First deportation train leaves Drancy for Auschwitz

Abba Kovner urged Jewish youth and resistance factions in the Vilna ghetto to resist Nazi Germany and its collaborators, warning that deportations meant murder. The appeal helped bring divided...

Senior Nazi officials met at Wannsee to coordinate the deportation of Europe’s Jews into a program euphemistically called the “Final Solution.” The conference did not initiate the genocide: mass...

German SS authorities began gassing Jews at Bełżec, one of the Operation Reinhard killing centers built in occupied Poland. Deportation trains brought Jewish communities from ghettos to a site...

Slovak authorities began systematic deportations by sending a transport of young Jewish women and girls from Poprad into German custody. Slovakia was then a nominally sovereign Axis partner; its...

The first transport of Slovak Jewish women arrived at Auschwitz. Most were young women and teenagers deported the previous day from Poprad by the Slovak state. Their arrival marks the start of mass...

A German ordinance required Jews aged six and older in the occupied zone to wear a yellow star beginning June 7. It marked Jewish people for public humiliation and facilitated exclusion and...

German occupation authorities deported the first group of Dutch Jews from Westerbork to Auschwitz. Dutch police and administrative bodies participated in the machinery of arrest and deportation; the...

French police arrested thousands of Jews in Paris and surrounding areas during the two-day roundup of July 16–17. Many families were detained at the Vélodrome d’Hiver before transfer to Drancy and...

German SS and police units, assisted by auxiliaries, began mass deportations from the Warsaw ghetto to the Treblinka killing center. By September, about 265,000 Jews had been deported and murdered;...

The first transport of Jews from the Mechelen transit camp departed for Auschwitz on August 4 and arrived August 5. German authorities relied on Belgian records and police cooperation, while...