“Night of the Long Knives.” Hitler has his Nazi rivals murdered

Hitler repudiates the Versailles and Locarno Treaties as German troops occupy the Rhineland

Fall of Ethiopia to Italy

FDR re-elected president for second term

Germany and Japan sign the Anti-Comintern Pact, directed at the Soviet Union

The German army marches into Austria and the formal union (Anschluss) of Austria with Germany takes place

FDR forms the President’s Advisory Committee onPolitical Refugees (PACPR)

The “Decree Regarding Registration of Jewish Property” requires all Jews in Germany to register their assets

First Jews begin forced labor in Mauthausen concentration camp

Germany, Great Britain, France, and Italy sign the Munich Agreement approving Germany’s annexation of the Sudetenland

FDR’s attempted “purge” of conservative Democrats

The Crystal Night (Kristallnacht) pogrom takes place throughout Germany and Austria

Establishment of Mossad for Aliyah B (illegal immigration to Palestine)

The first gassing of disabled patients by the Nazis

Himmler orders the establishment of a concentration camp at Auschwitz (Oswiecim, Poland)

Germany launches its offensive against the Low Countries and France.

Rotterdam bombed by Germans

Neville Chamberlain resigns as British prime minister and is replaced by Winston Churchill

FDR tells Congress “These are ominous days...we have seen the treacherous use of the ‘fifth column’”

Germany invades France

British cabinet wrestles with the decision to continue the war against Germany

German troops enter Paris

The first prisoners, more than seven hundred Poles, arrive at Auschwitz

The German bombing campaign against England, the Battle of Britain (“the Blitz”) begins

United States agrees to provide Great Britain with fifty destroyers in return for bases

Tripartite (Axis) Pact between Germany, Italy and Japan

Warsaw ghetto established

FDR reelected president for a third term; Wendell Willkie loses

Warsaw ghetto sealed

FDR’s “Arsenal of Democracy” speech

Rationing begins in the United States

Manilla, capital of the Philippines, surrenders to the Japanese

Executive order 9066, signed by President Roosevelt, orders all Japanese Americans living on the West Coast of the United States into internment camps

The St. James Palace Declaration on war crimes

Singapore surrenders

The Belzec extermination camp begins killing Jews deported from Lvov

The Franks are required to wear yellow star. Anne Frank buys her diary

Jews in occupied France are required to wear the yellow badge

The U.S. Navy defeats the Japanese fleet at the Battle of Midway

Surrender of British at Tobruk

The Treblinka death camp begins receiving Jews from Warsaw. It is the last of the three camps, along with Belzec and Sobibor, created to exterminate Polish Jews

Mass demonstration at Madison Square Garden and in New York City sponsored by AJ Congress and B’nai B’rith against Nazi massacres of Polish Jews

The mass murder of Jews at Treblinka begins

Riegner’s telegram to Rabbi Wise describing his belief in Final Solution

The Battle of Stalingrad begins

FDR warns Germans that war criminals would face “fearful retribution”

Efforts by FDR and State Department to save five thousand Jewish children in France

Japanese withdraw at Guadalcanal

Operation Torch, the invasion of North Africa, begins as Allied troops land in Morocco and Algeria

Welles confirms massacre of Jews to Wise; Wise makes facts public that two million Jews were dead. Actually, approximately three and a half million Jews were dead

Day of mourning in major American cities for the Jews of Europe

United Nations Declaration on Jewish Massacres issued by FDR, Churchill, Stalin and Allied governments-in-exile

President Roosevelt creates the War Refugee Board.

Allies land at Anzio

First large-scale daylight bombing of Berlin by USAAF

German forces occupy Hungary; Horthy arrested

FDR condemns the massacre of the Jews as “one of the blackest crimes of all history” and promises swift punishment of the Nazis

Ploesti bombed by USAAF based at Foggia, Italy

German authorities begin the deportation of Jews from Hungary to Auschwitz

Joel Brand arrives in Istanbul

United States troops enter Rome

Jewish Agency Executive votes 11 to 1 not to request bombing of Auschwitz

Operation Bagration along an eight-hundred-mile front in White Russia (now Belarus). The Soviets inflict immense losses on the Germany army and drive them back almost four hundred miles

Kubowitzki writes Pehle opposing bombing of Auschwitz

Horthy orders a halt to the deportation of Jews from Hungary to Auschwitz; four hundred, thirty-seven thousand, four hundred, two Hungarian Jews killed at Auschwitz; Raoul Wallenberg arrives in Budapest

A small group of German army officers, eager to end the war, unsuccessfully attempts to assassinate Adolf Hitler

After living undetected for twenty-five months, Anne Frank and her family, and the four others hiding in the secret annex are reported to the Nazis. The annex dwellers are all sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp

Paris is liberated

Industrialist Oskar Schindler is granted permission by the Nazis to establish a munitions factory in Czechoslovakia

United States General Douglas MacArthur returns to liberate the Philippines from Japanese control

Moscow Conference

FDR is reelected president for a fourth term. Lord Moyne is assassinated by the Stern Gang