, “More than 700,000 Polish Jews have been slaughtered by the Germans in the greatest massacres in the world’s history.”

June 26

The British broadcast information about the plight of Jews in Occupied Poland.

June 28

The Germans launch a summer offensive against the Red Army in the Don River basin of the Soviet Union.

June 29

Armed Jewish resistance takes place at Slonim, Belorussia. Germans burn Jews to death; nearly 15,000 are killed.

June 30

Closing of Jewish schools in Germany.

A second gas chamber begins functioning at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

A headline in the London Daily Telegraph reads: “MORE THAN 1,000,000 JEWS KILLED IN EUROPE.”

June-July 1942

The New York Times highlights articles on Christian victims of the Germans rather than on Jewish victims, even though the numbers of Jewish victims are immensely greater.

July 1942

Hundreds of German Jews are deported to the ghetto/camp at Theresienstadt. In Paderborn, Germany, all Jewish orphans are deported to Theresienstadt.

Seven trains of Jewish deportees leave Westerbork for the Auschwitz death camp.

At Kleck, Belorussia, a few dozen Jews break out and join partisans.

Extermination activities at the Sobibór death camp are temporarily halted for railway construction and enlargement of the camp’s gas chambers.

The Jewish community at Gorodenka, Ukraine, is wiped out.

The U.S. and Britain agree on an Allied invasion of North Africa.

July 1

Massacres of Jews in Minsk, Lida, and Slonim, all in Belorussia.

July 2

Berlin Jews are sent to Theresienstadt.

The Jewish community from Ropczyce, Poland, is murdered at the Belzec death camp.

The New York Times reports the “slaughter of 700,000 Jews” in German-occupied Poland.

July 4

Start of mass gassings at Auschwitz.

July 6

The first issue of Eynikeyt (Unity), a Yiddish-language journal of the Soviet Jewish Antifascist Committee, is published.

Anne Frank and her family go into hiding in Amsterdam.

July 7

SS chief Heinrich Himmler chairs a meeting of SS functionaries to discuss sterilization and other gynecological procedures and experiments on Jewish women held at Auschwitz. The procedures will be conducted without the womens knowledge.

Almost 200 women arrive in Ravensbrück from the Czech village of Lidice. The Germans destroyed Lidice, a small village outside Prague, in retaliation for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the German governor of Bohemia and Moravia and head of the Security Police. SS forces killed all the men of Lidice and more than 50 women. They deported the remaining 200 women and almost 100 children to camps in Germany. Demolition squads burned and destroyed the village.

One thousand Jews from Rzeszów, Poland, are killed at the Rudna Forest. Fourteen thousand are deported to the Belzec death camp.

July 8

Seven thousand Lvov Jews are murdered at the Janówska labor/extermination camp.

Jewish partisan Vitka Kempner and two others leave the Jewish ghetto at Vilna carrying a land mine with which they hope to disable a German military train located five miles southeast.

July 9

Jewish partisan Vitka Kempner returns to the Vilna Ghetto, having successfully planted a land mine and blown up the engine and ammunition cars of a German military train.

July 10

At Auschwitz, 100 Jewish women are selected for experiments with sterilization.

July 11

The Germans require all Jewish men between the ages of 18 and 45 living in Salonika to report to Liberty Square where they are assigned to Organisation Todt labor battalions. 9,000 Jewish men report. About 2,000 are assigned to forced-labor projects for the German army. The remainder are detained until the Jewish communities of Salonika and Athens pay a huge ransom to the German occupation authorities for their release. As part of the payment, the Jewish cemetery in Salonika is transferred to city ownership. The city dismantles it and uses stones from the cemetery in the construction of a university on the site.

July 13-15

Several thousand Jews of Rovno, Ukraine, are rounded up and executed in the streets by Einsatzgruppen.

July 14

Thousands of Dutch Jews are arrested in Amsterdam and deported to Auschwitz, where many are gassed.

The Przemysl, Poland, ghetto is sealed by the Nazis.

July 15

First deportation train from the Westerbork transit camp in Holland to Auschwitz. By September 13, 1944, over 100 trains had carried more than 100,000 people to killing centers and concentration camps in the German Reich and the General Government.

Major police raids in Paris.

July 16

La Grande Rafle (“The Big Sweep”) commences in Paris, as the German and Austrian Jews living in the city, about 13,000 total, are rounded up.

July 17

A Nazi delegation headed by SS chief Heinrich Himmler tours the death camp at Auschwitz, where Himmler observes a mass gassing of inmates.

July 19

Himmler orders Operation Reinhard, the mass deportation of Jews in Poland to extermination camps by December 31.

Deportations to the Auschwitz death camp begin for Parisian Jews who have been held at Drancy, France, since July 16.

The Family Hostage Law is announced in Occupied France. Under its provisions, fugitive “terrorists” who do not surrender to German authorities can expect their male relatives to be killed, female relatives sent to work camps, and children sent to special schools for political reeducation.

July 20

SS doctor Karl Gebhardt begins sulfanilamide experiments in Ravensbrück on about 80 concentration camp prisoners, mostly Polish women. Gebhardt seeks to determine the effectiveness of sulfanilamide in preventing infections in battlefield wounds for the benefit of the German armed forces. He deliberately inflicts wounds on prisoners and infects them with bacteria. He tests treatments of sulfanilamide and other drugs. Some women die as a result of these experiments; many others are crippled or maimed. Other experiments at Ravensbrück include the testing of various methods of setting and transplanting bones and sterilization experiments on women and children, mostly Roma (Gypsies).

Germans murder 1000 Jews at Kleck, Belorussia; 400 flee into forests. Two from the latter group, Moshe Fish and Leva Gilchik (from nearby Kopyl), will form a partisan group.

July 20-21

Jews are deported from Kowale Panskie, Poland, to the Chelmno death camp.

July 21

Mass protest rally at Madison Square Garden.

Six hundred Jews remaining in Niéswiez, Poland, battle their Nazi attackers. Many Jews and a few Nazis are killed, and some of the Jews who survive manage to flee into nearby forests.

July 22

German authorities and Ukrainian and Latvian guards in SS uniforms surround the walls of the Warsaw Ghetto. Start of the “resettlement” of the inhabitants of the Warsaw Ghetto to the extermination camps at Belzec and Treblinka. Personnel at the camp railway station are told to expect a “shuttle service” of Jews. Approximately 300,000 Jews were deported from Warsaw to the killing centers. Of that number, about 265,000 were sent to Treblinka where they were murdered.

Armed resistance during liquidation of Nieswiez ghetto, western Belorussia.

July 23

Gassing operations begin at Treblinka. Between July 1942 and November 1943, SS special detachments at Treblinka murdered an estimated 750,000 Jews and at least 2,000 Gypsies.

Adam Czerniaków, chairman of the Warsaw Ghetto’s Jewish Council, commits suicide rather than acquiesce to German demands to prepare 6000 Jews each day for deportation.

SS Senior Colonel General Viktor Brack advises Heinrich Himmler that all healthy Jews should be castrated or sterilized, and the remainder annihilated.

July 22-September 12

265,000 Jews are deported from Warsaw to the Treblinka death camp, where they are exterminated.

July 24

Martin Luther, undersecretary of state at the German Foreign Ministry, alerts Nazi Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop that Italian authorities are resistant to the German plan to deport Jews from Italian-held regions of Croatia.

July 27

The German government in the Occupied Eastern Territories warns that any Pole or Ukrainian who attempts to hide or assist a Jew will be “shot dead.”

July 28

Young members of the Warsaw Ghetto establish Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa (ZOB; Jewish Fighting Organization). At this time, the only weapon in the ghetto is a single pistol.

SS chief Heinrich Himmler writes to a senior SS official that the Occupied Eastern Territories “are to become free of Jews.”

Jewish parents in Tarnów, Poland, are forced to watch as their children are shot by Gestapo agents. The parents and other adults are subsequently deported to the camp at Belzec for extermination.

In the Lódz Ghetto, two male Jews, one just 16 years old, are hanged after escaping a work gang.

July 28-31

About 30,000 Jews are killed in Minsk.

July 29

The Nazis post notices in the Warsaw Ghetto offering extra food (mainly bread and jam) to Jews who go voluntarily to “resettlement.”

July 30

German industrialist Eduard Schulte, whose company has mines near Auschwitz, reveals to a Swiss colleague that Hitler and the German Reich have decided to round up the millions of Jews of Occupied Europe, concentrate them in the East, and murder them using prussic acid starting in the fall of 1942. The information is soon communicated to Swiss World Jewish Congress representative Gerhart Riegner.

July 31

Army Group South crosses the Don on a wide front.

Governor Wilhelm Kube reports to Hinrich Lohse, Reichskommissar of the Baltic regions and Belorussia, that “Jewry has been completely eliminated” in the Minsk area.

Bluma Rozenfeld, 19, leaps to her death from a fifth-floor window in the Lódz Ghetto.

Israel Lichtenstein writes from the Warsaw Ghetto: “At present, together with me, both of us get ready to meet and receive death. I wish my little daughter to be remembered. Margalith, twenty months old today....I don’t lament my own life nor that of my wife. I pity only the so little, nice and talented girl. She deserves to be remembered.”

Late July 1942

Germany decides not to disclose the whereabouts of Dutch deportees, saying only that they had been sent to “an unknown destination...somewhere in the East”--that is, to the Auschwitz extermination camp.

August 1942

Throughout Europe, more than 400,000 Jews are murdered.

In Poland, Swedish diplomat Baron Göran von Otter is told by SS Obersturmführer Kurt Gerstein of Nazi killings of Jews in Poland.

Deportations of Jews from France and Holland continue.

Jews are deported from Zagreb, Croatia, to Auschwitz, which is suffering a virulent epidemic of typhus.

Jews from the Eastern Galicia region of Poland are deported to Belzec. Throughout the month 150,000 Jews are murdered there.

In the Volhynia region of Poland, 87,000 Jews are killed.

A heat wave and caterpillars destroy a cabbage crop cultivated by residents of the Lódz Ghetto.

In the Ukraine, some 500 Jewish families are shot to death by SS Einsatzgruppen and dumped in a mass grave near the town of Zagrodski.

The Majdanek camp is fitted with gas chambers.

Fifty thousand Jews are deported from Lvov to the Belzec death camp.

Catholic nun Edith Stein, born a Jew, is arrested in the Netherlands by the Gestapo.

The United States, British, and German governments save two and a half million Greek civilians from starvation. Great Britain and the United States agree to permit food to reach Greece after the Germans assure them that the food will not be confiscated. Great Britain ships 35,000 tons of food per month to Greece and the United States pays for it; the process is monitored by neutral nations and the International Red Cross. The agreement costs the Allies $30 million per year. In contrast, the Allies do not seek to help feed Europe’s Jews.

A Polish partisan named Trzcinski passes a hand grenade into a railcar carrying Jewish deportees to the Treblinka death camp. The grenade will be used later at the camp to wound a group of Ukrainian guards.

August 1-2

81,000 Polish Jews from Warsaw are deported to the Treblinka death camp.

August 2

Lota Hirszberg, 56, kills herself with sleeping powder in the Lódz Ghetto.

August 3

Twelve thousand Jews from Przemysl, Poland, are deported to the Belzec death camp.

The first portion of Emanuel Ringelblum’s Warsaw diary, hidden in ten tin boxes and milk cans, is secretly buried for safekeeping by a Warsaw schoolteacher named Israel Lichtenstein.

August 4

First deportations from Belgium to Auschwitz. The first day’s deportees number 998. The Germans deported more than 25,000 Jews, about half of Belgium’s Jewish population, to the Auschwitz-Birkenau killing center in Occupied Poland, where most of them perished. The deportations continued until the end of July 1944.

August 5

SS troops in Radom, Poland, shoot 600 older people and children as well as hundreds of other Jews found in hiding places. Six thousand Jews from the city’s small ghetto and 2000 from the large ghetto are deported to the Treblinka death camp.

The Jewish community at Pilica, Poland, is liquidated.

August 6

Three thousand Jews are murdered at Diatlovo, Belorussia. Six hundred escape, more than 100 of whom form a partisan unit led by Hirsch Kaplinski.

Fifteen thousand Jews from Warsaw are deported to the Treblinka death camp.

August 6-17

Twenty thousand Jews from Radom, Poland, are murdered at the Treblinka death camp.

August 8

U.S. delays information on plan to annihilate Jews to verify sources.

Jews of Szczebrzeszyn, Poland, go into hiding when Nazis order 2000 to assemble for deportation. By day’s end, only a handful have been discovered.

Catholic nun Edith Stein is gassed at Auschwitz.

August 9

Armed resistance during the liquidation of the Mir ghetto, western Belorussia. 180 Jews escape to forests outside Mir.

The Jewish Council of Zwierzyniec, Poland, ransoms its community with gold. Only 52 of the town’s poorest Jews are seized for deportation.

The Jewish community at Radun, Belorussia, is liquidated.

Fifteen hundred Jews from Kremenets, Ukraine, are relocated to the Bialokrynitsa camp.

August 10

One thousand Jews deported by train from the Theresienstadt camp/ghetto on August 4 are transferred to gassing vans at Maly Trostinets (near Minsk), executed, and dumped into open graves.

Eight hundred Jews are murdered at Brzozów, Poland.

Six German and Ukrainian policemen are killed by Jews while attempting to enter the Jewish ghetto at Kremenets, Ukraine.

The Yeheskel Atlas Jewish partisan company attacks a German garrison in Derechin, Belorussia. Forty-four German policemen are captured and executed.

August 10-30

“Resettlement” of the Lemberg (Lvov) ghetto in Ukraine. 50,000 Jews deported to extermination camps.

August 11

Jews resisting deportation from Kremenets, Ukraine, set the ghetto on fire.

In Belgium, 999 Jews, including 172 children, are deported to their deaths in the East.

August 13

The Jewish communities at Mir, Belorussia, and Gorodok, Ukraine, are liquidated.

Switzerland forces Jews (mostly French) already safe in Switzerland back across the border. The Swiss government will turn back 10,000 Jews to their deaths during the remainder of the war on the grounds that only political refugees can be admitted into Switzerland, not “racial refugees.” The Swiss government does, however, welcome the gold that the Germans extract from the mouths and fingers of the dead Jews.

August 13-27

53,750 Jews from Warsaw are deported to the Treblinka death camp.

United States State Department officials and the British Foreign Office decide that the Riegner Cable outlining details of the Holocaust be kept secret.

August 14

Arrest of 7,000 “stateless” Jews in unoccupied France.

The entire Jewish community from Gorlice, Poland, is deported to the Belzec extermination camp.

August 14-15

A woman named Rivka Yosselevska is one of just four Jews to survive a bloody burial-pit massacre outside Zagrodski, Poland, near Pinsk.

August 15

The Germans open Jawiszowice, a slave-labor camp located near Auschwitz.

One thousand Belgian Jews, including 172 children, are deported to their deaths in the East.

Mid-August 1942

A healthy Jewish teenage boy is removed from a deportation train at the Belzec death camp, stripped naked, hung upside down from gallows for three hours, and then killed as camp guards use sticks to force sand down his throat.

August 17

341 French-Jewish children from the ages of two to ten, as well as 323 girls up to the age of 16, are gassed at Auschwitz. Two of the victims are Suzanne Perl, seven, and her sister Micheline, three.

August 17-18

2500 Jews from Drogobych, Ukraine, are murdered at the Belzec death camp.

August 18

998 Jews, including 287 children, are deported to the East from Belgium.

August 19

Nazis murder the children of the Rembertów Ghetto. The town’s adult Jews, more than 1000, are assembled for deportation to the Treblinka death camp. About 300 of the people are ordered eastward along the road to Wesola. Before they walk a mile, the 300 are murdered. The 700 who remain are ordered to march south, and as the group passes the town of Anin, one woman melts into a crowd of non-Jewish Polish onlookers and escapes. Forty-five others are machine-gunned at Anin, ostensibly because they attempted escape. Hours later the marchers reach the ghetto at Falenica, where Jews already have been forcibly assembled; those who are discovered in hiding are shot. Inside the ghetto, two Jews resist, using an axe to kill the first German who steps through the doors of their apartment.

At the Belzec extermination camp, 700 to 800 Jews herded into a gas chamber wait in torment for nearly three hours until a balky diesel engine can be started and the chamber filled with deadly exhaust. SS gas/disinfectant expert but anti-Nazi Kurt Gerstein is on hand to observe.

August 19-23

Seventeen thousand Jews from Lutsk, Ukraine, are taken to Polanka Hill and executed.

August 20

The ZOB (Jewish Fighting Organization) attempts to assassinate Joseph Szerynski, commander of the Jewish police in the Warsaw Ghetto. Later in the day, other ZOB members set fire to several Warsaw warehouses.

The Jewish community from Falenica, Poland, is liquidated at the Treblinka death camp.

General Friedrich Paulu’s ill-fated 6th Army approaches Stalingrad.

August 20-24

Nineteen thousand Jews of Kielce, Poland, are deported to the Treblinka death camp.

Gas/disinfectant expert Kurt Gerstein observes gas executions at Treblinka, one day after witnessing similar deaths at Belzec.

August 21

3500 Jews from Minsk Mazowiecki, Poland, are murdered at Treblinka.

The Jewish community at Ozorków, Poland, is murdered.

August 22

Ten thousand Jews from Wielun, Poland, are deported to the Chelmno death camp.

Ten thousand Jews from Siedlce, Poland, are murdered at the Treblinka death camp.

The Jewish community from Losice, Poland, is liquidated at the Treblinka death camp.

August 24

Jews are locked in a church at Lask, Poland, and killed. Among the victims are a mother and her baby, who is born inside the church.

At Zdunska Wola, Poland, 1100 Jews are herded to the local Jewish cemetery, where all but about 100 are shot and beaten to death. Survivors are forced to bury the victims.

At the Treblinka death camp, a deranged, young Jewish woman is discovered hiding a small child beneath the bedsheet she wears. Camp guards shoot and kill both the woman and the child.

August 24-28

Ten thousand Jews from Nowy Sacz, Poland, are deported to the Belzec extermination camp.

August 26

After being unloaded at the Treblinka death camp, a Jew named Friedman uses a razor blade to cut the throat of a Ukrainian guard. SS guards retaliate by immediately opening fire on the other newly arrived deportees.

August 25-26

Thousands of Jews from Miedzyrzec, Poland, are deported to the Treblinka death camp.

Nearly 1000 Belgian Jews, including 232 children, are deported to the East.

August 26

518 Jewish children deported from Paris are gassed at Auschwitz.

August 27

Eight thousand Jews from Wieliczka, Poland, are killed at the Belzec death camp.

When a transport train carrying 6000 Jews from Miedzyrzec, Poland, arrives at the Treblinka extermination camp, guards discover that all 6000 have died of suffocation during the 75-mile journey.

Several thousand Jews from Chortkov, Poland, are assembled in the town square and forced to witness the murders of the community’s children.

The Soviet defense of Stalingrad stiffens as the German siege intensifies.

August 27-28

Fourteen thousand Jews are killed at Sarny, Ukraine.

August 28

World Jewish Congress (WJC) President Stephen S. Wise receives a cable from Swiss WJC representative Gerhart Riegner regarding the “Final Solution.” Wise elects to suppress the information until it can be verified.

Ten thousand Jews are murdered at Miedzyrzec, Poland.

Jews of Chortkov, Ukraine, are put into freight cars and transported to the death camp at Belzec.

German authorities order the arrests of Parisian priests who have sheltered Jews.

August 29

The Jewish community from Olesko, Ukraine, is deported to the Belzec death camp.

Occupation officials in the East inform Berlin that the “Jewish problem” has been “totally solved” in Serbia. Since German occupation, 14,500 of Serbia’s 16,000 Jews have been murdered.

August 30

Members of the Jewish community at Rabka, Poland, are murdered.

French Bishop Pierre-Marie Théas reminds his parishes that all human beings are created by the same God, Christians and Jews alike, and that “all men regardless of race or religion deserve respect from individuals and governments.”

August-September 1942

Deportations from Zagreb, Croatia, to Auschwitz.

Gassings near Minsk of Jews deported from Theresienstadt.

Late Summer 1942

SS officer Kurt Gerstein fails in his attempt to publicize his knowledge of the mass gassings of Jews. He is rebuffed in his approach to the German papal nuncio, Cesare Orsenigo.

September 1942

Fourteen thousand Jews are taken to gravel pits at Piatydni, Ukraine, and machine-gunned.

Moshe Skoczylas and Michael Majtek form Jewish partisan units at Dzialoszyce, Poland.

German troops reach the Caucasus and begin exterminations of indigenous Jews.

SS chief Heinrich Himmler suggests that camp inmates be put to work in on-site arms factories. Armaments chief Albert Speer objects, offering a compromise accepted by Hitler: Himmler’s inmates will be made available to Speer for labor in conventional arms factories.

New York Congressman Emanuel Celler, a Jew, submits legislation to allow French Jews about to be deported to their deaths in Eastern Europe to immigrate to the United States. The bill is killed by the House Committee on Immigration.

As Jews are being deported from France to their deaths in the Third Reich, the Vichy Ministry of Information urges the press to remember “the true teaching of Saint Thomas and the Popes...the general and traditional teaching of the Catholic Church about the Jewish problem.”

Early September 1942

An SS guard on a deportation train headed for the Belzec death camp shoots and kills Jadzia Beer, a Polish girl from Jaworów, after her skirt becomes caught in a railcar window and she dangles helplessly from the window.

September 1

Thousands of Jews from Stry, Ukraine, are murdered at the Belzec death camp.

Security forces raid five hospitals in the Lódz Ghetto, evacuating and slaughtering patients. Babies are thrown out of an upper-story windows, some bayoneted before they hit the ground.

A German shepherd that licks the face of a Jewish baby at the Treblinka extermination camp is savagely beaten by its SS master before the guard tramples the baby to death.

Allied troops make significant gains in France and Italy, and Soviet troops reach Bulgaria.

September 2

The 10,000 Jews of Dzialoszyce, Poland, are rounded up by Gestapo agents and by Polish and Ukrainian police, then terrorized while standing in the hot sun all day. Two thousand residents are executed in the Dolles Jewish cemetery. The 8000 residents who remain are deported to the Belzec death camp.

In Oslo, Norway, Julius Samuel, the chief rabbi of Norway, refuses to go into hiding or to flee the country. He is arrested and interned in a camp at Berg, south of Oslo.

September 3

At Lachva, Belorussia, more than 800 Jews battle Nazis in a revolt led by Dov Lopatyn. Most of the rebels are killed.

The Geneva-based World Jewish Congress learns of deportations of French Jews.

Josef Kaplan, a leader of the ZOB (Jewish Fighting Organization), is arrested in Warsaw, joining another leader, Yisrael Zeltzer, in detention. When another ZOB leader, Shmuel Braslav, is stopped in the street by German troops, he is shot dead after trying to pull a knife. Another ZOB leader, Reginka Justman, is shot after being stopped while carrying the ZOB’s arms cache to a new hiding place; the arms are seized.

September 3-14

The Times of London runs articles describing the deportations of French Jews.

September 4

Jews in Macedonia are required to wear the Yellow Star.

September 4-12

Lódz Ghetto’s Jewish Council leader, Chaim Rumkowski, acquiesces to Nazi demands for deportation of the community’s children and adults who are over the age of 65. During the action, Germans fire randomly into crowds, execute individual Jews, and invade Jewish hospitals. They deport approximately 15,000 people.

September 5

Some 800 Jewish women at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, weakened by hunger and overwork, are gassed. Later at the camp, 661 Jews taken from a Holland deportation train are gassed.

September 6-7

More than 1000 Polish Jews are killed by Nazis in the streets of the Warsaw Ghetto.

September 6-21

Nearly 48,000 Jews from Warsaw are deported to the Treblinka extermination camp.

September 7

At least 5000 Jews from Kolomyia, Ukraine, are deported to Belzec; 1000 are killed in the Kolomyia Ghetto itself.

September 8

During a session of Britain’s House of Commons, Prime Minister Winston Churchill remarks angrily about Nazi deportations of French Jews.

September 9

Massacre of Jews near Kislowodsk, Caucasus.

Two thousand Jews are deported from the camp in Lublin to Majdanek.

The Times of London reports on the Vichy (Occupied France) government’s dismissal of General Robert de Saint-Vincent, military governor of Lyons, for his refusal to initiate mass arrests of Jews in his region of responsibility. The same edition of the Times reports on a German order for the arrest of Catholic priests who shelter Jews in the unoccupied zone of France.

September 10-12

In Belgium, foreign Jews are seized in Antwerp. They are sent to a camp in Mechelen, Belgium, and then to forced labor in northern France.

September 11

Meir Berliner, an Argentine Jew deported to the Treblinka death camp from Warsaw, stabs an SS officer, Max Bialas, to death with a penknife. In reprisal, Berliner and 150 other Treblinka inmates are executed.

At Stolin, Belorussia, Jewish resistance is led by Moses Glazer and Asher Shapira.

Five thousand Jews are deported from the Warsaw Ghetto to Treblinka. Among the deportees is noted author Hillel Zeitlin, age 71.

September 12

Battle of Stalingrad begins: The German Sixth Army and Fourth Panzer Army reach the suburbs of Stalingrad. They’re primed to meet the Soviets in the Battle of Stalingrad.

More than 4800 Polish Jews are deported from Warsaw to the Treblinka extermination camp. A young Jew named Abraham Jakób Krzepicki escapes from Treblinka and makes his way to Warsaw, where ghetto historian Emanuel Ringelblum sees that Krzepicki’s eyewitness camp testimony is taken down.

September 13

The Jewish community at Checiny, Poland, is deported.

September 15-16

Members of the Kalush, Ukraine, Jewish community are deported to the Belzec death camp.

September 15-21

The Jewish community from Kamenka, Ukraine, is murdered at the Belzec death camp.

September 16

Conclusion of “resettlement” of the Lodz ghetto (55,000 victims).

Six thousand Jews from Jedrzejów, Poland, are murdered at the Treblinka death camp.

German 6th Army fights its way house to house into Stalingrad.

September 18

Food rations are dramatically reduced for Jews throughout Greater Germany.

Reich Minister of Justice Otto Thierack and SS chief Heinrich Himmler agree that Jews and selected other camp inmates will be transferred to SS custody for Vernichtung durch Arbeit (extermination through work); i.e., hard labor until death.

September 21

Open-pit burning of bodies begins at Auschwitz in place of burial. The decision is made to dig up and burn those already buried (107,000 corpses) to prevent the fouling of ground water and to hide evidence of atrocities.

September 22

The Jewish ghetto in Czestochowa, Poland, is liquidated; 40,000 residents are transported to the Treblinka death camp and killed.

The leading French Protestant, Pastor Marc Boegner, publicly protests the Jewish deportations. He personally attempts to convince Vichy France Premier Pierre Laval to end the roundups of Jewish children. After Boegner offers to have the children adopted, Laval tells him that “not one of them must remain in France.”

Fall 1942

New construction at the Treblinka death camp greatly increases its gas-chamber capacity.

Workers at the Sobibór extermination camp begin to burn the bodies of the camp’s victims.

September 23

Hundreds of Jews from Slovakia and 641 from France are gassed at Auschwitz.

At the Treblinka death camp, 10,000 Jews from Szydlowiec, Poland, are killed.

British Home Secretary and Minister of Home Security Herbert Morrison opposes any further admission of Jewish immigrants into Britain. He fears this would encourage the French Vichy government to “dump” Jewish children into Britain.

September 24

Ukrainian and German police begin firing into the Jewish ghetto at Tuchin, Ukraine. A Jewish revolt is led by Gecel Schwarzman (chairman of the Judenrat), Meir Himmelfarb (Schwarzman’s deputy), and Tuwia Czuwak. Armed Jews return fire and others set the ghetto ablaze. Two thousand of the ghetto’s 3000 residents escape to nearby forests.

German Foreign Office official Martin Luther passes on to subordinates the desire of Nazi Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop that deportations of Jews from across Europe be accelerated.

September 25

Learning about the impending liquidation of their ghetto, some Jews of Korets, Ukraine, escape to the woods while others resist by setting the ghetto ablaze. Resistance is led by Moshe Gildenman.

Swiss police decree that race alone does not guarantee refugee status, thus preventing Jews from crossing the Swiss border to safety.

Seven hundred Romanian Jews, interned at Drancy, are deported to Auschwitz.

475 French Jews are gassed at Auschwitz. One of the victims is ballet director René Blum, the brother of former French Prime Minister Léon Blum.

Abraham Gamzu, chairman of the Jewish Council at Kaluszyn, Poland, is executed after refusing to deliver Jews for deportation. Six thousand of the town's residents are deported to the Treblinka death camp and later killed.

September 26

SS Lieutenant General August Frank advises camp administrators that jewelry and other valuables seized from Jews should be sent to the German Reichsbank, and that razors and other practical items should be cleaned and delivered to front-line troops for sale to them. Proceeds will go to the Reich. Further, confiscated household items are to be distributed to ethnic Germans.

Brussels Jewish leader Edward Rotbel is deported to Auschwitz. Several hundred Dutch Jews are gassed there.

German railway officials meet in Berlin to plan track upgrades and additional trains in order to hasten deportations of Jews. They meet again on September 28.

September 26-29

Search parties of German and Ukrainian police capture 1000 of 2000 Jews who escaped from the Tuchin Ghetto on September 24. Some Jews are taken to Tuchin’s Jewish cemetery and shot, while most are killed where they are found in the forest.

September 27

Three hundred cold and hungry women and children, part of the 1000 Jews still at large following a September 24 escape from the ghetto at Tuchin, Ukraine, return to the city under German promises of safe repatriation. All 300 are shot. Of the 700 Tuchin Jews who remain at large, only about 20 will survive the war.

September 29

500 of nearly 800 Jews who attempt to escape Serniki, Poland, are killed by the Germans. Of 279 who reach nearby forests, 102 will perish before the end of the war.

September 30

Hitler declares publicly that the war will mean the destruction of European Jewry.

Polish Jews trapped in the Warsaw Ghetto construct more than 600 fortified bunkers from September 30, 1942 to January 1943.

October 1942

Jews are deported to Auschwitz from Holland and Belgium; to the Treblinka death camp from central Poland and the Theresienstadt camp/ghetto; and to the Belzec death camp from the Eastern Galicia region of Poland.

In the Occupied Soviet Union, many Jews are killed in the streets, in forests, and in rock quarries.

At Novogrudok, Belorussia, 50 Jews escape from the Germans and join local resistance led by Tuvia Bielski.

Eighteen hundred Jews are seized at Radziwillów, Ukraine; 600 escape. All told this month, about 80,000 Soviet Jews are murdered at execution pits throughout the occupied regions of the Soviet Union.

Fifteen deportation trains arrive at Auschwitz from Norway, Belgium, Holland, and Slovakia.

All Jewish property in Norway is confiscated.

Most Jewish escapees from the village of Markuszow, Poland, are destroyed by a German encirclement and subsequent armored and artillery attacks after five months of freedom in area forests.

As 3000 Jews are arrested at Pinczów, Poland, resistance is led by Michael Majtek and Zalman Fajnsztat.

Five thousand Jews are deported from Zawichost, Poland to Belzec.

British Vatican Ambassador Francis d’Arcy Osborne writes in his diary that Pope Pius XII only occasionally denounces moral crimes. But such rare and vague declarations “do not have...lasting force and validity.” Osborne points out that the Pope’s “policy of silence in regard to such offences against the conscience of the world must necessarily involve a renunciation of moral leadership.”

At a small labor camp at Budy, Poland, female German non-Jewish prisoners beat, mutilate, and kill dozens of captive Jewish women. When the massacre is over, Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss inspects the scene.

October 1

The Chelmek slave-labor camp, located in Poland near Auschwitz-Birkenau, opens to house Jews draining swamps to provide water to the nearby Bata shoe factory.

In Luków, Poland, Jewish Council member David Lieberman is told by German authorities that money he has collected to ransom Lublin’s Jews is useless, and deportations will continue, whereupon Lieberman tears the money to pieces and slaps the German official in the face. Ukrainian guards kill Lieberman immediately, and 4000 of the Jews Lieberman had hoped to protect are deported to the Treblinka extermination camp, where they are gassed.

October 1-2

Hundreds of Jews escape the Ukrainian town of Luboml but are quickly hunted down. In all, some 10,000 of the town’s Jews are killed.

October 2

At the Treblinka death camp, Jews from Zelechów, Poland, are murdered.

October 3

The Polish ambassador to the Vatican details to Pope Pius XII (through a report through the secretariat of state) that the Germans have gassed thousands of Jews.

October 4

German concentration camps to be “free of Jews”: all Jewish inmates deported to Auschwitz.

October 5

The SS transfers more than 600 Jewish women from Ravensbrück to Auschwitz-Birkenau. The transfer is a response to an order from the Reich Security Main Office requiring the transfer of all Jewish concentration camp prisoners from camps in Germany to Auschwitz.

October 6 & 9

Thousands of Jews from Miedzyrzec, Poland, are deported to the Treblinka death camp.

October 9

In Brussels, Belgium, five of six leading members of the Belgian Jewish community are released from incarceration following the intervention of Cardinal Joseph-Ernst van Roey and Belgium’s Queen Elizabeth.

October 11-12

Eleven thousand Jews from Ostrowiec-Swietokrzyski, Poland, are killed at the Treblinka death camp.

October 15

25,000 Jews of Brest-Litovsk, Belorussia, are murdered. Jewish resistance, led by Hana Ginsberg, attempts to fight back.

October 15-21

An SS Aktion is undertaken against Jews of Piotrków Trybunalski, Poland. Many are shot in their homes and 22,000 are deported to the Treblinka death camp.

October 17

1600 Jews from Buczacz, Ukraine, are murdered at the Belzec death camp.

405 Jews held in the Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen concentration camps are deported to Auschwitz. Austrian-Jewish opera librettist Fritz Beda is among those deported from Buchenwald.

October 18

The Ministry of Justice transfers responsibility for Jews and citizens of the eastern countries within Germany to the Gestapo.

Hitler issues Kommandobefehl (“Commando Order”), authorizing immediate execution of captured Allied Special Operations personnel, whether in or out of uniform.

October 20

Twelve thousand Jews are murdered at Bar in the Transnistria region of the Ukraine.

October 22

Nazis suppress revolt by Jews at Sachsenhausen assigned for deportation to Auschwitz.

Icek and Fraidla Dobrzynska, Jewish parents of two children who had been deported from Poland’s Lódz Ghetto in September 1942, commit suicide.

October 23

The Battle of El Alamein begins in Egypt.

Algerian-Jewish resistance leader José Aboulker meets with American General Mark Clark in Morocco. Aboulker is given 800 Sten guns, 800 grenades, 400 handguns, and 50 portable radios.

October 24

252 friends and relatives of persons from Lidice, Czechoslovakia, are murdered at the camp at Mauthausen, Austria, in reprisal for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich.

October 25

Germans demand that Oszmiana, Lithuania, give up 400 of its 1000 Jews. The selection of the victims is assigned to the Jewish police in the nearby city of Vilna. Vilna Ghetto leader Jacob Gens decides to hand over Oszmiana’s elderly Jews in order to save the others.

October 25-26

Male Jews in Norway are arrested and sent by sea to Szczecin, Poland, then by railcar to Auschwitz.

October 27

Second conference pertaining to sterilization.

Three thousand Jews are deported from Opoczno, Poland, to the Treblinka death camp. A few who escape to forests nearby form a partisan group, the Lions.

October 27-28

Seven thousand Kraków, Poland, Jews are deported to Belzec; 600 are killed in Kraków.

October 28

First deportations from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz.

Sixteen thousand Jews are murdered at Pinsk, Poland.

Mieczyslaw Gruber, a Jewish former soldier in the Polish Army, escapes with 17 others from a Nazi POW camp on Lipowa Street in Lublin. The group will later establish a partisan group in the forest northwest of the city.

The SS issues a secret directive that mittens and stockings confiscated from Jewish children at death camps be gathered and sent to SS families.

Jewish Warsaw Ghetto leaders ask Jan Karski, a Polish Catholic working for the underground, to tell the Polish and Allied governments: “We are helpless in the face of the German criminals....The Germans are not trying to enslave us as they have other people; we are being systematically murdered....Our entire people will be destroyed....”

October 29

Mass execution of Jews in Pinsk, Belorussia (16,000 victims).

Written comments by Winston Churchill excoriating Germany for the systematic extermination of European Jews are read at a London protest meeting chaired by the archbishop of Canterbury.

In Warsaw, resistance fighters with the Jewish Fighting Organization assassinate Jacob Lejkin, acting commander of the Warsaw Ghetto Jewish police, for his complicity in deportations of Jews.

3230 thousand Jews from Sandomierz, Poland, are murdered at the Belzec extermination camp.

Late October 1942

Local peasants betray six members of the Jewish Fighting Organization near Kraków, Poland, alerting German troops to the Jews’ presence.

Three thousand Jews readied for deportation from eastern Poland to the Belzec death camp are stripped naked to prevent resistance.

November 1942

Deportations of Jews from Holland and France continue. One thousand Jews are deported to Auschwitz from the Drancy, France, transit camp. Nearly 5200 are deported there from the Netherlands.

The Nazis occupy Vichy France.

The Jewish Sonderkommando at Auschwitz-Birkenau nears completion of its task of exhuming and burning Jewish corpses buried at the camp.

The Jewish community in Vienna is officially dissolved.

The Yishuv (Jewish community in British-controlled Palestine) receives confirmation of the “Final Solution.”

Klaus Barbie arrives in Lyons, France, to head a special commando in Section IV of the local Gestapo office. His instructions are to actively fight Jews, Communists, Freemasons, and members of the French Resistance.

November 1

First deportation from Bialystok district to Auschwitz.

November 1-6

More than 170,000 Jews are killed within one week at the Belzec, Auschwitz, and Treblinka death camps.

November 2

In the Lithuanian town of Marcinkance, 370 Jews who refuse to board trains for deportation bolt for the ghetto boundaries. In the melée that follows, 360 Jews and many guards are killed. Between deaths and successful escapes, not one Jew is left to board the trains.

In Zolochev, Ukraine, the chairman of the Jewish Council is murdered by Germans after refusing to sign a paper saying that the liquidation of the ghetto was necessitated by the spread of a typhus epidemic. 2500 Zolochev Jews, including poet S. J. Imber, are deported to Belzec.

More than 100,000 Jews remaining in the towns and villages in the Bialystok region of Poland are arrested and deported to holding camps at Zambrów, Volkovysk, Kelbasin, and Bogusze before being sent to the Auschwitz and Treblinka death camps.

Six thousand Jews are deported from Siemiatycze, Poland. Resistance is led by Herschl Shabbes.

Wolfram Sievers, head of Germany’s Ancestral Heritage Society, requests skeletons of 150 Jews. SS chief Heinrich Himmler okays a plan to establish a collection of Jewish skeletons and skulls at the Strasbourg Anatomical Institute in France, near the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp.

Allied forces at El Alamein, Egypt, send German General Erwin Rommel’s troops into full retreat.

November 3

Jewish communities of Bilgoraj, Poland, and Ostryna, Belorussia, are destroyed at the Belzec and Auschwitz death camps, respectively.

November 5

“Europa” rescue plan.

An SS man in Ciechanów, Poland, politely asks a Jewish woman to hand him her baby. When she complies, the trooper smashes the baby to the street headfirst, killing it.

Jewish men from Stopnica, Poland, are sent to a slave-labor camp at Skarzysko-Kamienna, while 400 old people and children are shot in the town cemetery. Three thousand others are put on a forced march; many are shot along the way, and survivors are sent to Treblinka.

Peasants in Siedliszcze, Poland, gather scythes in anticipation of the day's roundup of Jews, for which they’ll be paid for each Jew caught.

Six hundred Jews from Borislav, Poland, are deported naked to prevent resistance.

745 Jews, including 35 residents of the Rothschild Old Age Home, are deported from Paris to Auschwitz. After arrival, Jews awaiting entry into the gas chamber spy a truck loaded with corpses but continue on to their deaths.

November 5-11

1060 Greece-born Jews in and around Paris are seized and deported to Auschwitz.

November 6-7

One thousand Jews in Drancy, France, spend the night on a railroad siding crammed into boxcars. After the train departs for Auschwitz, two Jews squeeze to safety after bars in a small window are loosened.

November 7-30

More than 50,000 Jews in Poland and the Ukraine are deported to death camps at Belzec, Treblinka, and Majdanek.

November 8

U.K. and U.S. invade North Africa: Allied Operation Torch landings take place on the Algerian coast and incidentally ensure the safety of 117,000 Algerian Jews. Algerian-Jewish resistance, armed by the United States, helps prevent a Vichy French response to the Allied landings.

The Jews from Drancy, France, arrive by train at Auschwitz, where 227 are assigned to forced labor and 773 are gassed.

In Tripoli, Libya, German occupiers press 2600 Jews into forced labor to build military roads.

November 10

British victories in Egypt.

Six thousand Polish Jews who have been hiding in forests since the spring of 1942 surrender after the Germans promise safe passage to a new Jewish ghetto.

November 11

German and Italian troops occupy Vichy, France.

Norwegian Protestant bishops in Oslo publicly protest deportations of Norwegian Jews. They state in a letter to Norwegian Prime Minister Vidkun Quisling: “God does not differentiate between people.”

November 15

The Soviet-based Jewish Antifascist Committee releases a report, “The Liquidation of the Jews in Warsaw.”

In an action led by Mayer List, two Jewish women partisans in Paris place two time bombs at a Nazi barracks window, which will kill several soldiers.

Mid-November 1942

Official sources in Great Britain, the United States, and neutral nations confirm the validity of the Gerhart Riegner cable regarding the “Final Solution.”

November 16

German troops occupy Tunisia.

November 19

Soviet counterattack near Stalingrad. Red Army winter offensive opens with a massive attack against embattled and exhausted 6th Army.

Germans in Debica, Poland, announce that as of December 1, any Pole who assists Jews “will be punished by death.”

November 23

Red Army closes the ring around the 6th army in Stalingrad.

November 24

Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, a founder and president of the World Jewish Congress, announces at a press conference that the United States State Department has confirmed that Europe’s Jews are being slaughtered by the Nazis. Wise estimates that the Germans have already murdered two million Jews, which is an understatement.

November 25

First deportation of Jews from Norway to Auschwitz.

November 25-26

Jews in Piotrków Trybunalski, Poland, who are lured from hiding places by Nazi promises of no retribution, are taken to a synagogue, locked inside, and subjected to random gunfire by Ukrainians.

532 Jewish women and children in Norway are arrested and deported to Auschwitz. Although more than 700 Norwegian Jews were eventually sent to Auschwitz, about 930 found refuge in Sweden.

November 27

More than 110,000 Poles are expelled from their homes in the fertile Zamosc province so that the area can be resettled by ethnic Germans, SS troops, and Ukrainians. More than 300 villages are affected. Thousands of Polish children are deported from the area to Belzec and other death camps. Continues until August 1943.

November-early December 1942

Members of the ZOB in Kraków, Poland, disrupt rail lines and assassinate a German soldier, a German policeman, a German flier, two Gestapo agents, and a senior German clerk in the local Nazi administration.

December 1942

Members of the Siemiatycze Group of Jewish resisters kill a Polish peasant and his entire family as retribution for the peasant’s capture and betrayal to the Nazis of three Jews.

Nazis lock 1000 Gypsies in a Lithuanian synagogue until the prisoners starve to death.

Ghetto resistance is organized at Czestochowa and Kielce, Poland.

At Brody, Ukraine, Jewish resistance is led by Solomon Halberszstadt, Jakub Linder, and Samuel Weiler.

Concurrent Jewish resistance at Chortkov, Ukraine, is led by Heniek Nusbaum, Mundek Nusbaum, Reuven Rosenberg, and Meir Wasserman.

Jewish Resistance leader Dr. Yeheskel Atlas, a young Polish physician, is mortally wounded by Nazi troops in a battle at Wielka Wola, Poland.

The Jewish ghetto at Lvov, Ukraine, is liquidated.

The SS shuts down extermination activities at Belzec.

A forced-labor camp is established at Plaszów, Poland.

A Sonderkommando plan to escape from Auschwitz is discovered, and the inmates are gassed.

Partisan leader Hirsch Kaplinski, survivor of an August 1942 massacre of Jews at Diatlovo, Belorussia, is killed in combat during a German attack on the Lipiczany Forest.

December 2

Jews in 30 countries hold a day of prayer and fasting for European Jews.

December 3

Three young Jewish women who had escaped from a labor camp in Poznan, Poland, are forcibly taken to the Lódz Ghetto and shot.

One thousand Jews from Plonsk, Poland, are killed at Auschwitz.

Salomon Malkes, an official of the Lódz Ghetto, commits suicide after becoming despondent over the deportation of his mother.

December 4

Zofia Kossak-Szczucka and Wanda Filipowicz establish Zegota, a secret name of the Rada Pomocy Zydom (Council for Aid to the Jews), a non-Jewish group based in Warsaw. Zegota is run jointly by Jews and non-Jews.

Three hundred citizens of Slonim, Belorussia, are killed. Another 500 escape to join local partisan groups.

December 6

SS men lock 23 Christian Poles in a barn at Stary Ciepielow, Poland, and burn them alive on suspicion of aiding fugitive Jews.

Decemver 6-10

Nazis marshal troops, armored vehicles, and artillery to undertake a massive manhunt for more than 1000 fugitive Jews in the Parczew Forest in Poland.

December 7

German troops enter the Polish village of Bialka and murder 96 villagers suspected of shielding Jews fleeing the anti-Jewish Aktion in the nearby Parczew Forest.

United States State Department official G. Robert Borden Reams, an “expert” on the Jews in the Division of European Affairs, advises that the United States government remain silent concerning details of the Holocaust.

British official John Cecil Sterndale Bennett is upset because Bulgarian Jewish children may be allowed into Palestine based on Jewish Agency appeals.

December 8

Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, president of the World Jewish Congress, meets with other Jewish leaders and U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt to discuss the recently revealed plight of European Jews.

December 9

German troops in Tunis, Tunisia, seize 128 Jews and march them to a labor camp. One young Jew who drops from exhaustion is shot and killed.

Christian Century, an American Protestant journal, attacks Rabbi Stephen Wise, claiming he has lied about the Holocaust in his recent press conference. Christian Century further argues that even if what Wise has to say is true, to make the facts of the Holocaust public serves no purpose.

December 10

First transport of Jews from Germany arrives at Auschwitz.

At Wola Przybyslawska, Poland, near the Parczew Forest, Nazis shoot seven Poles accused of aiding Jews.

The Polish ambassador to Britain informs Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden that the Polish government-in-exile can confirm that the German authorities are systematically exterminating the entire Jewish population of Poland and the rest of Europe.

December 11

Jewish inmates of a labor camp at Lutsk, Ukraine, are informed by a Christian woman that the camp is about to be liquidiated. The Jews quickly plan a revolt.

December 12

Jewish prisoners at a labor camp in Lutsk, Ukraine, armed with knives, bricks, iron bars, acid, and several revolvers and sawed-off shotguns, revolt against Germans and Ukrainians. The uprising is crushed.

December 13

German Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels complains in his diary about Italy’s halfhearted persecution of Jews.

December 15

Faked, upbeat postcard messages arrive at Jewish homes in Holland from friends and relatives interned at Auschwitz and the Theresienstadt camp/ghetto.

December 16

A Jewish ghetto is established in Kharkov, Ukraine.

Germany decrees that German Gypsies must be deported to Auschwitz and destroyed. Exceptions include former Wehrmacht soldiers, important war-industry workers, and those who are “socially adapted.”

December 17

Allies solemnly condemn the extermination of the Jews and promise to punish the perpetrators. Pressure from members of Parliament, from Jewish groups in England, from the Anglican Church, from the British press, and from the Polish government-in-exile persuades the Allied governments to publish their first official recognition of atrocities in Poland. The Allied nations--Great Britain, United States, Soviet Union, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Greece, Luxembourg, Holland, Norway, Poland, Yugoslavia, and the French National Committee--officially condemn the Nazis’ “bestial policy of cold-blooded extermination.” They vow to punish those responsible. Several U.S. State Department officials try to block this declaration. All previous and following declarations neglect to mention Jews.

Accepting the United States government position that the Jews being massacred by the Germans can be helped only by a total and unconditional Allied victory over Germany, the American press continues to treat the Holocaust as just another war story, and is unwilling to discuss the systematic annihilation of the Jews. Given the Allied governments’ knowledge of the Holocaust at this time, waiting until the Allied Armed Forces have achieved a total victory over the Germans indicates that the Allied governments have accepted the probablility that the majority of European Jews will be killed before the Germans can be stopped.

Jewish inmates at the labor camp at Kruszyna, Poland, near Radom, attack guards with knives and fists. Six prisoners are killed and four escape.

December 18

When Jewish forced laborers at Kruszyna, Poland, refuse to board trucks, more than 100 of them are shot.

British Ambassador to the Vatican Francis d’Arcy Osborne asserts that Pope Pius XII “does not see that his silence is highly damning to the Holy See.”

December 19

After three weeks trapped in a synagogue by hostile Ukrainian troops, 42 Jewish men are marched to the Rakow Forest and ordered to dig ditches. They resist and are then shot. A few manage to escape. Later in the day, 560 more Jews are led from the synagogue to the forest and murdered.

December 22

Nazi troops gathered at Cyganeria, a coffee house in Kraków, Poland, are attacked by Jewish partisans. Several SS officers as well as two partisans, including partisan leader Aharon Liebeskind, are murdered during the attack.

December 23

Jewish Fighting Organization attacks Germans in Kraków.

December 24

Germans mount a second hunt in Poland’s Parczew Forest for fugitive Jews.

French Admiral Francois Jean Darlan, a Vichy government political power and collaborator, is shot and fatally wounded by 20-year-old French royalist Fernand Bonnier de la Chapelle.

December 25

Four prisoners who escape from the Sobibór extermination camp are shot dead after they are betrayed by local villagers.

December 26

Twenty-year-old French royalist Fernand Bonnier de la Chapelle is executed by Vichy firing squad two days after fatally wounding Vichy Admiral Francois Jean Darlan.

December 28

Two Jews are shot for mutiny at the Stalowa Wola, Poland, slave-labor camp.

Dr. Carl Clauberg begins his sterilization experiments on women prisoners at Auschwitz.

December 30

Pope Pius XII tells an American representative that he regards the atrocity stories about Jews as exaggerations “for the purposes of propaganda.”

December 31

By this date, the German Reich has deported more than two million Jews to death camps. Hundreds of thousands more Jews have been murdered by Einsatzgruppen and police battalions.

Late 1942

Nineteen members of a Belorussian partisan group led by Tuvia Bielski are ambushed and killed by German soldiers

1942: Other important events

A gas chamber (probably never used) and a crematorium are installed at the Dachau concentration camp.

A concentration camp is established at Riga, Latvia.

A forced-labor camp for Jews is established at Vilna, Lithuania.

Delegates from the United States, Great Britain, and Occupied European nation’ governments-in-exile attend the St. James Palace Conference in London to discuss Nazi war crimes and possible Allied responses. Jews are not discussed as a unique category of victims.

The Germans elevate collaborator Pierre Laval to premier of Vichy France.

Hajj Amin al-Husseini, grand mufti of Jerusalem, flees to Germany following an unsuccessful attempt by Arab nationalists to undermine British control of Palestine, and to create a Muslim legion to fight alongside German troops.

The American Council for Judaism, an anti-Zionist organization, is co-founded in New York by New York Times publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger.

German Protestant theologian Karl Friedrich Stellbrink is arrested after disseminating letters of anti-Nazi Bishop Clemens August Graf von Galen.

Hitler names Albert Speer minister for armaments and munitions.

Yitzhak Shamir succeeds Abraham Stern as head of the Zionist Stern Gang in Palestine after Stern is killed by British security forces.

The Jewish Combat Organization, a resistance group, is formed in Warsaw, Poland.

Janusz Korczak, director of a Jewish orphanage in Warsaw, refuses an offer of freedom from his Polish friends and accompanies his young charges to Treblinka.

The Antifascist Bloc, an amalgamation of Jewish Communists and Zionist Socialists, begins publication of Der Ruf (The Call), an underground, anti-Nazi newspaper.

At the Theresienstadt camp/ghetto, a half-Jewish Czech youth named Petr Ginz conceives Vedem (In the Lead), a secret camp “magazine” of poetry, humor, gardening tips, and the grim truth about camp operations.

German Catholic priest Max Josef Metzger writes a plea for a new German government. The letter will be intercepted by the Gestapo, precipitating his arrest.

1932

1933

1934

1935

1936

1937

1938

1939

1940

1941

1942

1943

1944

1945

Holocaust Memorial Center
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Holocaust Chronology of 1942