When did the Holocaust happen?
The Holocaust unfolded in stages from 1933 to 1945. Legal persecution began when Hitler took power in 1933, escalated with Kristallnacht in 1938, and reached industrialized mass murder during 1941–1945. The systematic extermination — the 'Final Solution' — was coordinated at the Wannsee Conference in January 1942 and continued until Allied forces liberated the camps in 1945.
The Holocaust's timeline reveals the incremental nature of genocide — how a society moved step by step from prejudice to persecution to industrialized mass murder over a period of twelve years. This progression is essential to understanding how the Holocaust happened and why it was not stopped sooner.
The first phase (1933–1938) encompassed legal persecution. When Hitler became Chancellor on January 30, 1933, anti-Jewish measures began almost immediately. A nationwide boycott of Jewish businesses was organized on April 1, 1933. The Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service (April 1933) expelled Jews from government employment. The Nuremberg Laws of September 1935 stripped Jews of German citizenship and prohibited marriage or sexual relations between Jews and non-Jews. By 1938, Jews had been progressively excluded from professions, schools, cultural institutions, and public life.
Kristallnacht (November 9–10, 1938) marked the transition to organized violence. Across Germany and Austria, Nazi paramilitaries destroyed synagogues, Jewish businesses, and homes, killing at least 91 people and arresting 30,000 Jewish men. This pogrom signaled that the regime was prepared to use physical violence, not merely legal discrimination. In the aftermath, Jewish emigration accelerated, but many countries — including the United States — refused to accept significant numbers of refugees.
The genocidal phase began with the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. Einsatzgruppen followed the advancing army, systematically shooting Jewish communities. Babi Yar (September 1941), where over 33,000 Jews were killed in two days, was among the largest single massacres. The Wannsee Conference of January 20, 1942, formalized the 'Final Solution' — the coordinated deportation of Europe's Jews to extermination camps. From 1942 to 1945, the death camps operated with industrial efficiency — Auschwitz-Birkenau alone killed over 1.1 million people.
Liberation came incrementally as Allied forces advanced. Soviet troops liberated Majdanek in July 1944 and Auschwitz in January 1945. British forces liberated Bergen-Belsen in April 1945, where they found thousands of unburied corpses and survivors near death from starvation and disease. American forces liberated Dachau and Buchenwald. The full horror of the camps, documented by military photographers and journalists, shocked the world and permanently transformed humanity's understanding of what organized hatred could produce.
The timeline matters because it demonstrates that the Holocaust was not a sudden explosion of violence but a deliberate, escalating process. At each stage, intervention was theoretically possible — and the failure to intervene, by both German society and the international community, enabled the progression to the next stage.