Germany annexes Austria in the Anschluss

The Nazi Party and affiliated organizations staged a nationwide boycott of Jewish-owned shops, lawyers, and doctors. The action made exclusion visible in public space and foreshadowed the state-backed...

The Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service enabled the dismissal of Jewish civil servants and people labeled politically unreliable, with limited exceptions that were later...

Nazi student groups burned works by Jewish, socialist, liberal, and other writers in public ceremonies in Berlin and other cities. The spectacle linked cultural censorship to the regime’s wider...

The Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring created hereditary health courts that ordered forced sterilization. This coercive eugenic program targeted disabled people and others...

The Reich Citizenship Law and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor defined Jews by ancestry, stripped them of full political citizenship, and criminalized relationships...

Delegates from 32 countries met at Évian-les-Bains to discuss refugees fleeing Nazi persecution. Most governments kept restrictive immigration rules, leaving Jews with few safe destinations;...

A German decree required passports issued to Jews to be marked with a red letter J, following pressure from other states seeking to identify Jewish refugees. The measure shows how Nazi persecution...

German authorities forcibly expelled thousands of Jews who held Polish citizenship, many of whom had lived in Germany for years. Poland initially refused many entry, leaving families stranded at the...

After a Nazi-organized pogrom began on the night of November 9–10, synagogues were burned, Jewish businesses and homes destroyed, and Jewish people assaulted and killed. Police and fire services...

The German government imposed a one-billion-Reichsmark fine on German Jews and ordered the “Aryanization” of Jewish businesses. Perpetrators turned mob violence into state-enforced economic...