Chronological Index:

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It is difficult to begin a chronological index, a matrix – as it were – for a massive event. In fact, Nazi Germany generated several policies of planned mass killing, a practice which culminated in the attempt to completely destroy European Jewry in a planned way, which will be the focal point of this index. The beginning of these mass killing practices has been clearly identified: the first massacres took place in the context of the total ideological war against the USSR. However, the warning signs preceding these practices, without which the latter remain mostly difficult to understand, are still being discussed (Burrin, 1989; Gerlach, 1998; Browning, 1992 and 2003; Brayard, 2004). With a few rare exceptions, the factual information about these phenomena has been well documented and analyzed, which justifies attributing four stars to all of the facts and events detailed below, except when indicated otherwise.

Should one link Hitler directly to Luther, as some U.S. authors did in the 1950s? The approach chosen here will not. The first manifestations of discrimination against Jews began in Germany during the First World War, then were eclipsed on the institutional level during the Weimar Republic; afterward, they grew steadily from 1933 to 1941. However, one cannot trace a direct line from discrimination to persecution and killing.

Thus, we must begin by focusing on Germany, even though murder practices (in the strictest sense) did not take place there at the time, in order to explain a process which blazed across the whole of Europe and led to the participation of a very broad part of European societies, and the killing of over 5 million Jews from all the countries involved (Hilberg, 1961). We shall also present a detailed account of the local implementation procedures of violent impulses, which were sometimes decided locally, but were more frequently inspired by the Berlin-based decision-making centers, through a general matrix, and four geographically-based indexes. Based on the general matrix, which will concentrate on the central (i.e., German) point of view, we shall:

• show how discrimination practices were exported, radicalized and spread to the fringe of territories that were occupied early on – Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland. Actually, these countries initially served as laboratories for Nazi Germany’s Final Solution, and then – in the case of Poland – as a vanguard in this process.
• Observe how killing practices began differently, and followed specific procedures in Yugoslavia, and especially in Russia.
• Describe how the Nazis implemented the decision to eradicate European Jewry, which had been taken between December 1941 and the end of January 1942, and adapted it to particular local conditions in Western Europe.

 1. The beginning: World War I and ethno-nationalism

This chronology begins in 1916, an important date which corresponds to the great battles of Verdun and the Somme, which were dependant on military equipment, and indicated the adaptation of European societies to industrial warfare and its consequence, mass death. Thus, this year was marked by a first climax of destruction, but also by the first open and institutional manifestation of identified German anti-Semitism.

May 1916: Census of the Jews drafted into the German armed forces, officially to put an end to rumors that they were not sent to the Front as much as other troops. The census results were not publicized; this added to the rumors, which grew after 1918 (Kruse, 1997).

1918-1924: At the end of the war, Germany experienced a series of different kinds of unrest and conflict: friction in its border areas due to inter-community clashes in Silesia and in the Posen area, several coup attempts, revolutionary movements and the Spartakist crisis in Berlin, Max Hoelz’s Communist insurrection in Thuringia and Saxony (Schumann, 2001), as well as Kapp’s separatist coup in Bavaria. Germans experienced the occupation of the Rhineland and the Ruhr region by Franco-Belgian forces as the peak of the crisis, as this occupation was perceived as an invasion, coupled with an internal betrayal, due to the activitives of the Rhinelander separatists (Krumeich, Schröder (eds.), 2004). The idea of a “World of enemies” in league with one another against Germany, which had emerged during World War I, came back to the fore at this time. The imagined conjunction of the action of internal and external enemies, some of which were seen as marked by a biological difference, constitutes a mental structure born of war culture, and of its preservation as a framework of thought by völkische activists throughout this period.
The DAP (Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, or German Workers’ Party) was created in 1919 and became the NSDAP (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, or National-Socialist German Workers’ Party) in 1920. It was just one of the many elements of the ethno-nationalist völkisch network, in which groups appeared and disappeared in a metastatic and rapid manner, in the local contexts of evolution in Germany during that period (Herbert, 1996; Kampe, 1987). Adolf Hitler, who had been active on the nationalist scene since Germany’s defeat in the war, quickly took control of the NSDAP.
In 1923-1924, the NSDAP was actually marginalized in this movement due to its wait-and-see position during the Rhineland crisis. It was criticized for not having reacted to this event, perceived by certain activists as the ultimate invasion by the world of enemies (Herbert, 1996: 101-102).

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