German and Lithuanian authorities select Jews in the Kovno ghetto

A police decree required Jews over age six in the Reich to wear a yellow Star of David in public. Forced marking extended social isolation and facilitated police control and deportation; comparable...

German occupation authorities established two ghettos in Vilna (Vilnius). Lithuanian auxiliaries took part in persecution and mass shootings, while Jewish residents faced confinement, forced labor,...

German forces and auxiliaries ordered Kyiv’s Jews to assemble, then shot 33,771 people at the Babyn Yar ravine on September 29–30, according to German reports. The massacre relied on organized state...

Romanian and German forces occupied Odesa, a major Black Sea port with a large, multiethnic Jewish community. Romanian occupation quickly brought anti-Jewish policies, forced labor, deportations,...

After a bomb killed Romanian officials at the Odesa command headquarters, Romanian authorities began a reprisal massacre of Jews. Over several days, tens of thousands were shot, hanged, or burned....

German SS and police units and Lithuanian police auxiliaries murdered approximately 9,200 people from the Kovno ghetto at Fort IX. The previous day, German officials had selected the victims. The...

German authorities began mass murder at Chełmno, where victims were killed in gas vans and buried or burned in nearby forests. It was the first stationary killing center used by Nazi Germany for the...

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...