Buchenwald, near Weimar, is set up as a concentration camp providing forced labour for local arms manufacturers

Left-wingers and Jews suffer immediate persecution in Nazi Austria, now part of Germany

Nazi gangs smash the premises of Jews throughout Germany and Austria in a night that becomes known as Kristallnacht, the night of cut glass

Nazi murder squads (Einsatzgruppen) kill Poland's elite

Adolf Hitler orders the 'mercy killing' of all those with specified categories of infirmity, beginning with newborn babies and young children

In preparation for the invasion of Russia, Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler set up Special Task Commandos (Einsatzkommando) to exterminate Communists and Jews

The systematic shooting of Russian Jews by German Einsatzgruppen is the first step in the development of the Holocaust

Goering orders Reinhard Heydrich to prepare plans for the 'final solution of the Jewish queston'

Nazi experiments are carried out on Jews and Soviet prisoners of war to find effective means of murder by gas

Adolf Eichmann, in an official letter about policy in relation to the Jews, uses the phrase 'the final solution'

In three adapted vans at Chelmno, in western Poland, the Germans begin using poison gas to kill Jews

Reinhard Heydrich convenes a meeting at Wannsee to discuss the practical details of the 'final solution'

The Nazis build a new style of concentration camp, at Auschwitz in Poland, in which the fit will work and the unfit will be killed

German industrial enterprises are moved from the vulnerable Ruhr valley to the slave labour facilities of Auschwitz

Anne Frank and her family go into hiding in an Amsterdam attic

Treblinka is constructed, in Poland, as the Nazis' first large-scale and purpose-built death camp

An international declaration condemns Germany's 'bestial policy of cold-blooded extermination'

Zoot Suit riots, starting in Los Angeles, target young Mexican Americans

Jews in Warsaw resist a fierce German onslaught for a month before their ghetto is finally destroyed

Belsen, used as a prisoner-of-war camp since 1940, is turned into a concentration camp

German troops massacre more than 600 civilians in the French village of Oradour

The hiding place in Amsterdam of Anne Frank and her family is discovered by the Gestapo

Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat in Budapest, saves thousands of Jews from extermination

After Soviet troops liberate Hungary, Raoul Wallenberg is abducted and vanishes

The Red Army liberates the surviving prisoners at Auschwitz, who include the Italian novelist Primo Levi