The Timeline section focuses on the history of the Holocaust, chronicling the years from 1918 to the present. Hitler's rise to power was the initiation of a period that wrought great fear and destruction. Millions were forced to live in ghettos, only to be deported later to the concentration camps. The tragic details remained obscure until the liberation of the death camps and the further revelations during the Nuremberg War Trials. The subsections below offer a simplified outline for thinking about how the Holocaust unfolded. However, it should be kept in mind that many of the categories overlap.

• Rise of the Nazi Party (1918-1933) During the fourteen years following the end of World War I, the Nazi party grew from a small political group to the most powerful party in Germany.

• Nazification (1933-1939)  Once Hitler became Chancellor and later Reichsführer, the Nazi party quickly changed Germany's political, social, and economic structure.

• The Ghettos (1939-1941)  Confining Jews to ghettos was another critical step in Hitler's Final Solution.

• The Camps (1941-1942)  The concentration camps were Hitler's final step in the annihilation of the Jews.

• Resistnce (1942-1944)  People resisted by any means possible, from stealing a slice of bread to sabotaging Nazi installations.

• Rescue and Liberation (1944-1945 Some survived through the heroics of neighbors; others were liberated by the Allies.

• Aftermath (1945-2000)  After the war, Nazi perpetrators faced punishment for their war crimes and survivors began rebuilding their lives
• Approximately 50 million people died in WWII, approximately 25 million military personel and approximately 25 million civilian casualties. Approximately 11 million (6 million Jews of which 1 and 1/2 million were children) of this 25 million civilians were killed at the hands of Hitler's henchmen in death camps, work camps, dying of starvation in ghettoes and in the camps or just being shot on the street or whole communities lined up and killed. Some of these were not even know about until afer the fall of the "iron curtain" (1990) like in the Ukraine, at a revene called Barbii Yar, tens of thousands of Jews were killed in a matter of 3 days. I visited the site while I was in the Ukraine in 1999.  There had never been a single marker placed at that site until the rest of the world knew about it (after 1990). The other 5 million,  other  than the  Jews,  were Poles,  gypsies,  Jewish sympathizers, homosexuals, nazis traitors and even Germans that were against the Hitler regime. Those 11 million that was killed needlessly represented 44% of all the civilians killed in WWII. Some reasearchers say as many as 5  million Poles  alone were killed in the Holocaust. More than one million of the victims were children. What ever the true figures are, one must admit that the Holocaust is one of the greatest atrocities ever perpetrated on mankind.
• Stalin was the greatest mass murderer of all time. He killed as many as  25 million of his own people.
•                                                        Frank   Duncan
•   The Forgotten Holocaust by Dr. Richard C. Lukas, and
•   Jews and Poles in World War II by Stefan Korbonski