The Holocaust: Facts and Figures

* Number of Jews who lived in Europe before 1933: Approximately 9.5 million, 60 percent of the world’s Jews

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* Jews estimated murdered in the Holocaust: 6 million

* Number of Jews in Europe in 1950: 3.5 million, of which about 2 million in the USSR

* Number of Jewish children killed by Nazis: 1.1 million

* Number of homosexuals killed by Nazis: Between 3,000 and 9,000

* Number of mentally ill or physically disabled put to death by Nazis: approximately 200,000

* Roma (Gypsy) people killed by Germans: Estimates range between 220,000 and 500,000

* Number of camps, prisons and other facilities of incarceration within Germany and the lands it occupied: 40,000.

* Number of Nazi extermination camps: 6 - Auschwitz, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor and Treblinka, all of them in occupied Poland

* Number of cities, towns and villages where Germans forced Jews to live in closed ghettos: Approximately 1,100, according to the “Yad Vashem Encyclopedia of the Ghettos During the Holocaust”

* Number of Nazi war criminals imprisoned after being convicted, between 1945 and 1985: 10,000

* Number of Nazi war criminals executed during the same period: 5,000

Countries occupied by Germans, with percentage of their Jewish populations killed, and number of victims in parentheses:

Poland: 91 percent (approximately 3 million)

Greece: 87 percent (65,000)

Lithuania: 83 percent (140,000)

Slovakia: 80 percent (71,000)

Yugoslavia: 77 percent (60,000)

Latvia: 76 percent (70,000)

Netherlands: 71 percent (100,000)

Hungary: 66 percent (550,000)

Bohemia/Moravia: 66 percent (78,000)

Norway: 45 percent (762)

Romania: 44 percent (270,000)

Estonia: 44 percent (2,000)

Belgium: 38 percent (25,000)

Luxembourg: 28 percent (1,000)

Soviet Union: 33 percent (1,000,000)

France: 30 percent (77,000)

Austria: 27 percent (50,000)

Germany: 25 percent (142,000)

Italy: 17 percent (7,500)

Finland: 0.35 percent (8)

Denmark: 0.75 percent (60)

Bulgaria: 0 percent (0)

Key dates

1933

January 30: Adolf Hitler elected chancellor of Germany

March 22: Dachau, the first concentration camp, is opened outside Munich

March 23: Reichstag passes Enabling Act, giving Hitler power to make laws without approval of the parliament

April 1: Semi-official boycott of Jewish businesses in Germany, ignored by many citizens

September 15: Nuremberg Laws issued, depriving Jews of citizenship, prohibiting them from having sexual relations with Aryans, and a variety of other restrictions that removed them from public life

1936

March 7: Roma are stripped of German citizenship; German army occupies the Rhineland, violating both the Versailles and Locarno treaties

1938

March 11-13: The Anschluss, in which Germany occupies and annexes Austria

September 28: Signing of the Munich Agreement, in which the Allies -- excluding Czechoslovakia -- agree to German occupation of the Sudetenland, German-speaking border regions of Czechoslovakia

November 9-10: Kristallnacht: A night of anti-Jewish pogroms throughout Germany and occupied territories. Some 90 Jews are killed, and another 30,000 are arrested and sent to concentration camps. Two hundred and sixty-seven synagogues are destroyed

1939

September 1: Germany invades Poland, triggering World War II

1940

April 9: Germany invades Denmark and Norway

May 10: Germany invades Belgium, the Netherlands and France

1941

April 6: Germany invades Greece and Yugoslavia

June 22: Germany invades Soviet Union. Here, Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing squads), are used to murder Jews.

December 7: Japan attacks U.S. naval station at Pearl Harbor; U.S. enters the war

December 8: After Einsatzgruppen are found inefficient for mass killings, the first murders by poison gas (using automobile exhaust) begin at Chelmno death camp

1942

January 20: Wannsee Conference, Berlin. Senior German officials are presented with the plan for the “Final Solution” already decided upon at the highest levels. Adolf Eichmann takes minutes.

March 27: Deportations of Jews from France begin

July 15: Deportations of Jews from the Netherlands begin

July 22: Deportations from Warsaw Ghetto begin; within two months, some 260,000 Jews are taken to Treblinka.

1943

April 19: Warsaw Ghetto Uprising begins (after massive deportations the preceding year)

1944

March 19: Germany occupies Hungary. Deportations of what will be 400,000 Jews from Hungary begin

June 6: D-Day - Allies begin counter-invasion of France

July 23: First death camp is liberated, Majdanek, by Soviet troops

August 25: Liberation of Paris

1945

January 27: Soviets liberate Auschwitz death camp

April 30: Hitler kills himself in his Berlin bunker

May 8 (May 9 in USSR): Signing of unconditional surrender by Germany to Allies.

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Muslim religious representatives walk through the entrance gate to Auschwitz.Credit: AP

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Women in prison garb work in the Ravensbrueck concentration camp. Credit: AP

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A child walks past a row of bodies at the recently liberated concentration camp Bergen-Belsen. 1945.Credit: AP

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